The Greenland and West Antarctic ice caps are melting at half the speed previously predicted, it has been announced.

Scientists measured the change in the ice caps by analysing changes in Earth’s gravitational field using two satellites, which monitor the distribution of mass on Earth including ice and water.

When ice melts and joins the sea, this has a small, but detectable effect on the Earth's gravitational field.

The Inter-Academy report into the IPCC, led by Rajendra Pachauri, tiptoes around a mighty elephant in the room, argues Christopher Booker.

RAJENDRA PACHAURI has a chauffeur, lives in luxury and jets across the world on his quest to ban Sunday roasts and cheap flights. Now he's accused of exaggerating the climate change crisis.

MOST mornings he is driven to work from his £5 million home in a 1.8-litre Toyota Corolla by his personal chauffeur, as befits his status as director-general of a New Delhi research institute employing more than 700 staff.

Dr Rajendra Pachauri is also a winner of a Nobel Peace prize, the holder of India’s  second-highest civilian award, an officer of the French Legion of Honour and is used to being treated with respect.

But for some of those who challenge the international consensus on climate change he is public enemy number one and his travel arrangements are fair game. That’s because he is also the chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the UN body set up in 1988 to conduct regular assessments on the state of global warming.

UN climate change experts have been accused of making 'imprecise and vague' statements and over-egging the evidence.

A scathing report into the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change called for it to avoid politics and stick instead to predictions based on solid science.

The probe, by representatives of the Royal Society and foreign scientific academies, took a thinly-veiled swipe at Rajendra Pachauri, the panel's chairman for the past eight years.

The country's state-owned weather and atmospheric research body is being taken to court in a challenge over the accuracy of its data used to calculate global warming.

The New Zealand Climate Science Coalition said it had lodged papers with the High Court asking the court to invalidate the official temperatures record of the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (Niwa).

The lobby of climate sceptics and ACT Party have long criticised Niwa over its temperature data, which Niwa says is mainstream science and not controversial, and the raw data publicly available.

The New Zealand Climate Science Education Trust, a newly registered arm of the Coalition, has filed a claim in the High Court seeking a declaration to invalidate the NZ Temperature Record, currently promoted by NIWA, and featured on its website.  To download media release, bacgrounder and summary of claim, link here

To download explanatory graph, link here 

Fewer Australians believe that humans are responsible for climate change, but despite this, the market for environmentally friendly products such as LED bulbs is growing and manufacturers are releasing increasingly innovative and eco-friendly products.

An August 6 report by Gallup Worldview has revealed that while Australians are still concerned about climate change, fewer blame it on human activities.

Global climate change talks have moved backwards since last year, say negotiators from both rich and poor nations at discussions in Germany.

The US envoy said some countries had "walked away" from commitments made at Copenhagen last year to contain greenhouse gas emissions.

But the top UN climate official, Christiana Figueres, said progress had been made towards an eventual deal.

The Democrats' proposed legislation to end a $75m cap on oil spill damages failed due to lack of support from its own party.

Hopes that the worst oil spill in history would bring sweeping reform to America's offshore oil industry were thwarted after Democrats in Senate had to put proposed legislation on hold.

Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader, said he could not find support for the oil spill measures, which would have got rid of a $75m (£47m) cap on damages companies like BP would have to pay in the event of a spill.

Reid had earlier planned to open debate on the bill today.

The Maldives have become a symbol of the dangers of global warming, amid fears the low-lying nation could disappear as a result of rising sea levels. But one team of scientists believes the truth is more complicated. The Maldives coral islands, they postulate, may be growing with the rising waters.

For many scientists, there are only two types of material: living and dead. "It makes thinking nice and easy," says Paul Kench, a geologist with the University of Auckland in New Zealand.

Islands, for example, are generally assigned to the sphere of the inanimate. Kench, however, wants to convince the scientific world that the opposite is true. That's why he is currently spending much of his time swimming around with flippers in the emerald-green waters of the Indian Ocean.

Kench traveled to the Maldives with five fellow scientists. Together, they intend to fathom the true essence of the tropical archipelago. "These islands are like a growing organism, constantly changing and sometimes even ceasing to exist," says Kench.

