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Direct experience of extreme weather events increases concern about climate change and willingness to engage in energy-saving behaviour, according to a new research paper published in the first edition of the journal Nature Climate Change this week. In particular, members of the British public are more prepared to take personal action and reduce their energy use when they perceive their local area has a greater vulnerability to flooding, according to the research by Cardiff and Nottingham Universities.

interesting visualization of the information provided by climate change skeptics versus science.

"Researchers 'dedicated if slightly disorganised', but basic science was fair, finds inquiry commissioned by university"

"We saw no evidence of any deliberate scientific malpractice in any of the work of the Climatic Research Unit and had it been there we believe that it is likely that we would have detected it. Rather we found a small group of dedicated if slightly disorganized researchers who were ill-prepared for being the focus of public attention. As with many small research groups their internal procedures were rather informal."

"One lesson is that anyone hoping to up-end decades of research pointing to a growing human influence on the climate by challenging a single batch of studies (in this case efforts to chart past temperatures using indirect clues like tree rings) is almost surely on a fool's errand. Another is that scientists, even when under relentless pressure, need to conduct their work scrupulously, carefully and openly and understand that transparency is inevitable in the digital era. A third is that scientists in highly specialized fields would do well to reach out for added statistical expertise when trying to test broader implications of their work."

"Speed is not a word typically associated with trees; they can take centuries to grow. However, a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has found evidence that forests in the Eastern United States are growing faster than they have in the past 225 years. The study offers a rare look at how an ecosystem is responding to climate change."

Cool Green Science: The Conservation Blog of The Nature Conservancy - A blog on conservation, from migratory birds to coral reefs, from rainforests to climate change to personal green technology.

New research shows that the 2010 Amazon drought may have been even more devastating to the region's rainforests than the unusual 2005 drought, which was previously billed as a one-in-100 year event.

"The period from 2000 through 2009 has been "warmer than the 1990s, which were warmer than the 1980s and so on," said Michel Jarraud, the secretary general of the international weather agency, speaking at a news conference at the climate talks in Copenhagen."

"Our ecological footprint - what we take out of the planet - is now 1.3 times the biological capacity of the Earth. In the words of Professor Bob Watson, Defra's chief scientific adviser and former chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), we are in danger of approaching "a point of no return". So the action we take in the... See More next couple of decades will determine whether the stable environment on which human civilization has depended since the last Ice Age 10,000 years ago will continue. "

A lot depends on how 'peat' and 'natural forest' are defined and how rights are agreed upon. Strong lobbies from the forest and tree-crop plantation industry argue that the economy will be harmed if 'business as usual' is interrupted. According to news sources, definitions of 'natural forest' and 'peat' differ between drafts prepared by the Indonesian Government's emissions reduction taskforce and by the Ministry of Forestry. There are several key issues that need to be resolved.

The world's coral reefs are in danger of dying out in the next 20 years unless carbon emissions are cut drastically, warns a coalition of scientists led by Sir David Attenborough.