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Independent (UK): Imagine U2 clambering on to a train to take them to a sold-out stadium; Keith Richards swigging from a bottle of organic, Fairtrade booze while Bon Jovi recycle their post-gig waste. Unlikely as it sounds, it may yet come to pass as rock'n'roll's tradition of painting the town red fades to an ethical shade of green. Polluting private jets, excessive dressing room demands and arena-busting tours are no long sustainable, according to the biggest study so far on the effect of the live ...

At last, global warming inspires good fiction. And scientists are the rightful heroes

Gossip columnists long ago supplanted the literary editors in media hierarchies, and a writer must be grateful if the press greets the publication of his or her book with anything so quaint as a discussion of its literary merit. When Martin Amis released The Pregnant Widow in February, he discovered that the big issue for journalists was not how he expressed his ideas but whether he had upset Anna Ford. The former newsreader proved she is not at her best when the autocue is off by accusing him of smoking in the hospital room where her husband was dying in 1988 – he didn't, apparently – and of being a neglectful godfather to her daughter, a charge that even if true had nothing to do with his book.

After this, Ian McEwan must be grateful that Angela Rippon is not greeting the publication of Solar by announcing that he stood her up on a date in 1976, or that Fiona Bruce is not telling the papers he snubbed her at a dinner party during Blair's first term.

The "story" about McEwan nevertheless remains as irrelevant to his fiction as the babbling about whether the atheist Amis was a good godfather. Inspired by the Sunday Times, the pack has decided that McEwan is satirising a voyage in which he accompanied Rachel Whiteread, Antony Gormley and other enlightened artists to see the effect of global warming in the Arctic.

McEwan does indeed acknowledge his debt to the Cape Farewell expedition, and includes a scene in which the cynical hero contrasts the idealistic conversation of his progressive companions when they are together at dinner with the naked selfishness with which they steal each other's gloves, scarves and helmets in the ship's boot room. "Four days ago the room had started out in orderly condition, with all gear hanging on or stowed below the numbered pegs," says Michael Beard. "Finite resources, equally shared, in the golden age of not so long ago. Now it was a ruin… How were they to save the Earth when it was so much larger than the boot room?"

As scoops go, however, the hacks' effort was five years late – and so did not even qualify as yesterday's news. When he returned from the Arctic in 2005, McEwan made the contrast between the highmindedness of the dinner table and the low scramble for petty advantage in the boot room in a speech you can still find on the internet. More pertinently, he understands that the contradiction is at the heart of contemporary environmental concerns. Far from mocking fears about climate change, McEwan is struggling to find a way to write them.

Opposition to global warming has been a good cause which has failed to inspire good fiction. I do not claim encyclopaedic knowledge, but Solar is the first novel I have read to tackle it successfully. The difficulty was that there appeared to be no space for any emotion except despair. If Europe slashed its carbon emissions, would America reciprocate? Even if it did, how could you persuade one billion Chinese consumers not to buy cars or hundreds of millions of Indians and Africans to abandon self-enrichment? The campaign against climate change ran against the grain of human nature.

McEwan has found a way out by turning to the pioneering green thinkers James Lovelock and Stewart Brand, who have been begging environmentalists to stand their old opposition to technology on its head. They want them to see nuclear power, mega-cities and GM food as innovations that can slow down emissions. To put it another way, they hope to use 21st-century science to limit the damage caused by 19th and 20th-century science.

McEwan tells me that he prefers technicians to humanities graduates who spout apocalyptic predictions. He sniffs in some the same fanaticism that inspired millenarian religion, communism and fascism, and suspects they want to compensate for the knowledge of the inevitability of their own deaths by imagining that the species will go down with them.

The optimism – and it may be a false optimism – new technologies bring allows McEwan to create a protagonist who is not an impossibly righteous hero or the gritty survivor of a coming catastrophe but an all too fleshy adulterer and glutton. Michael Beard is a Nobel Laureate whose glory days are long gone. He steals the work of an equally lecherous colleague, who dies, appropriately, by slipping on a polar bear-skin rug. Beard realises the robbed research could create a new source of clean energy and goes on a slob's progress through the arguments against global warming as he tries to cash in.

