As climate science continues to be proven correct, climate deniers are quickly becoming an endangered species. Fear not! Introducing DNYR, the climate change denying robot who will ensure you still get your fill of all the robotic arguments climate deniers put out.•Click on the red button to generate climate change denying arguments. Click on the link underneath the quotes to read the associated news reports Continue reading...

Pollution in China, Europe’s refugee crisis, the aftermath of Storm Desmond – the best photography in news, culture and sport from around the world this week Continue reading...

Delegates from the COP21 Climate talks in the Le Bourget, near Paris arrive at the venue on Saturday morning. An draft was created late on Friday night and is due to be presented to work negotiators on Saturday morning. Nozipho Mxakato-Diseko, South African diplomat and head of the Group of 77 and China bloc, said the deal is dependent on whether the US is prepared to ratify the agreement

Predictions that rising seas could destroy over a quarter of El Salvador’s coastal areas have left people living along the country’s shoreline facing a bleak future Continue reading...

After talks again stretched through the night, François Hollande and Ban Ki-moon are to unveil document on limiting climate change for formal adoptionNegotiators in Paris are to present their final draft text on Saturday morning for a deal on limiting climate change after working through Friday night to thrash out remaining details.The French president, François Hollande, is due to join Ban Ki-moon at the landmark summit at 11.30am local time, when the text is expected to be published. The draft is predicted to be officially adopted in the afternoon. Continue reading...

The destruction in the north of England brings into stark focus the effects of storms on housing. We look at the wider situation1. Millions of households are at risk from floodingAround 5m, or a sixth of the properties in England, are deemed to have a higher than normal risk of flooding – but only around half are from rivers or the sea. The rest are at risk from rising groundwater, sewer problems and flash flooding. According to the Association of British Insurers, just 55% of those living in flood risk areas are aware that their home is at risk. At least 350,000 properties are considered to be at such high risk that the industry accepts they are not a viable commercial risk for the industry. You can check your risk of flooding at Checkmyfloodrisk.co.uk or the Environment Agency website. Continue reading...

Upper Padley, Derbyshire “History may be servitude, history may be freedom,” TS Eliot wrote. At Padley, it felt like the formerIt wasn’t quite midwinter spring, but the morning was unusually warm, the moors tucked up under blankets of thick grey cloud. Smoke from the chimney of the Grindleford Café rose in an unwaveringly straight line to heaven. Close by, the damp black mouth of the Totley Tunnel burrowed off towards Sheffield.The coming of the railway changed this landscape’s energy, cutting off Bole Hill and part of Grindleford from the Derwent valley below. A line of terraced houses was built alongside the tracks, a blessing for the local wildlife on this December morning. A man leant against his back doorframe watching birds feeding in his garden while on the other side of the track I was walking, a crowd of tits and chaffinches combed a hawthorn. Continue reading...

Friends of a farmer who killed himself following a long dispute with the industry furious at being handed Lifeline leaflets with gas company brandingGas company funding of suicide prevention counselling in Queensland’s gasfields has sparked fresh controversy after a government department distributed a brochure for the service to friends of a farmer who took his life after a long battle with the industry.Family friends of the late George Bender, whose suicide in October brought national attention to rural community tensions with gas companies, were furious to receive the Queensland Gas Company-branded leaflet at a meeting with the state’s chief health officer, Jeanette Young, last month in Chinchilla. Continue reading...

Foreign minister Julie Bishop responds to Twitter outrage by saying Australia has accepted an invitation after group of 100 nations held a press conferenceAustralia has belatedly joined a “coalition of ambition” in the Paris climate talks – a loose grouping of more than 100 developed and developing countries including the US, EU, Canada and Brazil – aimed at countering a push by China, India and Saudi Arabia to water down aspects of the climate pact as negotiations run overtime.

