News from Burma keeps getting worse: dire poverty, murderous repression and now cyclone Nargis has killed some 100,000 people. Disease and starvation could push the toll over the million mark as the country's despots, unbelievably, impede emergency aid while exporting rice - literally making a killing on inflated international prices. Burma is suffering even more than it might because it neglected its farms.

Climate change is already altering our planet's biology, with only life in Antarctica so far spared its influence. That's the conclusion from an analysis of tens of thousands of individual local studies covering shrinking glaciers, changing river flows, melting permafrost, increased coastal erosion, and warming lakes and rivers. The study, published in Nature (DOI: 10.1038/nature06937) this week, is based on more comprehensive data than any previous investigation of the biological effects of climate change.

Data laboriously extracted from an Antarctic ice core provide an unprecedented view of temperature, and levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide and methane, over the past 800,000 years of Earth's history.

In your Special Report 'Brazil goes to war against logging' (Nature 452, 134

Air travel shows no sign of losing its allure but its environmental impact is not going to go away. Katharine Sanderson looks at some of the ways that scientists and engineers hope to reduce the carbon wing-print of aircraft.

Few scientific creations have had greater impact on public opinion and policy than computer models of Earth's climate. These models, which unanimously show a rising tide of red as temperatures climb worldwide, have been key over the past decade in forging the scientific and political consensus that global warming is a grave danger. (Editorial)

Significant changes in physical and biological systems are occurring on all continents and in most oceans, with a concentration of available data in Europe and North America. Most of these changes are in the direction expected with warming temperature. Here the authors show that these changes in natural systems since at least 1970 are occurring in regions of observed temperature increases, and that these temperature increases at continental scales cannot be explained by natural climate variations alone.