AFP - Rio's zoo has been abuzz with activity in recent months, welcoming new arrivals to its collection of animals as it battles to try to save many of the nation's endangered species.

AP - Investigators with Toyota Motor Corp. and the federal government were unable to make a Toyota Prius speed out of control as its owner said it did on a California freeway, according to a draft memorandum obtained Saturday by The Associated Press that casts doubt on the driver's story.

AP - Investigators with Toyota and the federal government were unable to make a Toyota Prius speed out of control as its owner said it did on a California freeway, according to a memorandum obtained Saturday by The Associated Press. A congressional spokesman said the finding cast doubt on the driver's story.

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

Say pants to the pesticides used in manufacturing cotton!

You might be doubtful that your choice of briefs can be a catalyst for global change, but consider the statistics. The UK underwear market was valued at £4.1bn in 2009. Most of that money is spent on multinational-produced pants. Some are constructed from a mixture of oil-based synthetics, including nylon (which results in emissions of nitrous oxide, a poisonous greenhouse gas).

Received wisdom tells us that cotton, the main underwear fibre, is the type of natural material we need in these delicate regions. Received wisdom is wrong. Although cotton covers less than 1% of the earth's landmass, it soaks up 25% of all pesticides and herbicides. A single pair of cotton pants uses 10ml of pesticides.

In the past year a number of NGOs have got their knickers in a twist about cotton pesticide endosulfan, banned in 62 countries. It is linked to reproductive and developmental damage in animals and humans and is manufactured by pharmaceutical brand Bayer. PantsToPoverty.com, a leader in fairtrade cotton underwear, instigated a "pants amnesty" whereby protestors sent their worst pair of pants to Bayer – which quickly pledged to phase out endosulfan by the end of 2010.

Greenknickers.org offers zero-carbon pants from recycled sources. Whomadeyourpants.co.uk is a workers' co-operative in Southampton employing women who have been granted asylum but find it difficult to get work. They take knickers seriously (like Alan Greenspan, who has said he looks at sales of men's underwear to indicate the direction of the economy). Ethical smalls can become a big deal.

• Fair trade
• Underwear (men)
• Pesticides
• Alan Greenspan
• Ethical and green living

The Natural History Museum has one of the world's greatest collections, capturing the earth's huge biodiversity. Ahead of a major new BBC TV series – Museum of Life – six members of their world-class team of 300 scientists each pick a treasure

The statistics defy comprehension. The mammal collection on its own contains 860,000 items, ranging from the skeleton of a blue whale to a dormouse. Yet this array of old bones and fur represents a mere slice of the contents of the Natural History Museum.

Over the three acres of storage space that forms a labyrinth around the museum in South Kensington, London, there are rooms that contain the remains of 58 million animals, drawers of five million pressed plants, and cupboards filled with nine million fossils. For good measure, this magnificent terracotta edifice – designed by Alfred Waterhouse and opened in 1881 – also provides a home for 300,000 rocks and minerals as well as 2,000 meteorites. This, quite simply, is one of the planet's most important natural history collections, a repository of the biological and geological wonders that have appeared on earth over its 4.6 billion-year history.

Yet only a tiny minority of these marvels is ever seen by the public. The rest are kept behind the scenes at the museum, although these artefacts are still of tremendous importance to researchers, as a new BBC2 TV series, Museum of Life, intends to show. Six documentaries examine some of the star specimens among the museum's scientific treasures and will demonstrate how they are being used as tools to understand, and improve, the planet's threatened ecology. Thus we will learn of the importance of giant tortoise excrement to the regeneration of the ebony forests of Mauritius and come to understand the usefulness of making moulds of dinosaur skeletons.

As Richard Fortey, one of the museum's most important palaeontologists, explains: "The golden rule of museum life is simple. Don't throw anything away. You never know – a technique or technology could come into existence and reveal a new scientific use for it."

As to the identity of the greatest treasures to be found within the walls of this scientific Hogwarts, there is, inevitably, disagreement. So the Observer asked some of the museum's personnel to name their favourites and explain why they have selected them.

Of course, opinions change over time and future generations will no doubt take a very different view – a point demonstrated by the museum's own walls. Waterhouse stipulated there should be carved images of living species on the west wing's walls while the east would only have those of extinct creatures. These included the coelacanth, then thought to be extinct, but which was discovered, very much alive, in 1934. As a result the coelacanth now finds itself commemorated on the wrong wall.

Museum of Life starts on Thursday

Mike Dixon, director of the Natural History Museum

"It is hard to believe that the great skeleton of Dippy, our fossil diplodocus, has not always dominated the museum's entrance hall. The two look as if they had been made for each other: a vast cathedral-like space filled by that wonderful 26m-long skeleton of a long-extinct dinosaur. It is a sight that never fails to hypnotise youngsters when they first set foot in the museum.

"Yet we were without Dippy for the first 24 years of our existence. Indeed, it might never have ended up here at all had not King Edward VII asked for a copy of the newly discovered dinosaur when he visited the Carnegie Museum in America. Over the next 18 months, casts of the fossilised bones were made from five different diplodocus skeletons and shipped to Britain in 36 crates. Dippy was assembled and formally introduced to the public on 12 May, 1905, in the reptile gallery before ending up in the great hall in 1979.

