Nowhere left to hide

It's official: there is nowhere left to hide from global warming. The notion that Antarctica is the last continent not to be heating up because of climate change is dead, according to a new study. The results suggest that the southernmost continent is warming roughly as fast as the rest of the planet. They overturn previous suggestions that only the Antarctic peninsula, which stretches points north towards South America, was heating up while the continent's interior cooled.

And now

THE author of a key government report on climate change has said the situation is even worse than he previously thought. Lord Nicolas Stern woke the world up to the threat of climate change when he produced the Stern Review three years ago. However, he has now said he thinks that the risks are even more dire than he first thought.

Writing in New Scientist magazine, he said: "Since my colleagues and I published the Stern Review in 2006, it has become apparent that the risks and potential costs of the impacts of climate change are even greater than we originally recognised. "Global emissions of greenhouse gases are growing more quickly than projected, the ability of the planet to absorb them now appears lower than was assumed, the potential increases in temperatures due to rising gas concentrations seem higher, and the physical impacts of a warming planet are appearing at a faster rate than expected."