The Obama administration has denied six permits to companies seeking to use seismic cannons to search for oil under the ocean floor, styming the oil industry’s hopes to drill off the coast between Delaware and Florida. This is the second time in less than a month that the outgoing president has taken an action “with an eye on the President-elect” to all but shut the door on drilling in the Atlantic Ocean, says The Washington Post. Before Christmas, Obama used a little-known law to ban hundreds of millions of acres of federally owned territories in the Arctic and Atlantic oceans from new offshore oil and gas drilling. Energy companies are free to submit new applications to the incoming Trump administration, but overturning the ban is likely to take months or years, notes Associated Press.

Scientists say a long-existing rift in the Larsen C ice shelf in Antarctica grew by 18 kilometres in the second half of December, with a huge iceberg now expected to break off within the next few months. While the team can’t attribute this particular iceberg’s fate to climate change, the lead author from Swansea University, professor Adrian Luckman, said climate warming “must be playing a part in the overall picture of ice shelf loss”. Mail Online, Vice News, The Huffington Post, Reuters and The Guardian were among those to cover the story this weekend, after first appearing on BBC News on Thursday. Scientists “aren’t alarmed” that the growing ice crack is a sign of a catastrophic collapse of the ice shelf, reports Associated Press. University of Colorado scientist Ted Scambos said a chunk of ice will break off “but it’s not going to lead to a runaway disintegration.”

Cleaning up the legacy of old oil and gasfields in the North Sea could cost UK taxpayers £24bn, reports the Financial Times, a figure that could “wipe out remaining tax revenues from an industry that has been among the Treasury’s most reliable cash cows”. The paper says the industry could even start to receive net payments from the exchequer, with tax refunds outweighing total tax payments. Half the estimated £53bn cost of cleanup will be covered through tax relief, the FT adds. Last year, Carbon Brief revealed how UK taxpayers gave £85m to Shell in 2015, as it reclaimed previous years’ tax to cover decommissioning. Separately, the Financial times reports that Shell is hoping to test European ‘leave no trace’ rules by abandoning subsea structures during decommissioning.

Part of the Arctic that should be a “nursery” for older ice has in recent years turned into a “graveyard”, say scientists, with ice getting younger and thinner. Nasa researchers have found that the thicker multi-year ice is being rapidly replaced by thinner ice formed over a single winter, making the polar region increasingly vulnerable to storms and a completely ice-free summer in the Arctic increasingly likely, says The Observer. A separate article in the Observer looks at how warmer waters mean Scottish fishermen are increasingly adding squid – once a rarity in the North Sea – to their usual catches of cod and haddock.

Engineering giant Rolls-Royce is teaming up with a host of rivals to develop small modular reactors (SMRs), reports The Telegraph. Entering a £250m competition launched last March by the Government to find the best SMR design for civil use, a spokesperson for Rolls Royce said the company believes the next-generation technology could support up to 40,000 jobs and realise the UKs nuclear power potential more cost-effectively that conventional plants. The controversial planned reactor at Hinkley Point has a cost of £18bn, notes the newspaper.

More than 50 ski resorts in France will be forced to turn off their snow cannons this weekend because of extreme drought, reports a Times front page this morning. With many resorts recording their 50th day without natural snowfall last week, the unseasonably dry weather conditions in the northwest Alps have seen many resorts rely on the machines this season to produce artificially snowy ski runs. Serge Taboulot, head meteorologist for the northern Alps at Météo France, called the drought “unprecedented”, adding: “We have data from the 19th century in Annecy, and we have never seen such a situation before.”

The Green Investment Bank (GIB) is set to be stripped of its prized assets when is sold later this month. Reports circulated on Sunday that the likely buyers, Australian bank Macquarie, had already lined up suitors for the Green Investment Bank’s wind and biomass assets, worth more than £2.7bn, and were planning a round of job cuts from its London and Edinburgh offices. The programme of sell-offs is likely to amplify concerns over the privatisation of GIB and raise questions over whether the government is selling off the state-owned lender too cheaply, says The Times. The conditions of sale set up by former business secretary Sajid Javid mean the government will retain a “golden share”, giving it a say in future investments, but it is powerless to block Macquarie selling off assets.

A powerful storm has hit California and other parts of the western United, dumping between 1.3 to 1.9 cm of rain per hour. After years of severe drought in California, the storm is drawing its strength from the interaction between an “atmospheric river,” a long plume of water vapor flowing from the tropics toward the West Coast and a low-pressure area near Oregon, according to meteorologists from the National Weather Service’s Weather Prediction Center in Maryland. Ice was expected overnight in Oregon, parts of Washington State and Idaho while Yosemite National Park was closed because of expected flooding.

Prof Phill Williamson takes issue with the press regulator’s handling of his complaint about an article that appeared in The Spectator in April 2016, in which climate-skeptic writer James Delingpole claimed all concerns over ocean acidification are unjustified “alarmism”. Suggesting that the Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO) is “a watchdog with no teeth”, Williamson concludes: “IPSO’s overall message is that ocean acidification is just a matter of opinion – not a hard-won, testable understanding of the likely effects of human-driven changes on the marine environment. This view of science is pernicious and has serious policy consequences.” The piece first appeared in The Conversation. Carbon Brief has a guest post by Williamson and another scientist with a similar experience of the press regulator’s decision on accuracy in media coverage of climate science.

One of the most popular myths among climate skeptics and those who benefit from maintaining the status quo is that the Earth isn’t warming, says Nuccitelli. Like every zombie climate myth, the claim – which centres on “cherry picking” natural short-term temperature oscillations caused by factors like the El Niño/La Niña – will inevitably rise again, despite unprecedented heat that caused 2014, 2015 and 2016 to be the hottest years on record. Cue an article in The Spectator this weekend by David Whitehouse, an advisor to climate skeptic lobby group the Global Warming Policy foundation, claiming new research confirming warming in the oceans has continued apace in recent decades “has been greatly exaggerated.”

Climate change is expected to increase wildfires and the spread of woody plants in arctic and alpine landscapes, but a new study shows that warming could also reinforce the positive feedback between the two. The researchers used field surveys and tests to examine how warming and fire affect recruitment, seedling growth and seedling survival. These findings suggest that warming, coupled with more frequent or severe fires, will likely result in an increase in the abundance of evergreen alpine shrubs. Given these shrubs are one of the most flammable components in alpine and tundra environments, this will likely result in more fires, the researchers say.

The boost to US maize and soybean yields from rising CO2 levels in the atmosphere will not outweigh the losses caused by climate extremes, a new study suggests. Using computer models, the researchers quantify the combined and separate impacts of high temperature, heat and drought stress on current and future maize and soybean production in the US. The results suggest that under a scenario of moderate warming, drought will continue to be the largest threat to maize and soybean. Under a high climate change scenario, high temperatures and heat stress will become the dominant stress on maize, the researchers say.

As a foreward to a special issue entitled “Focus on Impacts of Extreme Weather and Climate Events Across Sectors”, a new paper introduces the importance of the Inter-Sectoral Impact Model Intercomparison Project (ISIMIP). ISIMIP uses community-agreed sets of scenarios with standardised climate variables and socio-economic projections as inputs for projecting future risks, the authors explain. This provides a consistent basis that researchers around the world can use for assessing options for climate change mitigation and adaptation.