Foreign minister Julie Bishop says on Friday that Australia still hopes for ambitious targets and strong rules for transparency set in the final COP21 climate agreement. Speaking on the sidelines of the climate summit in Paris, France, she added that she expected five-yearly reviews on the climate deal to be included as a term of a final deal

The Eiffel Tower lights up on Friday night with messages of encouragement and caution as the COP21 global climate talks are drawn out past the original Friday deadline. Messages urged negotiators to decarbonise, keep global warming below “1.5 degrees” and warned that there is “no plan B”

Residents deluged by Storm Desmond braced for second weekend of rain as river levels remain high

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La centrale est-africaine a été construite en moins d’un an. Des emplois ont ainsi été créés et le pays est bien parti pour fournir de l’électricité à la moitié de la population d’ici 2017

The UN climate summit runs into overtime to allow more high-level lobbying7.08pm GMTAll the big action is going to happen on Saturday, with negotiations now going through the night behind closed doors, so I’m going to wrap this liveblog up now.Here’s the top of Suzanne Goldenberg’s news story on the state of play, which you’ll soon be able to read in full on our Paris climate talks coverage page.Barack Obama phoned the Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, on Friday in a last ditch effort to prise open a climate change agreement that can be unveiled at the UN climate talks in Paris on Saturday.As the negotiations ran into overtime – something that has happened at virtually every meeting of the last 20 years – Laurent Fabius, the French foreign minister called for a cooling off period to allow more high level lobbying behind closed doors. Fabius put off planned public plenary sessions, which risk being volatile, and gave the floor over to closed meetings in a last push for an agreement.6.50pm GMTLaurent Fabius has reiterated hopes the text will be released at 9am on Saturday. He says the Paris Committee which he chairs will meet at noon, and the final plenary will be at 2pm..@LaurentFabius: "Tomorrow at 9 a.m., I will present a text that is as balanced & as ambitious as possible" #COP21 pic.twitter.com/7rGNM3HU1i Continue reading...

Insufficient airport capacity has long been a serious problem for UK aviation. It is misleading to think of any decision about a hub airport in the south-east as a choice between either Heathrow or Gatwick. Although there have been earlier proposals to run the two airports as one, those proposals considered only partial solutions.Merging the working of the two sites can be most effectively achieved by building a new runway at Gatwick, a direct high-speed rail connection with a parallel motorway linking the two sites, and running the combined airports with an integrated communications system. Continue reading...

Government blames environmental concerns for delay in making a decision, but few take that at face valueSo is it the environment, or plain old politics? Heathrow said it was confident it could meet the government’s environmental criteria for a new runway – although it has yet to be told what green hoops it now needs to jump through.Sources in the Department for Transport say concerns about air quality – and the threat of legal challenge if they are not addressed – are real: there is work to be done to ensure the government meets European Union limits on pollution and this new “period of reflection” would allow it to incorporate new data on vehicle emissions and update the Airports Commission modelling. Continue reading...

Wealthy investors to earn millions after £175m of National Grid contracts are awarded to dirty electricity generators

Government postpones decision over third runway as Labour accuses Tories of procrastinating to help Zac Goldsmith’s mayoral campaign in LondonThe final decision on a third Heathrow runway could be delayed even further than the middle of 2016, the transport secretary has suggested.Patrick McLoughlin admitted on Friday morning that the government’s verdict on airport expansion could be postponed beyond the new deadline of next summer, which was announced on Thursday to widespread anger from business groups. Continue reading...

City links Free buses in Turin, the ‘horizontal elevator’ of Las Vegas, Japan’s recyling capital and the community at the heart of the Turner Prize feature in this week’s round-up of the best urban storiesThe best city stories we’ve collected this week include temporary public transport initiatives in Italian cities hoping to counter increasing air pollution, and the Japanese town on course to become the country’s first “zero-waste” community. We’d love to hear your responses to these stories: share your thoughts in the comments below. Continue reading...

Keeping the price of a barrel of crude at $75 or less will devastate the profitability of fossil fuel extraction – as the shelving of three tar sands projects demonstratesAs world leaders enter the home stretch of the Paris climate negotiations they should keep in mind a key measure of success in limiting carbon emissions: cheap oil. The lower the global price of oil, the more it stays in the ground – due to the brutal, if counterintuitive, logic of the petroleum marketplace.Related: Shell shelves plan for tar sands project in face of low oil prices Continue reading...

Residents of Morpeth, which last flooded in 2012, have spent the subsequent years battling to keep their insurance costs down. Harriet Meyer reportsGovernment pledges to spend billions of pounds on flood defences won’t necessarily shield householders against rising insurance costs in flood-hit areas of the country, despite the protection they offer.Around £23m of defences were completed in June in the Northumberland town of Morpeth after major floods in 2008 and 2012 wrought devastation. Yet some householders near the river Wansbeck still face massive and sometimes rising insurance premiums. Continue reading...

