A Scottish government target to reduce emissions by 42% by 2020 will be hard to meet before a global deal is in place, experts have warned. The Committee on Climate Change said it was "feasible but difficult" without a wider international agreement. The panel also suggested the Scottish target could be lowered to 38% until a global deal was in place. The Scottish government said it would continue to press other countries to act on climate change.

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The science of climate change is inexact. It is about uncertainty and probabilities. Based on the evidence, a criminal lawyer would not be able to prove that humans are responsible for potentially catastrophic climate change. But the evidence would certainly nail down a civil conviction. If the vast bulk of evidence says climate change is real and that humans are almost certainly to blame, why is the science being dismissed as exaggerated, unreliable or even fraudulent by the climate change doubters? Opinion polls show that public skepticism about man-made climate change has climbed in recent months as the stories questioning the legitimacy of the science migrate from the Internet's fringes to the mainstream media. The University of East Anglia affair certainly did a lot of damage. The university's Climatic Research Unit failed to keep proper records about Chinese weather stations and probably deleted potentially embarrassing correspondence to get around the Freedom of Information Act, among other sins. As far as scandals go, it's genuine.

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The United Nations' top climate diplomat will step down July 1 following a raucous four-year term during which world leaders struggled to reach agreement on a new international global warming deal. Yvo de Boer said today that he plans to leave his post as executive secretary of the Bonn, Germany-based U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change for a job providing consulting services to businesses and universities. De Boer, 55, was at the center of December's chaotic summit in Copenhagen, which ended in frustration for many world leaders who had hoped to craft a legally binding deal that would put the world on a path to reduce greenhouse gases in line with scientific warnings. Instead, they got a non-binding plan brokered in part by President Obama that saw two dozen of the world's largest global warming polluters pledging to cut emissions and help poor countries cope with climate change. In an interview with the Associated Press, de Boer said he wasn't leaving the U.N. job because of the outcome in Denmark. But he also acknowledged his disappointment that countries only "noted" the so-called "Copenhagen Accord" but didn't officially adopt it.

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A last-ditch attempt at passing a climate change bill begins in the Senate this week with senators mindful that time is running short and that approaches to the legislation still vary widely, according to sources. "We will present senators with a number of options when they get back from recess," said one Senate aide knowledgeable of the compromise legislation that is being developed. The goal is to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that scientists say threaten Earth. The options will be presented to three senators -- Democrat John Kerry, independent Joseph Lieberman and Republican Lindsey Graham -- who are leading the fight for a bill to battle global warming domestically. The aide said the Senate's drive for a bill got a boost last week with President Barack Obama's announcement of an $8.3 billion government loan guarantee to help start expanding the nuclear power industry, a top Republican priority. "The administration is really putting their money where their mouth is," the aide said. The Senate trio's success or failure likely will have a profound impact on international efforts to reduce carbon emissions and prevent Earth's temperature from exceeding a possibly dangerous 2 degree Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) increase from pre-industrial times.

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A panel of influential U.S. and European scientists yesterday affirmed the overwhelming scientific consensus that the Earth's climate is changing, but said they and their colleauges should have responded more quickly and effectively to news about errors in a major climate report and hacked researcher e-mails.

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Uncertainty is growing over the future of the Kyoto Protocol, the first legally binding treaty to cut greenhouse gases blamed for heating up the planet. Nearly 40 industrialised nations -- all except the United States -- are supposed to meet agreed emissions targets during the pact's 2008-12 first phase but some countries are way behind their targets and will likely miss them. The disappointing outcome from December's climate talks in Copenhagen has cast a cloud over whether Kyoto will be extended for a second period from 2013, raising questions over the shape of a future legally binding climate pact that all nations can agree on.

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With the continuing failure of governments to reach agreements on combating climate change, the outlook for both humans and nature remains bleak. And nowhere is the failure more conspicuous than in the avoidance of the subject of population growth. Population is a double-barreled environmental problem — not only is population increasing; so are emissions per capita. In 1970, when worldwide greenhouse gas emissions had just begun to transgress the sustainable capacity of the atmosphere, the world population was about 3.7 billion; today it’s about 6.9 billion — an increase of 86 percent. In that same period, worldwide emissions from fossil fuels rose from about 14 billion tons to an estimated 29 billion tons — an increase of 107 percent.

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President Barack Obama has announced more than $8bn (£5bn) of federal loan guarantees to begin building the first US nuclear power stations for 30 years. Two new plants are to be constructed in the state of Georgia by US electricity firm Southern Company. Mr Obama said the plants would be "safe and clean" and were needed to meet the country's future energy needs. There have been no new nuclear power plants started in the US since the 1979 accident at Three Mile Island. The accident was caused by the partial core meltdown of one of the reactors at the site in Pennsylvania, which resulted in a release of radioactive gases into the atmosphere.

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The coastal fog that gives San Francisco its romantic ambience is thinning out, a boon to drivers but a real threat to the giant redwoods there, researchers reported on Monday. It in unclear if natural climate variations or human activity is to blame, but the result could be the loss of trees, they reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "Fog prevents water loss from redwoods in summer, and is really important for both the tree and the forest," biologist Todd Dawson of the University of California Berkeley said in a statement. "The coast redwood is the tallest living tree species and notably long-lived, with some individuals exceeding 2,000 years in age," the researchers wrote in their report, available here "If the fog is gone, we might not have the redwood forests we do now."

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The main impact of climate change will be on water supplies and the world needs to learn from past cooperation such as over the Indus or Mekong Rivers to help avert future conflicts, experts said on Sunday.

Desertification, flash floods, melting glaciers, heatwaves, cyclones or water-borne diseases such as cholera are among the impacts of global warming inextricably tied to water. And competition for supplies might cause conflicts.

"The main manifestations of rising temperatures...are about water," said Zafar Adeel, chair of UN-Water which coordinates work on water among 26 U.N. agencies.

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