When his American business partner wonders if the denialists of the Tea Party movement may be right, Beard delivers a devastating account of the arguments for manmade global warming, which ends with the unanswerable point that in the unlikely event of the vast majority of qualified scientists being wrong, we'll be hitting peak oil soon and will need alternative energy anyway. He neatly illuminates the link between Palinism and postmodernism by forcing Beard to endure an audience at London's Institute of Contemporary Arts, which bellows that his so-called science is nothing but a "social construct" designed to preserve the "hegemonic arrogance" of the "white male elite". My colleagues should note that McEwan shows that the ICA rather than the Cape Farewell project has been the true butt of satirists ever since Amis invited its relativist crowd to raise their hands if they thought they were morally superior to the Taliban and only one third did. ("So many?" I hear you gasp. Yes, I was surprised too.)

The novel's burning question comes when Beard asks an audience of City investors, "How can we slow down and stop while sustaining our civilisation and continuing to bring millions out of poverty? Not by being virtuous… For humanity en masse, greed trumps virtue. So we have to welcome into our solutions the ordinary compulsions of self-interest, and also celebrate novelty, the thrill of invention [and] the pleasures of ingenuity."

McEwan attempts the difficult trick of blending raucous comedy with science and politics. I think he pulls it off magnificently. But given the current state of British criticism, I accept that you may want to hear what the newsreaders have to say before deciding for yourselves.

• Ian McEwan
• Martin Amis
• Climate change
• Arctic

Nick Cohen
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A new Gallup poll shows that compared to three years ago, twice as many Americans believe that global warming’s consequences are exaggerated.

And in just the last year, there has been an increase in skepticism from 41% to 48%.

The chart above shows a number of trends. Skepticism about global warming was generally low in 1997, when the polling started, before climate change was getting regular news coverage, either fact or opinion based.

In fact, the level of skepticism did not change much with the increasing coverage of climate change in the wake of An Inconvenient Truth, increasingly publicized consensus among the vast majority of climate scientists that global warming was real, human caused and potentially devastating, the Third Assessment Report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2001, or even the Nobel prize winning Fourth IPCC Assessment Report in 2007. So, we could assume that roughly 30% of the skeptics are not going to be persuaded by science. They have their opinion and they are sticking to it.

There is a nice little spike in skepticism just after the 2004 election, a point at which the move from climate change as a scientific issue to climate change as a partisan issue began to really take hold. But then Hurricane Katrina happened in the summer of 2005 and even some of the new skeptics began to see a connection between the voracity of the hurricane and our changing climate. Skepticism fell.

So what has happened more recently to increase the skepticism to such high levels? Not much to do with the science which continues to be conclusive. Just last week, the UK’s National Weather Service, the Met Office asserted that there are ‘clear fingerprints’ of human caused climate change in over 100 recent studies of sea ice, rainfall and global temperature.

This concept of global temperature is key and not well understood by the lay person. Both the Colbert Report and the Daily Show ran segments spoofing people’s (and Fox News’s) inability to understand that just because it is cold and snowing in Washington, D.C. doesn’t mean that there aren’t record high temperatures in Australia or Southern Africa. In fact, despite a snowy winter in the northeast, NASA reports that, globally, 2009 was the second warmest year since 1880. And despite 2008 being the coolest year of the decade due to a strong La Nina effect in the Pacific, the last decade was the warmest on record.

NASA explained it this way in a January press release:

The near-record global temperatures of 2009 occurred despite an unseasonably cool December in much of North America. High air pressures from the Arctic decreased the east-west flow of the jet stream, while increasing its tendency to blow from north to south. The result was an unusual effect that caused frigid air from the Arctic to rush into North America and warmer mid-latitude air to shift toward the north. This left North America cooler than normal, while the Arctic was warmer than normal.

"The contiguous 48 states cover only 1.5 percent of the world area, so the United States' temperature does not affect the global temperature much," Hansen said.

But does anyone know or care about global temperatures when they’re freezing their tail off in New Jersey? When shoveling out your driveway for the umpteenth time, it’s hard to even care that Maine and Vancouver have been snowless. For many, the data being used to assess global warming is what they can see out their own window. And the Gallup polling in March 2009 and March 2010 would reflect this method of formulating an opinion about climate change; following both of those cool winters in the U.S. skepticism increased. As Stephen Colbert would say, we may be turning into a nation of peek-a-boo-ologists.

There are a number of other factors that also seem to be driving the increasing skepticism about climate change; partisanship, money and so-called scandal.

Observe the sharp spike in skepticism following the 2008 election when passing a greenhouse gas emissions reduction bill became a major component of the Obama administration’s agenda, making it a major target of the Republican agenda. Climate change went from being a national issue that was embraced by members of both parties to a partisan issue with one side chanting “drill, baby, drill” and defining itself in opposition to anything and everything that the other side supports.