On the UN climate summit’s penultimate day on Friday, Greenpeace activists paint Paris’s streets yellow with ‘eco paint’. They dangle banners from the Arc de Triomphe calling on the French president, François Hollande, to ‘renew the energy’

The response to the 1970s oil shocks gave the planet a life-saving head start in the struggle to avoid catastrophic climate change

As the most important climate change event ever enters the final stages, get up to speed on the key points with our updated guide

En menos de diez años, el país ha reducido drásticamente su huella de carbono y sus costes de electricidad, sin subsidios del Gobierno. Los delegados de la cumbre de París pueden aprender mucho de este éxito

Many schools have already restricted outdoors activities as record levels of air pollution in the Indian capital are expected to last for months to come

With more rain and flooding expected in north-west England this weekend, we’d like to hear from anyone affectedMore flooding has been forecast for north-west of the country over the weekend. The Met Office has issued a yellow weather warning for rain on Saturday across north Wales, the north-west, Yorkshire and Humber, the Midlands and parts of the north-east. Continue reading...

Critics say energy auction rewards carbon emitters as National Grid confirms it has secured 45GW of generation to keep lights on at peak periodsThe government is facing calls for an urgent investigation into how companies were awarded more than £175m in subsidies to build heavily polluting “diesel farms” to provide the UK with backup energy generating capacity.Critics said an energy generation auction overseen by the National Grid had descended into a farce by rewarding intensive carbon dioxide (CO) emitters, just as ministers committed Britain to lower carbon emissions at UN climate change talks in Paris. Continue reading...

Business travel is booming and airlines are expecting other sectors to compensate for their apathyAfter a period of decline in some countries, business travel is on the rise. Total spending is expected to have grown by 7.4% in the UK, 3.1% in the US and 15% in China, according to the Global Business Travel Association, with $1.25tn predicted to have been spent globally on business flights this year. Continue reading...

Hugh Grant talks to the Guardian’s Marc Gunther about the agribusiness giant’s two-front war for a sustainable food supply“You have an easy job,” I tell Hugh Grant, the CEO of Monsanto, as we sit down at the W Hotel in New York City. He looks puzzled, so I explain: “I just read on the Internet that Monsanto controls the world’s food supply.”Grant, 57, jokes that it’s all effortless. The idea that Monsanto controls the world’s food is a canard, but there’s no doubt that it’s a major player in the food chain. The St Louis-based agribusiness giant produced 35.5% of the corn seeds and 28% of the soybean seeds planted in the US in 2014, with sales topping $15.8bn last year. Continue reading...

As summit enters closing stages, UN secretary general urges negotiators to set aside national interests to reach a strong global deal for allThe UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon has said the international climate talks that are edging towards a conclusion in Paris have been the most complicated and difficult negotiations he has ever been involved in.Ban said that differences still remain among the nearly 200 governments searching for a climate deal in Paris but he urged negotiators to set aside their national interests to reach a compromise. Continue reading...

From shrinking glaciers to extreme weather and urban waste, world’s top photographers present images that capture what is at stake as leaders from over 190 countries seek an international climate agreement in Paris Continue reading...

Prince of Wales criticises failure to address the ‘root cause’ of the problem and singles out damaging role of climate scepticsThe devastating flooding caused by Storm Desmond is linked to the failure to tackle climate change, the “root cause” of the problem, according to Prince Charles.The Prince, whose charity has given £40,000 to affected communities, also lashed out at climate sceptics in a speech on Thursday. “What right do they have to sacrifice our children and grandchildren’s future?” Continue reading...

US, UK and others accused of ‘cynical’ ploy in response to developing countries’ firm stance on holding rich nations accountable for climate change damage

The holiday season won’t be so merry and bright if the effects of climate change eventually ravage the Earth. Artist Zachary Scheer illustrates the ghosts of holidays future in these environmentally minded Christmas cards Continue reading...

If more capacity were vital, the market would have spoken. So let’s discourage these polluting flights and spend the money on roads and trains insteadNever take a fact from a lobbyist. Heathrow runways have nothing to do with “vital British business”. The idea that spending a staggering £18bn on one runway is economically essential is ludicrous. The economy has far more need of better roads to ports, more commuter trains or cheaper electricity. That they lack the glamour of an airport should not be the issue.A full 80% of London’s airport capacity serves one industry: foreign leisure travel. That industry is, overwhelmingly, Britons going abroad, and is thus negative to the balance of payments. Business export travel is a trivial part of the sum. Continue reading...

