Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott's top business advisor on Friday claimed climate change was a ruse encouraged by the United Nations to create a new authoritarian world order under its control.

Maurice Newman, chairman of the Prime Minister's Business Advisory Council, said the real agenda was "concentrated political authority. Global warming is the hook".

You’d think it was the ultimate petrolhead paradise, and indeed there is plenty at the Williams F1 headquarters – in an old Johnson and Johnson factory in Oxfordshire – to stimulate the inner Toad. Portraits of drivers Felipe Massa and Valtteri Bottas gaze down from the walls at the F1 car which dominates the reception area, looking, to the uninitiated eye like a high-tech stick insect, while topiary outside depicts a busy pit stop.

But the surprise is that, far from harboring an aggressive Top-Gear-type disdain for all things green, the company is reinventing itself as a champion of environmentally friendly technology. Yesterday it unveiled plans to fit aerofoils developed from racing cars to supermarket fridges so as to save energy, while a fuel-saving F1 flywheel is being tried out in buses. It is even supplying ecologically- correct supercars for the next Bond film.

If there’s anything to be gleaned about Joss Whedon’s worldview from his hit show Firefly, it might be that he’s pessimistic about the future of politics.

“Nothing will change in the future,” Whedon, who also wrote and directed the enormously successful Avengers movie, once said about the dystopian universe depicted in Firefly. “Technology will advance, but we will still have the same political, moral, and ethical problems as today.”

Extreme heatwaves and heavy rain storms are already happening with increasing regularity worldwide because of manmade climate change, according to new research.

Global warming over the last century means heat extremes that previously only occurred once every 1,000 days are happening four to five times more often, the study published in Nature Climate Change said.

BP's shareholders overwhelmingly supported a resolution on Thursday that would force the company to disclose some of its climate change-related risks. The shareholder vote was extraordinarily lopsided, with about 98% of shareholders approving the resolution, which had the backing of BP's chairman, Carl-Henric Svanberg.

The embrace of the climate change resolution is being called a watershed event in the history of climate-related shareholder resolutions, which investors large and small have been pursuing since 1999 to try to encourage oil, coal and gas companies to inform shareholders of their climate change-related risks and shift their investments into renewable sources of energy.

Pledges made by countries to slash carbon emissions are deeply inadequate to take them down to safe levels by 2030 and put the brakes on global warming, a new analysis warned Monday.

Based on the stated undertakings of the world's major emitters, global emissions could reach about 57-59 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (GtCO2e) by 2030, said the report co-authored by British academic Nicholas Stern, a former World Bank vice-president considered an authority on the economics of climate change.

Republican Bob Inglis received the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award on Sunday for reversing his position on climate change despite the predictable political fallout that helped cost him his seat in Congress.

Kennedy's grandson, Jack Schlossberg, presented the award to Inglis on Sunday at the JFK Library in Boston.

Greenland’s polar bears have a thyroid problem. Their endocrine systems, too, are being disrupted.

In both cases the culprit agency is environmental pollution by a range of long-lived industrial chemicals and pesticides.

China’s recent scrapping of small coal plants will avoid the release of as much as 11.4 million metric tons annually of climate-warming carbon dioxide, helping the country cut emissions for the first time in more than a decade.

The impact is a sign of what’s to come as China pushes for a cap on coal and moves to shutter, or refit, its dirtiest coal-burning power plants. China overhauled or scrapped as much as 3.3 gigawatts of the facilities in 2014, according to a March statement from the National Bureau of Statistics.

Three-quarters of known fossil fuel reserves must be kept in the ground if humanity is to avoid the worst effects of climate change, a group of leading scientists and economists have said in a statement timed to coincide with Earth Day.

The Earth League, which includes Nicholas Stern, the author of several influential reports on the economics of climate change; Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, a climate scientist and adviser to Angela Merkel; and the US economist Jeffrey Sachs, urged world leaders to follow up on their commitments to avoid dangerous global warming.