David Adam

The United Nations is to commission an independent group of top scientists to review its climate change panel.

Painting your roof white could help slow climate change by reflecting sunlight back into space. So would painting the moon.

Scientists warned this week that global warming will be "stronger than expected and sooner than expected", after a new analysis showed carbon dioxide is accumulating in the atmosphere much faster than predicted. Experts said the rise was caused by soaring economic development in China, and a reduction in the amount of carbon pollution soaked up by the world’s land and oceans.

Conservation experts are to reverse five centuries of British history and deliberately allow rising sea levels to flood a huge stretch of reclaimed Essex coastline. In the most ambitious and expensive project of its type, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) intends to puncture sea defences around Wallasea island, near Southend in southern England.

A critical meltdown of ice sheets and severe sea level rise could be inevitable because of global warming, the world’s scientists are preparing to warn their governments. New studies of Greenland and Antarctica have forced a United Nations expert panel to conclude there is a 50% chance that widespread ice sheet loss "may no longer be avoided" because of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

A third killer earthquake may be lurking beneath the Indian Ocean, seismologists say. Last Monday’s quake was caused by an increased geological stress set up by the giant earthquake in December, and they fear the process will repeat itself. Phil Cummins, a seismologist, said: "There is a chance that the next segment further to the south-east could rupture sooner than we expected. But we can’t predict the time."