The value of investment funds committed to selling off fossil fuel assets has jumped to $5.2tn, doubling just over a year, the Guardian writes. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon welcomed the results: “It’s clear the transition to a clean energy future is inevitable, beneficial and well underway, and that investors have a key role to play.” The divestment campaign began on university campuses in 2011, but the new report reveals that the concerns over fossil fuel investments have now entered the mainstream with more than 80% of the funds now committed to divest being managed by pension funds and commercial investment. Grist, the New York Times and Climate Central also have the story.

Christine Todd Whitman, the former head of the US Environmental Protection Agency under George W Bush, has slammed Trump’s pick to head the agency, the Hill reports. Trump announced last week that he would nominate Scott Pruitt, a climate change denier who has been a vocal opponent of the agency. “I don’t recall ever having seen an appointment of someone who is so disdainful of the agency and the science behind what the agency does”, said Whitman in an interview with Grist. “It doesn’t put us in a good place, in my mind”, she notes, “And he’s going to have trouble within the agency if he does convey that kind of disdain to the career staff.” She continued: “He obviously doesn’t care much for the agency or any of the regulations it has promulgated…He doesn’t believe in climate change; he wants to roll back the Clean Power Plan.”

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and a group of high-profile executives are investing $1 billion in a fund to increase financing of emerging energy research and reduce global greenhouse gas emissions to help meet goals set in Paris. The news comes a year after the climate deal was agreed. “We need affordable and reliable energy that doesn’t emit greenhouse gas to power the future and to get it, we need a different model for investing in good ideas and moving them from the lab to the market”, Gates told Quartz. Grist and /www.wired.com/2015/11/zuckerberg-gates-climate-change-breakthrough-energy-coalition/‘>Wired also cover the story.

Antarctica’s great glaciers are losing height by up to 7m per year, a new study based on satellite data has shown, which is likely the result of the warm seawater recorded around Antarctica in recent decades. The glaciers are dumping some “120 to 140 billion tonnes of ice a year into the ocean, which is sufficient to push up global waters by between 0.34mm and 0.40mm per annum”, the BBC reports.

Rising global temperatures melting Arctic sea ice are predicted to worsen the decline in polar bear numbers over the next 40 years as their primary habitat disappears. The polar bear population of 26,000 in expected to decrease by a third, said the researchers, who presented their findings at the American Geophysical Union meeting yesterday. The study also found that the world’s largest reindeer herd has fallen by 40% since 2000, the BBC reports, as rising temperatures and human activity affect their migration patterns. The herd, which live in the Taimyr Peninsula on the northernmost tip of Russia have been tracked for nearly 50 years by aerial surveys and more recently by satellite imagery. The reindeer are losing access to plants because warmer winter temps mean less snowfall, Time writes. AP and Reuters also carry the story.

Wind power plays a key role in curbing greenhouse emissions from other energy sources such as coal and gas, a new study from Edinburgh University has shown. It found that energy from windfarms in the UK prevented almost 36m tonnes of harmful carbon emissions in six years, the equivalent of ‘taking 2.3m cars off the road’. The study is described as “most accurate of its kind to date” as it uses real, rather than estimated, energy output figures, the Guardian reports.

Emissions of the greenhouse gas methane are on the rise globally, reaching levels unseen in at least two decades, finds a new study in Environmental Research Letters. Methane levels began to increase dramatically around 2007 and even more so in 2014, a spike which the researchers largely attribute to agriculture, although energy development also play a role. However precise details remain unclear: “Unlike carbon dioxide, where we have well described power plants, almost everything in the global methane budget is diffuse” says Robert Jackson, one of the authors of the study. The Guardian also has the story.

The US’ first offshore windfarm has opened off the coast of Rhode Island, with five turbines producing enough electricity to power 17,000 homes, the Telegraph reports. Partners GE and Deepwater Wind announced yesterday that the farm had begun producing energy for the grid. Deepwater Wind CEO Jeffrey Grybowski said: “We’re more confident than ever that this is just the start of a new US renewable energy industry that will put thousands of Americans to work and power communities up and down the East Coast for decades to come”. However, the Washington Post notes that president-elect Donald Trump may not be as keen on the technology, as he tried to stop an offshore wind farm that he said obscured the view from one of his Scottish golf courses. The Hill and Reuters also have the story.

A year on from the Paris Agreement, we’re on “uncertain ground”, argues an editorial in the LA Times. With the rise of nationalist populism in Europe and the election of Donald Trump, the “commitments from the developed world seem less reliable than they were a year ago”, the Times notes, “but there has been progress, both within and outside the Paris framework”. It concludes that “the big question is whether the world can change quickly enough to make a sufficient difference.”

While global treaties to reduce greenhouse gas emissions are important, “they are not enough”, writes Andrew J Hoffman, Professor at the Ross School of Business and Education, in an article that takes a look at the shifting modes of business sustainability towards market transformation. The ultimate responsibility for going carbon neutral is “falling first and foremost on business”, he says.

Methane has a higher warming potential than CO2 but changes over the past decade remain unexplained. A consortium of scientists under the umbrella of the Global Carbon Project have put together the first methane budget, a “living document” that will be updated as and when more studies add new information to the methane cycle puzzle. About 60 % of global emissions are anthropogenic, where uncertainties appear smaller compared to those from natural sources. The biggest uncertainties are emissions from wetland and other inland waters, the paper notes.

The goal to keep Earth under 1.5C agreed in Paris could be more easily achieved with the combination of emissions cuts and solar geoengineering, than by either approach on its own. To combat some of the much-discussed risk posed by solar geoengineering, a new study suggests injecting solid calcite (limestone) particles rather than sulphuric acid, neutralising acids resulting from anthropogenic emissions that deplete stratospheric ozone. This would reduce net radiative forcing while simultaneously increasing column ozone, explain the authors.