The anti-climate effort has been largely underwritten by conservative billionaires, often working through secretive funding networks. They have displaced corporations as the prime supporters of 91 think tanks, advocacy groups and industry associations which have worked to block action on climate change.

The vast majority of the 91 groups on Brulle's list – 79% – were registered as charitable organisations and enjoyed considerable tax breaks. Those 91 groups included trade organisations, think tanks and campaign groups.

Funding also went to groups that took on climate change denial as a core mission – such as the Heartland Institute, which held regular conclaves dedicated to undermining the United Nations climate panel's reports, and the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which tried and failed to prosecute a climate scientist, Michael Mann, for academic fraud.

More than 200 million people around the world are at risk of exposure to toxic waste, a report has concluded.

"It's a serious public health issue that hasn't really been quantified," Dr Jack Caravanos, director of research at the Blacksmith Institute and professor of public health at the City University of New York told the BBC's Tamil Service.

There is no respite. Left unabated, climate change will cause global shortages of food and water, and drive people into deeper poverty. This is the upshot of the next Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report on the societal impacts of climate change, according to a leaked draft.

By exacerbating poverty, climate change may also increase the risk of violent conflict.

With temperatures remaining above 30°C and with wind gusts of up to 100 kilometres an hour, conditions favour the fires, and this weather is expected to continue.

Climate models predict the worst fire weather will be increasingly common in NSW, but the ferocity of the current fires was not caused by particularly bad fire weather, says climate scientist Andy Pitman from the University of New South Wales in Sydney. Instead, it was the result of a very warm winter – the second warmest on record in NSW and part of Australia's warmest 12 months on record– which was probably caused by climate change, according to Pitman.

The German government has persuaded its EU partners to delay introducing new limits on CO2 emissions from cars.

"Weakening the agreed 2020 limits, which have long been known, is a shameful sop to German car manufacturers and will slow the development of new technologies to deliver more efficient and less polluting cars," Ms Harms said after the ministers' vote.

The Brauer-Bund beer association is worried that fracking for shale gas, which involves pumping water and chemicals at high pressure into the ground, could pollute water used for brewing and break a 500-year-old industry rule on water purity.

"The water has to be pure and more than half Germany's brewers have their own wells which are situated outside areas that could be protected under the government's current planned legislation on fracking," said a Brauer-Bund spokesman.

Given resistance from opposition parties which could block the law in the upper house of parliament, it is unlikely that a law on fracking will be passed before an election in September.

A recent report by the European Food Safety Agency (EFSA) concluded that the pesticides posed a "high acute risk" to pollinators, including honeybees.

A spokeswoman for Defra, the UK's environment department, said 14 out of the 27 EU nations - including the UK and Germany - had not supported the commission's proposals as they currently stood.

Global web-based campaign group Avaaz condemned the UK's and Germany's decision to abstain, saying the governments had "caved in to the industry lobby".

The persistent drought is taking a toll on producers of ethanol, with corn becoming so scarce that nearly two dozen ethanol plants have been forced to halt production.

"There's a lot of anxiety in the industry right now about the drought and a lot of folks watching the weather and hoping and praying this drought is going to break," said Geoff Cooper, vice president for research and analysis for the Renewable Fuels Association.

In the course of analysis to identify potential allergens in GMO crops, the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) has belatedly discovered that the most common genetic regulatory sequence in commercial GMOs also encodes a significant fragment of a viral gene (Podevin and du Jardin 2012). This finding has serious ramifications for crop biotechnology and its regulation, but possibly even greater ones for consumers and farmers. This is because there are clear indications that this viral gene (called Gene VI) might not be safe for human consumption. It also may disturb the normal functioning of crops, including their natural pest resistance.

They could 1) recall all CaMV Gene VI-containing crops (in Europe that would mean revoking importation and planting approvals) or, 2) undertake a retrospective risk assessment of the CaMV promoter and its Gene VI sequences and hope to give it a clean bill of health.

It is easy to see the attraction for EFSA of option two. Recall would be a massive political and financial decision and would also be a huge embarrassment to the regulators themselves. It would leave very few GMO crops on the market and might even mean the end of crop biotechnology.

The paper, published on 29 November in the journal Science, shows that melting Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets have added 11.1mm (0.43") to global sea levels since 1992.

"The rate of ice loss from Greenland has increased almost five-fold since the mid-1990s" said NASA's Erik Ivins, co-author on the study. "In contrast, while the regional changes in Antarctic ice over time are sometimes quite striking, the overall balance has remained fairly constant—at least within the certainty of the satellite measurements we have to hand."