The essential overhaul of Britain’s energy system has been thrown into disarray by the resignation of one of its architects – just as Energy Secretary Ed Davey prepares to escalate his drive to stamp out doubts about the existence of climate change.

An agreement can be reached but it requires strong political will, says the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change

Apiece of Fleet Street folklore departed The Independent this week. Michael McCarthy finally hung up his binoculars as the paper's Environment Editor.

Climate change will bring greater extremes in weather, the Government's outgoing chief scientific adviser has warned as he called for urgent action to tackle global warming.

A former energy minister warned against "national panic", after a major gas pipeline unexpectedly shut down, gas prices soared and energy advisers suggested dwindling supplies could lead to rationing for the first time.

Britain's health system could slip back by 200 years unless the "catastrophic threat" of antibiotic resistance is successfully tackled, the Government's Chief Medical Officer warns today.

Britain's health system could slip back by 200 years unless the "catastrophic threat" of antibiotic resistance is successfully tackled, the Government's Chief Medical Officer warns today.

Worldwide concerns about climate change have dropped dramatically since 2009

In 1967 we didn't know that man-made chemicals could hole the stratospheric ozone layer. The term "global warming" had not been coined, and the link between climate change and human activities was not well-made. Some scientists thought a new ice age was approaching in the coming decades, not believing that polar and glacier ice would be melting at record rates, leading to unprecedented rates of rises in sea level.

One of the more widespread urban myths whose veracity is disputed is that the Inuit peoples have scores, even hundreds, of different words for snow. Whatever the precise truth, it is certainly the case that those who live in the Far North have more snow-words than those in the temperate latitudes, with the implication, of course, of many different kinds of snow.

If there was ever a case of fiddling while Rome burns, then the sadly dilatory global response to the threat from climate change is surely it. Even as weather patterns become measurably more extreme the world over; even as the polar ice caps melt back ever further each summer, opening up newly navigable shipping lanes; even as average global temperatures continue their inexorable rise; still, attempts to forge an international consensus make only glacially slow progress. Yet as research published in this newspaper today makes clear, the longer we take to act, the more unaffordable remedial action becomes.

An attempt by climate sceptics to hijack the latest UN report on global warming by selectively leaking claims that it is caused by sunspots rather than man-made emissions of carbon dioxide has backfired.

Amid the political horse trading, politicians ignore climate change at their peril