Another major glacier in Greenland appears to have begun a rapid retreat into a deep underwater basin. A new paper in the journal Science found that the Zachariae glacier – which contains 0.5m of potential sea level rise – has began rapidly retreating, especially since 2012, drawing on 40 years of satellite data and aerial surveys. The news follows similar stories at Greenland’s Jakobshavn Glacier and also in the Amundsen Sea region of West Antarctica. “This is sort of the second major floodgate from Greenland that has opened up,” says one of the study’s authors Eric Rignot, of UC-Irvine and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Up to 95% of the floating, sea-based part of the glacier has been lost since 2002, the Independent reports. The Guardian also carried the story.

The EU has warned the Obama administration that a global climate deal at the Paris summit must be legally binding, after the US secretary of state John Kerry said that it “definitively” would not be a treaty. “The Paris agreement must be an international legally binding agreement,” a spokeswoman for the EU’s climate commissioner, Miguel Arias Cañete , told the Guardian. Kerry told the Financial Times on Wednesday that any agreement in Paris, where world leaders meet in three weeks’ time, is “definitively not going to be a treaty”.

The Conservative government is giving billions in ever increasing handouts to oil and gas majors – despite an earlier pledge to phase them out – at the same time as cutting support for clean energy, a new report has found. The Overseas Development Institute and Oil Change International found that as a whole, G20 nations are responsible for $452bn (£297bn) a year in fossil fuel subsidies. DeSmogBlog compares this figure to subsidies received by the renewable energy sector, which has received $121 billion in subsidies globally, not just among the G20. Alex Doukas, one of the authors of the report, told Inside Climate News: “Handing money to fossil fuel companies undermines their credibility [at Paris]”.

British solar and fuel cell firms are to invest in India as part of £10bn trade deal set to be signed today by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, during a three-day trip to the UK. Modi is scheduled to launch a drive to promote the adoption of solar power across developing countries at the UN climate conference in Paris next month.

Research shows warmer waters and increased CO2 levels as a result of climate change could make sharks significantly smaller and less aggressive. Marine biologists from the University of Adelaide found that ocean acidification reduced the sharks’ ability to smell its prey, while warmer waters and longer hunting times used up more of the shark’s energy. The MailOnline also covered the story.

Investors could be hit hard amid changes in short-term market swings, triggered by climate impact concerns, a report from the University of Cambridge has warned. It says global investment portfolios could see losses of up to 45%, with no investor “immune from the risks posed by climate change”. The report follows Bank of England Governor Mark Carney’s remarks that climate change would “threaten financial resilience”. Energy Live News also has the story.

Presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton outlined a $30 billion plan yesterday to help parts of the US recover from the decline of the coal industry. “Hillary Clinton is committed to meeting the climate change challenge as President and making the United States a clean energy superpower,” the plan’s fact sheet says. “At the same time, she will not allow coal communities to be left behind”. The Financial Times and the Guardian also covered the story.

Pakistan has not included a single measurable target in its contribution to a UN climate deal, submitted six weeks behind deadline yesterday, Climate Home reports. Analysis is under way to determine potential carbon cuts, it promised, as well as investment needed to adapt to the impacts of climate change. Pakistan produced 0.7% of global greenhouse gas emissions in 2010, according to EU data.

As fears grow over the outcome of UN talks, the focus will be on holding nations to their pledges, writes Pilita Clark for the Financial Times, in a comprehensive overview of what to expect from the Paris climate conference. Don’t expect a specific global carbon price or a ban on fossil fuel subsidies, she says, and it’s still not clear how much legal impact the eventual agreement will have. Yet few people expect Paris to be a repeat of Copenhagen, she says. Overall, “there is a real chance a deal will be struck, a medium chance it will be very strong — and a small chance it will produce the deep cuts in emissions required to avoid risky global warming”.

On Thursday, the “carefully crafted dance” to avoid the Senate exploded into a bit of international confusion, when John Kerry told The Financial Times that the Paris Climate agreement was “definitely not going to be a treaty”, prompting Hollande to object and say “if the deal is not legally binding, there is no accord.” But both can be right, international lawyer Nigel Purvis tells Borenstein. It’s an issue of definitions and the way an agreement is framed – non-binding international agreements can still be binding domestically.

National Grid is adamant there will be no blackouts this winter, but the safety cushion between supply and demand is increasingly threadbare, writes Rob Davies in the Guardian. The power network company has been forced to find increasingly inventive and expensive weapons to stave off power cuts, and despite these measures it “still risks sailing closer to the wind than is comfortable”.

While climate change conures up images of rising temperatures, droughts and storms, the changes in the oceans are too often overlooked, says the introduction to a new special issue in Science on the oceans and climate change. A collection of papers and perspectives explores the impact of rising sea levels, ocean acidification on corals, fisheries on the move and building green infrastructure to create refugia for vulnerable marine life. Climate change impacts on the deep sea are less visible but the ecosystems are uniquely sensitive to even small changes in their environment, says the editorial.

It’s often assumed that since global demand for biomass is expected to double between 2005 and 2050 today’s crop land will be insufficient to meet that demand, even with improved technology and measures to optimise growth. A new study disagrees, saying that along with higher cropping intensity and a more efficient use of space, global biomass would exceed he demand in 2050 and make the expansion of crop land redundant.

The impact of warming water on predators has received some attention in the scientific literature, but not in conjunction with ocean acidification, says a new study that explores their joint effects on shark behaviour. The paper finds that while higher temperature increases embryonic growth, high carbon dioxide concentration and warming together had a negative effect by raising energy demands, decreasing metabolic rates and impairing their ability to find food.