The New Zealand scientist has studded this unusual body of islands with sensors to measure its growth. The other team members want to see how he does it, and so, equipped with masks and snorkels, they dive into the amazing underwater world of the islands' lagoons. Flat, rounded shapes with jagged edges and odd-looking spheres become visible. They see a forest of coral, whose chalky skeletons form the reefs. The islands owe their existence to the life-and-death cycle of these marine organisms.

Plan to charge large polluters abandoned in favour of narrower legislation focusing on increasing firms' liability for oil spills.

A major climate change bill that would have capped carbon emissions has been abandoned by Democrats in the US Senate in the face of opposition from both sides of the house.

Under pressure from falling popularity ratings, Barack Obama had hoped the bill would add to the two biggest legislative successes of his presidency: the comprehensive health care bill and reform of the US banking and financial sector.

Democrats have been trying to pass a plan that charges power plants, manufacturers and other large polluters for their carbon dioxide emissions, the leading contributor to global warming, for more than a year. But it ran into opposition from Republican senators, as well as Democrats eager not to jeopardise their chances in November's midterm elections.

IPCC head ­Rajendra Pachauri says the UN panel's next report must make sure 'errors of any kind are completely eliminated'.

Scientists have reacted with dismay at a letter sent out by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) advising them not to talk to journalists. The letter was published just two days before the publication of a review of the "Climategate" affair that criticized researchers at the University of East Anglia for lacking openness.

Americans are “profoundly bored” with the notion of climate change, according to the writer Ian McEwan, whose latest novel has been poorly received in the US.

GLOBAL warming scientists were yesterday slammed for not being open with the public over the “climategate” scandal.

An inquiry into emails leaked from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) criticised it for withholding information about the extent of global warming.

However, it also concluded that researchers had been responsible and honest.

Out of all the main income-earning sectors in the economy, agriculture has done the best job at controlling its emissions, writes Don Nicolson.

New Zealand embarks on the second phase of the emissions trading scheme today. The ETS is supposedly a market mechanism. It is supposed to drive efficiencies by pricing the sources of greenhouse-changing gasses in such a way that industry will have no choice but to improve.

It's a nice argument and sounds convincing, except the ETS is a controlled market. It's heavily regulated and depends on the mandatory participation by every New Zealander. I have travelled extensively around New Zealand and have asked restaurant staff, hotel cleaners and those usual fonts of knowledge, taxi drivers, what they know about the ETS. The response has largely drawn blank faces.

From today, anyone who uses electricity or land transport fuels - which is everybody - will pay more to cover the cost of emissions units needed to meet the greenhouse gas emissions produced.

It is estimated that retail electricity prices will soon rise by 5 per cent and it will add about four cents a litre to the cost of petrol and diesel.

G20 leaders in Toronto tried to avoid the fate of colleagues felled by warming advocacy.

Last week’s G8 and G20 meetings in Toronto and its environs confirmed that the world’s leaders accept the demise of global-warming alarmism.

One year ago, the G8 talked tough about cutting global temperatures by two degrees. In Toronto, they neutered that tough talk, replacing it with a nebulous commitment to do their best on climate change — and not to try to outdo each other. The global-warming commitments of the G20 — which now carries more clout than the G8 — went from nebulous to non-existent: The G20’s draft promise going into the meetings of investing in green technologies faded into a mere commitment to “a green economy and to sustainable global growth.”

These leaders’ collective decisions in Toronto reflect their individual experiences at home, and a desire to avoid the fate that met their true-believing colleagues, all of whom have been hurt by the economic and political consequences of their global-warming advocacy.

The scientist behind the controversial 'hockey stick' graph has said it was 'somewhat misplaced' to make his work an 'icon of the climate change debate'.

The story of the IPCC's claims about threats to the Amazon rainforest takes another bizarre turn, says Christopher Booker.

Last week the beleaguered global warming lobby was exulting over what it took to be the best news it has had in a long time. A serious allegation, which last January rocked the authority of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, was “corrected” as untrue by The Sunday Times, the newspaper which most prominently reported it. The reputation of the IPCC, it seemed, had been triumphantly vindicated. The growing tide of scepticism over climate change had at last been reversed. But this episode leaves many questions unanswered.

The past six months has seen a series of unprecedented setbacks for the cause of catastrophic man-made climate change: the collapse of the Kyoto process; the release of incriminating Climategate emails; the discovery of the shoddy standards of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC); the mounting evidence that a job-creating green industrial revolution is a fantasy; and the growing suspicion by the public that it has been sold a bill of goods.