More than 240,000 people in Somaliland do not have enough food because of acute droughts caused by poor rains. Save the Children, which is building wells and reservoirs and providing chlorination, warns that malnutrition rates – especially for children under five – are alarming and likely to increasePhotographs by Felicity McCabe/Save the Children

Extending capital into surrounding farmland is part of ongoing discrimination against Oromo people, say protesters. Global Voices reportsAt least 10 students are said to have been killed and hundreds injured during protests against the Ethiopian government’s plans to expand the capital city into surrounding farmland.According to Human Rights Watch, the students were killed this week when security forces used excessive force and live ammunition to disperse the crowds. Continue reading...

Multilateral development banks are funding a roll out of hydropower projects in national parks, world heritage sites and conservation zones across the BalkansInternational banks have ploughed hundreds of millions of euros into a wave of hydropower projects sweeping across many pristine national parks and environmentally-protected regions in the Balkans, according to a new report.Around half of 1,640 planned and actual projects in countries such as Bosnia, Macedonia and Albania are to be constructed in protected national parks, world heritage and Natura 2000 (EU protected) sites or their equivalents. Continue reading...

French foreign minister calls for second all-night session to seal agreement on 20-year diplomatic process but admits talks will finish on Saturday

Early next year, production of the Defender will cease at its West Midlands home. The model that has served a host of British icons including the Queen has finally been overtaken by time, technology and legislationThat great steel and aluminium beast, the Land Rover Defender, and its ancestors have been clanging and clunking their way off the production line at Solihull since 1948. Born in postwar rationing, the Defender feels as quintessentially British as the Queen, Churchill or Bond, among the other national icons who have been plonked atop its unbending chassis.Orders have boomed of late, and the 2 millionth Defender will be auctioned off at Bonhams in London next week, probably for the price of a luxury sports car. But the model that has served adventurers, soldiers, farmers and generations of enthusiasts is almost done: overtaken at last by time, technology and legislation. Continue reading...

Met Office issues yellow weather warning for rain this weekend as clear-up continues in Cumbrian towns and villagesMore flooding has been forecast for north-west of the country over the weekend as the army arrives in Keswick to help the clear-up effort.Residents of the Cumbrian town, one of the worst-hit by last weekend’s flooding, will be assisted by 100 soldiers from 2nd Battalion Duke of Lancaster’s Regiment. Continue reading...

French foreign minister says Paris talks are ‘extremely close’ to agreement but negotiations will overrun into SaturdayNegotiators in Paris are within reach of a global agreement to curb greenhouse emissions to 2030 and beyond, with the French foreign minister, Laurent Fabius, saying the meeting was “extremely close to the finishing line” as he presented a draft text that cut through many key sticking points.After reading the draft and chairing a meeting of the so-called “umbrella group” of developed nations, the Australian foreign minister, Julie Bishop, said she thought the text was “about 80% there”.

Government announces postponement of final decision on airport expansion over environmental concernsDavid Cameron has delayed the decision on whether to allow a third runway at Heathrow airport until summer 2016 over environmental concerns.The government said it was supporting more airport capacity in the south-east by 2030, as recommended by the Airports Commission. However, it delivered a setback to Heathrow’s hopes of building a third runway by neglecting to mention the airport by name in its statement and making clear other viable options – such as expansion at Gatwick – were still on the table. Continue reading...

What more can we expect from a government with such a shambolic response to climate change and disregard for the poorest people in high-risk flood areas?Not everyone is equal in their capacity to recover from flooding. Tenure, for example, is a particular problem: people who rent privately and struggle to get their landlords to fix even minor problems in their homes may be up against significant challenges in the face of natural disaster.Meanwhile housing associations and councils, already blasted by cuts, are likely to struggle to repair homes quickly with dwindling funds and mass staff layoffs. Many socially deprived areas are also in high-risk flood areas: charting the Indices of Multiple Deprivation against maps of flood risk shows a high correlation between poorer areas and those vulnerable to flooding, especially as a result of rainwater flooding. Continue reading...

Scenes in Cumbria before and after the flood waters receded Continue reading...