For Republicans, “the new political expediency is to be a global warming skeptic,” said Marc Morano, executive editor of the skeptic clearinghouse website ClimateDepot.com and a former aide to outspoken skeptic Sen. James M. Inhofe (R-Okla.). - Los Angeles Times

Then there are recent errors in research and stolen emails that are easily misunderstood. Atmospheric Sciences professor Andrew Dressler of Texas A & M University explained in an Op/Ed in the Houston Chronicle last week why relying on these ‘scandals’ to formulate an opinion about the reality of climate change is foolish.

In recent months, e-mails stolen from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit in the United Kingdom and errors in one of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's reports have caused a flurry of questions about the validity of climate change science.

These issues have led several states, including Texas, to challenge the Environmental Protection Agency's finding that heat-trapping gases like carbon dioxide (also known as greenhouse gases) are a threat to human health. However, Texas' challenge to the EPA's endangerment finding on carbon dioxide contains very little science. Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott admitted that the state did not consult any climate scientists, including the many here in the state, before putting together the challenge to the EPA. Instead, the footnotes in the document reveal that the state relied mainly on British newspaper articles to make its case.

Contrary to what one might read in newspapers, the science of climate change is strong… - Houston Chronicle

As he goes on to explain, the climate is definitely changing, human activity definitely causes heat trapping gases and those heat trapping gases are the cause of the changing climate. It should be simple, but it is not.

Finally, and perhaps most impacting, there is the money being poured into creating a so-called debate over whether climate change is real, human caused and dangerous. Greenpeace reports that from 1998 – 2006,. ExxonMobil put over $2.2 million into just one denier think tank. From 1998 – 2005, the company spent $16 million with denier lobby groups and think tanks. BP spent $8 million in just 8 months in 2009 lobbying against climate legislation. The Heritage Foundation, which tried to use the 2008 La Nina cooling to cast doubts on the reality of climate change, received $50,000 from ExxonMobil that year, and another denier think tank, Atlas Economic Research, received $100,000.

As the tobacco companies can attest, pour enough money into a marketing campaign and you can get people to do just about anything. Even spend their hard earned money on a product that will kill them.

All of these factors have played a role in increasing the level of skepticism about climate change. What they haven’t done is changed the scientific conclusions that climate change is real, human caused and poses a great danger. And they haven’t solved the problem of what we are going to do about that.

Mongabay: As the President of France, Nicholas Sarkozy, argues in Paris that more funding is needed to stop deforestation and mitigate climate change, a shipment of illegal rosewood is being readied for export in Madagascar by a French company with the tacit approval of the French government. The shipment of some 4,000-5,000 tons of rosewood will be shipped under the auspices of the French company, Delmas, according to Derek Schuurman, who has published papers on the illegal logging crisis for ...

Telegraph: A new study, funded by Nasa, has found that the most serious drought in the Amazon for more than a century had little impact on the rainforest's vegetation. The findings appear to disprove claims by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that up to 40% of the Amazon rainforest could react drastically to even a small reduction in rainfall and could see the trees replaced by tropical grassland. The IPCC has already faced intense criticism for using a report by ...

Telegraph: At least one in six of the 255 wind farms in Britain have received noise complaints according to figures obtained by the Daily Telegraph. But local authorities have never managed to prosecute on the grounds of noise nuisance because it is so difficult to prove. The main problem is the intermittent nature of noise from wind farms that makes it difficult to measure. Inspectors have to be on the site when the noise is worst, even though that could be in the middle of the night. ...

Associated Press: A new report says birds that live in and visit Louisiana's badly damaged and eroding coast are threatened by climate change. On Louisiana's coast, sea level rise and the loss of habitat will threaten migratory songbirds, ocean bird species and waterfowl, according to Melanie Driscoll, director of bird conservation at the Louisiana Audubon Society. The report, "The State of the Birds: 2010 Report on Climate Change," was released Thursday. A 2009 report on bird populations ...

Agence France-Presse: Around 60 countries pushed ahead on Thursday with a multi-billion-dollar scheme to reduce climate-changing emissions from deforestation, to which Germany added its support, British minister Joan Ruddock said on Thursday. "There was a tremendous mood of determination to get things done. I regard this as quite a breakthrough, actually," Ruddock, who is secretary of state for energy and climate change, told AFP in a phone interview. Around 60 countries, gathering donor economies ...

