An article by David Rose, published in the Mail on Sunday this weekend, alleges that US climate scientists exaggerated their data for a 2015 study to “dupe” world leaders into adopting the Paris Climate Agreement, reports Mashable. The allegation comes from Dr David Bates, a scientist who used to work at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Bates claims that NOAA broke its own rules for scientific integrity when it published a study in 2015 that showed the much-discussed “slowdown” in recent warming at Earth’s surface was largely a result of the way temperature records have been pieced together. Scientists in the US and Europe “swiftly denounced” the Mail’s story, says Mashable, pointing to multiple independent analyses supporting NOAA’s findings. Among the rebuttals is an article for Carbon Brief by climate scientist Zeke Hausfather, and a blog post by Victor Venema, a German scientist with the World Meteorological Organisation. In another blog post, one of the scientists who worked in the NOAA group responsible for the 2015 study says that Bates “was not involved in any aspect of the work”. He also debunks a “small selection” of the mis-representations of the study in Rose’s article. Nevertheless, the Mail’s article has been picked up by much of the right-wing press, including the Washington Times, the Daily Caller, and Breitbart. The story has also prompted a response by members of the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space, and Technology.

On Friday, the House of Representatives in the US passed a resolution to reverse a pollution rule for oil and natural gas drillers that was put in place by the Obama administration. The rule aims to curbs leaking, flaring and venting of methane emissions from oil and gas drilling operations on public lands, says the Washington Post. If approved by the Senate and signed by President Trump, the rule would come off the books for good. “It is a big, fat victory, after all this time,” Luke Popovich, a vice president at the National Mining Association, told the New York Times. Repealing the rule is expected to result in the waste of $330m in taxpayer-owned gas annually, and reduce direct payments to the public by $800m over the next decade, says Think Progress. Elsewhere, the New York Times has an article about how Scott Pruitt, President Trump’s pick to run the Environmental Protection Agency, “will use the legal tools at his disposal to pare back the agency’s reach and power, and trim its budget selectively.”

Plans for a new nuclear power station in Cumbria are in doubt as Toshiba is set to withdraw from the consortium behind the Moorside project. Two industry sources close to the process said Toshiba had privately decided to pull out of the project, echoing earlier rumours that the Japanese company was withdrawing from new nuclear projects in the UK. Moorside is among the most advanced of several new nuclear plants planned by the UK to replace old reactors due to be taken out of service in years ahead, says the Financial Times. If Toshiba does withdraw, new reactor technology may be needed from elsewhere, the FT says. This could be an opportunity for Korea Electric Power Corporation (Kepco), the South Korean energy group, to offer its reactor instead. Meanwhile, the Sunday Telegraph reports that plans are being drawn up for a new Europe-wide nuclear group after the UK’s decision to pull out of the European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom). Tim Yeo, a former energy select committee chair, told The Sunday Telegraph that he will unveil plans in the coming weeks to replace Euratom. “The need for discussion is urgent because the enforcement of nuclear rules and safety regulation is extremely important across Europe,” Mr Yeo said.

Fossil-fuel power stations were among the winners of contracts worth £378m to ensure adequate supplies of electricity next winter. Gas-fired stations secured the biggest share of contracts — almost 40% — in the capacity auction held by National Grid. Coal and biomass plants won a further fifth of the contracts, which pay power companies to be available during peak demand on winter evenings. Last week’s auction closed at a lower-than-expected price of £6.95 per kilowatt, says the FT, implying plentiful supply and raising questions over whether the auction was needed at all. Over 96% of capacity will come from existing power plants and interconnectors, notes the Telegraph, while only 3% will be sourced from new projects. A small number of payments will be made to companies who agree to reduce usage at times of high demand, it adds.

Oil prices could drop sharply this summer as US shale companies increase output to take advantage of the recent market recovery, the head of the International Energy Agency, Dr Fatih Birol, has warned. Recent stability in crude prices could be shortlived, : “The name of the game [this year] is volatility,” he said. “We are entering a period of greater volatility.” The recent deal between oil exporters in Opec and non-Opec countries to curb production is already taking effect, Birol said, but this could encourage rival producers in North America and other regions. “I wouldn’t be surprised if the US becomes a powerhouse in oil and gas exports,” Dr Birol said. “The reserves and the investor appetite are there.”

As expected, there is much comment on the allegations from the Mail on Sunday’s story about a recent study by NOAA scientists. Writing in the Guardian, John Abraham points out the omissions in the Mail article, including that the study’s findings have “already been independently verified by other researchers,” and that the “story’s source was never involved any part of the work.” Abraham also says that claims the scientists discarded high-quality temperature measurements in favour of low quality data are “demonstrably false”. “The lengths to which Mr. Rose goes in his attack are disheartening and dishonest,” Abraham concludes. In another commentary, Bob Ward, the policy and communications director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics, says that the “attack by the ‘The Mail on Sunday’ on the accuracy and integrity of a recent paper on global warming is based on inaccurate and misleading claims, including a fake graph.” Elsewhere, an editorial in the Mail on Sunday says that “thanks to [the original story’s] revelation”, “much of the urgent rhetoric spouted by politicians since 2015 now looks threadbare. And President Donald Trump will find it easier than before to dismiss the Climate Change agenda completely.” And writing in the Times, climate sceptic peer Matt Ridley compares the Mail on Sunday’s allegations to “scientific misconduct as serious as that of the anti-vaccine campaign of Andrew Wakefield”.

If Toshiba withdraws from the Moorside new nuclear plant in the UK, it will leave the government in need of a plan B on electricity supplies, writes Nick Butler in the Financial Times. The ambition to build 16 gigawatts of new nuclear capacity by the mid 2030s is at “serious risk of delay”, he says. “The difficulty for the industry is that while nuclear costs are rising, those of almost all the alternatives are falling — offshore wind in particular has made remarkable cost breakthroughs,” Butler writes, adding: “Governments have to plan ahead, and sometimes events and technology overtake them.”

A new study of 32 glaciers across the Everest region finds that overall, the glaciers lost 0.52 metres of water equivalent per year between 2000–2015 but that individual glaciers show distinct differences. Mass loss from glaciers terminating in lakes was 32 % higher per year than those terminating on land, for example. Future predictions of mass loss across the region are likely to be complicated by highly spatially variable responses to climate change, say the authors.

Previously unpublished electromagnetic surveys of ice thickness in the Barents Sea taken by helicopters show that in some years, such as 2003 and 1995, the region is dominated by thick multi-year ice varying in thickness from 0.6-1.4m. Conversely, in 2014 the ice was predominantly locally grown and less that 1 month old, leading to very different conditions for shopping traffic and heat transport from the ocean to the atmosphere. The Barents Sea is one of the fastest changing regions of the Arctic, experiencing among the strongest declines in winter-time sea-ice area at around 23% per decade.