Ancient bat may well have used sound waves to sense the world, Sid Perkins reports in the latest Deleted Scenes blog.

A decline in stratospheric water vapor has slowed Earth’s surface warming slightly in recent years.

London’s Sunday Mail reported that it had reached the author of a chapter in a purportedly authoritative 2007 climate-change assessment and learned that this scientist – Murari Lal – deliberately used unsubstantiated sources for conclusions about the rate of glacier melting in the Himalayas. Lal doesn’t dispute that mistakes were made – ones that likely exaggerated projections of glacier melting. But he does challenge the newspaper’s charge that those mistakes were politically motivated.

A London newspaper reports today that the unsubstantiated Himalayan-glacier melt figures contained in a supposedly authoritative 2007 report on climate warming were used intentionally, despite the report’s lead author knowing there were no data to back them up.

On average, the economic impact of late flights exceeds that of hurricanes (p. 9)

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change acknowledged today that it had erred in projecting the rate and impacts of retreating Himalayan glaciers in a 2007 report.

British newspapers have uncovered what appears to be an embarrassing fact-checking omission by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC. It regards the degree of glacial melting in the Himalayas — information that said parts of the area could be icefree a quarter century from now.

Find all the Science News coverage of the 2009 United Nation's climate summit in one place.

Chemical changes in seawater make a key nutrient less available to these organisms.