San Francisco Chronicle: Emperor penguins and chicks in Antarctica are the most severely threatened by impending climate changes, the report says. The birds need solid sea ice to lay eggs and raise chicks on. Shifting sea ice around Antarctica is already disrupting penguin colonies as the world's climate warms, according to a new report by a team of polar scientists. The researchers looked at the complex relationship between emperor and Adelie penguins and their changing habitats and studied how a ...

Press Democrat: To a long list of predators and threats, the western snowy plover, a sparrow-sized bird that nests in sandy beaches on the Sonoma coast, has a new nemesis: climate change. The little brown, black and white shorebird is among the feathered species at risk from rising seas due to climate change, bird experts said. "They are already in trouble," Gary Langham, director of bird conservation for Audubon California, said of the plovers, a threatened species since 1993. "Climate change ...

Monroe News: Lake Erie was shrouded in fog Friday, but its future waters might be a muddier brown or an eerier bright green due to persistent pollution and climate change, experts suggest. The lake, especially its shallowest western basin bordering Monroe County and northwest Ohio, is suffering from farm-related and other runoff that threatens to return its health to that of the 1970s when it was written off as dead. "We don't want to be responsible for writing Lake Erie's obituary again," said ...

Herald: Government has called on farmers to adjust to changing weather patterns and become more scientific in their approach to agriculture. In a speech read on his behalf by Mr Collins Mungate, a senior official in the Ministry of Media, Information and Publicity, Minister Webster Shamu said Zimbabwe -- like all other countries in the region -- was affected by the effects of global warming and climate change. "Our rainfall pattern, amount and distribution of rain have changed ...

Associated Press: Sen. John Kerry, hoping to win over wavering senators, said he is pushing environmental reforms to create jobs and spark energy independence, with climate benefits along "for the ride." In an interview with The Associated Press, the Massachusetts Democrat said legislation he's crafting with Sens. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., will differ from a House-passed bill that embraces a so-called "cap and trade" approach to reduce pollution blamed for global ...

News Journal: Young people in evangelical churches have likely never heard a sermon linking scripture with a love of creation and caring for the earth. That explains the slowness of mainline evangelicals in signing onto the movement to lower carbon emissions and avert climate change, said the Rev. Richard Cizik, president of the New Evangelical Partnership for the Common Good. He's reached that opinion from hundreds of talks he's given on campuses, and it's sad news for Americans who believe ...

Daily Comet: The combined forces of climate change and land loss pose a major threat to Louisiana bird species, especially those that depend on the disappearing coast, according to a report released Thursday by a partnership of university bird researchers, federal agencies and environmental groups. The State of the Birds: 2010 Report on Climate Change," released Thursday by U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, was prepared by a partnership of university bird researchers, federal agencies and ...

Guardian: Watch one of the contentious climate change adverts The advertising watchdog has mildly rebuked the government over the phrasing of a claim in two advertisements on the danger of climate change, while dismissing the rest of the complaints against the controversial television and newspaper campaign. The campaign, run by the Department of Environment and Climate Change last winter, brought in 939 complaints. Various groups said the adverts were political, too scary, and factually ...

redOrbit: Using green algae to produce hydrocarbon oil for biofuel production is nothing new; nature has been doing so for hundreds of millions of years, according a Texas AgriLife Research scientist. "Oils from the green algae Botryococcus braunii can be readily detected in petroleum deposits and coal deposits suggesting that B. braunii has been a contributor to developing these deposits and may be the major contributor," said Dr. Timothy Devarenne, AgriLife Research scientist with the Texas ...

Guardian: In 1993, three years into her presidency of Ireland, Mary Robinson paid a visit to west Belfast. The trip was controversial before she went – the Irish government didn't want her there, and neither did the British – but it became far more controversial when, in the course of her tour, she happened to shake the hand of a local politician, one Gerry Adams. The next day, "trying to be a good president, I washed the hair and waited for the hairdresser to arrive," Robinson told an RTÉ radio show ...

Guardian: The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis by Jeremy Rifkin 688pp, Polity Press, £17.99 Buy The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis at the Guardian bookshop Whoever hacked into the emails at the University of East Anglia fired the opening salvo in a new kind of dirty war. The Copenhagen conference met on the basis that dealing with global warming was in everyone's interest. The idea that nearly 200 ...

New York Times: Changes in the global climate are imposing additional stress on hundreds of species of migratory birds in the United States that are already threatened by other environmental factors, according to a new Interior Department report. The department's annual State of the Birds report shows that nearly a third of the nation's 800 bird species are endangered, threatened or suffering from population decline. For the first time, the report adds climate change to other factors threatening bird ...