Two billion people worldwide do their cooking on open fires, producing sooty pollution that shortens millions of lives and exacerbates global warming. If widely adopted, a new generation of inexpensive, durable cook stoves could go a long way toward alleviating this problem.

With a single, concerted initiative, says Lakshman Guruswami, the world could save millions of people in poor nations from respiratory ailments and early death, while dealing a big blow to global warming — and all at a surprisingly small cost.

China and India joined almost all other major greenhouse gas emitters Tuesday in signing up to the climate accord struck in Copenhagen, boosting a deal strongly favored by the United States.

More than 100 nations have now endorsed the Copenhagen Accord, a non-binding agreement reached after two weeks of tortuous wrangling at a 194-nation summit in December.

The accord plans $100 billion a year in climate aid for developing nations from 2020 and seeks to limit global warming to below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6F) above pre-industrial times, but produced no timetable of emission limits to reach that goal.

Battling energy costs one draft at a time The folks at Land-of-Sky Regional Council submitted this news item: Who knew that a snake could help keep the cold away? Through the Retired & Senior Volunteer Program, residents of Laurel Woods Apartments in south Asheville volunteered to stuff and decorate 17 draft-stoppers — aka "draft-constrictors," since the completed ones look like snakes. The volunteers on the RSVP Simple Acts of Green Team then donated the draft-constrictors to Hands On Asheville-Buncombe to be distributed to families served by the Council on Aging and Meals on Wheels. Drafters: These volunteers — the RSVP…

Last week, the Gowanus Canal, a 1.8-mile, 100-foot wide waterway in northwest Brooklyn which empties into Upper New York Bay, was added to the National Priorities List (NPL) otherwise known Superfund by the Environmental Protection Agency. The new designation means that the EPA will now move ahead to clean up this derelict canal and to compel PRP’s (principal responsible parties) to perform the cleanup or reimburse the government for EPA-led action. The EPA is now locked in to what may be a tough and perhaps a long dragged-out process of restoring the Gowanus, while forcing cooperation from PRP’s and catering to often sensitive local community interests.

The sensitivity of Amazon rain forests to dry season droughts is still poorly understood, with reports of enhanced tree mortality and forest fires on one hand, and excessive forest greening on the other. In a current story there is a report that previous conclusions of large scale greening of the Amazon as a result of drought are not reproducible. Approximately 11%-12% of these drought stricken forests display greening, while, 28%-20% show browning or no change, and for the rest, the data are not of sufficient quality to characterize any changes. These changes are also not unique; approximately similar changes are observed in non-drought years as well.

It’s the big pink elephant in the room that few others wish to acknowledge, but a central theme in a new report by former climate negotiator Nigel Purvis: An international climate change treaty isn’t likely to be signed anytime soon.

Purvis served as president Clinton’s chief UN climate negotiator, and in his report released today Purvis says that the United States and Europe should “accept reality” and take immediate practical steps to deal with global warming.

The Environmental Protection Agency chief fought back on Monday against Senate attempts to challenge the agency’s authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, saying delaying action would be bad for the economy.

President Barack Obama has long said the EPA would take steps to regulate greenhouse gases if Congress failed to pass climate legislation. The bill faces an uncertain future in the Senate amid opposition from fossil fuel-rich states.

The Toba super eruption occurred between 69,000 and 77,000 years ago at Lake Toba (present day Indonesia), and it is recognized as one of Earth’s largest known eruptions. The related catastrophe theory holds that this super volcanic event plunged the planet into a 6 to 10 year volcanic winter, which resulted in the world’s human population being reduced to 10,000 or even a mere 1,000 breeding pairs, creating a bottleneck in human evolution. Some researchers argue that the Toba eruption produced not only a catastrophic volcanic winter but also an additional 1,000 year cooling episode.

Newly discovered archaeological sites in southern and northern India have revealed how people lived before and after the colossal Toba volcanic eruption 74,000 years ago.

The ‘innovation gap’ for neglected tropical diseases is rapidly growing, say Sandeep P. Kishore and colleagues, but research universities in the United States could help close the gap.

Total research funding for diabetes is more than 15 times greater than that for malaria, and more than 100 times that of other diseases such as schistosomiasis.

The authors suggest three key steps to making a meaningful impact on neglected disease research.

Salt is precious in poverty-stricken coastal West Africa, but conservation experts say efforts to extract it are laying waste to mangrove swamps, causing erosion and ravaging fish stocks.

In Sierra Leone, one of Africa’s poorest nations still recovering from a 1991-2002 civil war, lawmakers are preparing a bill to join a seven-nation charter to protect the region’s mangrove forests.

Conservation group Wetlands International says the initiative is essential for West Africa to save the 800,000 hectares (2 million acres) of mangrove swamps it has left, less than a third of the 3 million hectares it started with.