The Chinese government has issued a temporary moratorium on new facilities for converting coal into liquid transportation fuels, although at least two of the biggest projects will still move forward.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) elected new leadership last week in Geneva, Switzerland, unanimously re-electing the Indian economist Rajendra Pachauri as chairman but choosing new heads of the three working groups that coordinate the writing of its massive reports.

Parisian pollution is nothing compared with that of Beijing or Mexico City. Yet Paris, with 11 million people crammed into a region just 20 kilometres across, is to take centre stage in a new research project on the impact of megacities on air pollution. The MEGAPOLI project, which starts next month, will focus on building regional air-pollution models for every city in the world with a population of more than five million. It encompasses 23 research organizations from 11 European countries, along with 24 collaborating partners outside Europe.

As we become an ever more urban species, cities will be a crucial front in the fight against climate change. Scientists, architects and planners must join forces to make our metropolitan future clean and sustainable. (Editorial)

Atlantic tropical cyclones are getting stronger on average, with a 30-year trend that has been related to an increase in ocean temperatures over the Atlantic Ocean and elsewhere. Over the rest

As this year's Atlantic hurricane season becomes ever more violent, scientists have come up with the firmest evidence so far that global warming will significantly increase the intensity of the most extreme storms worldwide.

It is thought, that the Northern Hemisphere experienced only ephemeral glaciations from the Late Eocene to the Early Pliocene epochs (about 38 to 4 million years ago), and that the onset of extensive glaciations did not occur until about 3 million years ago. Several hypotheses have been proposed to explain this increase in Northern Hemisphere glaciation during the Late Pliocene.

Viruses are the most abundant biological organisms of the world's oceans. Viral infections are a substantial source of
mortality in a range of organisms

Viruses that infect microbes in deep-sea sediments may be a key driver in the world's largest ecosystem and integral to the global carbon cycle, data reveal.

Rail travel produces more than a third less emissions than road transport