China relaxes its one-child policy.

Researchers find that the United States emits 50 percent more of the potent greenhouse gas methane than previously thought. 

President Barack Obama orders that the U.S. government get 20 percent of its electricity from renewable sources by 2020, nearly triple the current amount. 

The "polar vortex" delivers record-breaking arctic cold to much of the United States and is blamed for at least 21 deaths. 

Seventeen inches of rain falls on Sardinia in 90 minutes. 

Extreme weather and other disasters cost the world as much as $200 billion in 2012, says the World Bank. 

Britain refuses to finance new coal-fired power plants abroad. In the United States, a similar ban is lifted by Congress. 

Freedom Industries spills the chemical 4-methylcyclohexene methanol, used to treat coal, into West Virginia's Elk River, contaminating drinking water for more than 300,000 people. 

Donald Trump loses his fight to block a 103-turbine wind farm on Scotland's Shetland Islands that would be visible from his new golf resort there. 

Duke Energy is fined $1 million for the deaths of 14 golden eagles and many other protected birds at two of its wind farms in Wyoming.

The Interior Department grants wind farms extended permits to kill a limited number of eagles provided that they take strict precautions to reduce bird collisions. 

In an effort to combat climate change, the Norwegian Army will eat vegetarian one day a week. 

The number of monarch butterflies migrating to Mexico plummets. 

The western black rhinoceros is extinct.

A mysterious disease is wiping out starfish along the Pacific Coast. 

Right whales fail to show up at their usual winter feeding grounds in the Bay of Fundy.

Canada asserts sovereignty over the North Pole. So does Russia. 

The world's oldest creature, a 507-year-old clam, dies when researchers open it. 

Astronomers say there are at least 8.8 billion potentially habitable planets in the Milky Way. 

A Montana hunter mistakes a cross-country skier's pet malamute for a wolf and kills it. 

A Laysan albatross named Wisdom, the oldest banded bird in the world, lays an egg at age 62.