Lighter-coloured crops, aerosols in the stratosphere and iron filings in the ocean are among the measures being considered by leading scientists for "geo-engineering" the Earth's climate, leaked documents from the UN climate science body show.

Africa, notoriously, has the worst roads in the world because its extremes of sun and rain bake them dry or leave them cratered and impassable for months at a time. The whole continent, which is physically larger than China, western Europe, India and the US together, still only has 171,000 km of all-weather roads - less than a country like Poland.

Keynote abstracts ahead of a geo-engineering expert group meeting in Lima in Peru next week

Australia is often cited as being particularly vulnerable to climate change, with projections of longer droughts punctuated by increasingly horrendous floods. In Western Australia, rainfall has already declined by 20%, and the tragic "Black Saturday" bush fires that claimed 173 lives in 2009 were amplified by an unprecedented heatwave. It is less well known that Australia is also a coal "superpower," being the world's largest exporter of this dirtiest of all fossil fuels.

Televisions could be left on standby without wasting energy, say the makers of the new microchip.

The eerily lethargic sun shows no signs of perking up, solar physicists say. The sun may wallow in inactivity for the next decade - or longer, which could affect Earth's climate as well as the health of orbiting satellites.

Enjoy our stormy sun while it lasts. When our star drops out of its latest sunspot activity cycle, the sun is most likely going into hibernation, scientists announced today.

ADD one more to the list: after the driest spring in more than 20 years, parts of eastern England are officially in a state of drought, according to the UK's Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. This comes hard on the heels of some of the worst droughts on record across the globe, from Texas to China.

Over the last few years, the politics of climate change have been amply forged in the fires of a changeable Sun.

Reducing nuclear will cost much more, be less sustainable and there will be less energy security says IEA chief Nobuo Tanaka

Layers of frozen sea water, known as sea ice, cap the Arctic Ocean. The ice grows dramatically each winter, and melts just as dramatically each summer. In the past decade, the melting has grown more dramatic, while growth has become less so, as you can see in our World of Change feature.