"He has also changed over the years. For a long time we reckoned the diplodocus must have lumbered about in swamps because its body would have been too heavy to move about on dry land and would have needed water or mud for support. However, our ideas about sauropod dinosaurs have changed and we now believe they were much more dynamic and active than we had thought. So we have raised Dippy's head and also his tail, which would have acted as a counterbalance. Essentially, though, he is the same old Dippy that has entranced visitors to the museum for more than 100 years."

Caroline Smith, curator of meteorites

"There are about 38,000 meteorites in museum and private collections in the world but this one is special because it's one of only a handful that are known to have come from another planet: Mars. About 12m years ago an asteroid or comet crashed on to Mars. The resulting blast blew pieces of rock into space and into orbit round the Sun. Then, in 1911, the Earth passed through that orbit and swept up some of those pieces of rock and these fell over the Nakhla area of Egypt. There was a fireball, a detonation and then a shower of stones. Locals claimed a dog was killed – which would have made the animal the only known victim of an interplanetary attack. However, the story is pretty suspect.

"The piece, which is a star specimen in our vault gallery, has a beautiful shiny black exterior. This is known as a fusion crust and was created by the intense heat of the meteorite's fiery passage through the atmosphere. Its interior is mostly a mixture of iron and magnesium silicates called pyroxene and olivine. Some scientists say they can see signs of fossil bacteria-like entities in the meteorite but I am not convinced. On the other hand, it is now clear some of that the minerals that make up the meteorite could only have been created in the presence of water. This shows that Mars – at least in the distant past – must have been a wet, fairly hospitable place."

Angela Milner, research associate in the palaeontology department

"Archaeopteryx has unique, iconic importance for a very simple reason: it is a perfect example of evolution in action. It looks half-way between a bird and a small meat-eating dinosaur which, of course, is exactly what it is.

"It was found inside a piece of limestone in southern Germany and brought in 1862 to the museum, where Thomas Huxley recognised it is a transitional fossil that links modern birds with dinosaurs. Thus it became a key piece of evidence in the debate about natural selection. Our specimen is 147m years old and is the earliest known fossil of an animal that we can definitely call a bird. In other words, its lineage had only relatively recently evolved from dinosaur predecessors. It is wonderfully preserved despite the age, however. You can see its feathers in perfect detail.

"Archaeopteryx would have been about the size of a magpie and would have had a long tail like a magpie's. However, in its case this tail was made out of bone. Since then, birds have evolved tails that are made out of feathers. Intriguingly, we actually have two versions of this particular archaeopteryx. It was preserved in a slab of lithographic limestone which was split apart to reveal the bird inside.

"Both sides reveal detailed impressions of the bird. A copy of one is displayed in the earth gallery and another in the bird gallery."

Chris Stringer, research leader of human origins at the museum

"This is a beautifully preserved skull of an early human being who we think lived about 300,000 years ago. It is also a fossil of special historical importance. In the 19th century, Charles Darwin had predicted science would show that the origins of humanity lay in Africa. But for the next 50 years the only fossils dug up were in Europe and Asia. The Broken Hill Skull – which was found in a mine in Zambia (then Rhodesia) in 1921 - changed that perspective and helped show our birthplace is, indeed, an African one. It has personal importance as well. When I saw a replica of the skull in the museum when I was a youngster, I was captivated, and decided, there and then, to study evolution.

"The skull of Broken Hill Man – we believe it is male from its size – was coated in ore when it was dug up. However, the huge brow-ridges over its eyes marked it out as special and it was sent to the museum.Today we now believe it belongs to a species called Homo heidelbergensis: big-brained, powerfully built hunter-gatherers who may also have been our direct ancestors.

"The skull – a replica is displayed in our human evolution gallery - also reveals clear evidence of illness among ancient people. It has a hole at the back which was probably caused by a small tumour or brain abscess which burst through the skull wall. However, to judge from the subsequent bone growth around the hole, this appears to have partly healed.

"In fact, it is more likely his teeth killed Broken Hill Man. These, and his upper jawbone, were riddled with abscesses that would have caused him immense pain and may even have led to the spread of a fatal infection."

Oliver Crimmen, lead curator in the fish group in the zoology department

"When I was young I was fascinated by the aquarium at London zoo and, in particular, by the tank that contained marine creatures from the Amazon. There was one fish, called the arapaima, which I thought was especially exciting. It was huge, around two metres, and looked truly spectacular.

"Then one day I found the tank had been closed and was being cleaned out. I never found out what happened to the arapaima – until I went to work for the Natural History Museum. There I came across a specimen preserved in alcohol. It was only when I checked the label that I discovered it had come from the zoo. It was, in fact, the very fish that had drawn me to the aquarium a decade earlier and begun my fascination with marine biology. The arapaima seems to have haunted my life.

"In fact, it is a really intriguing fish – not just because of its unusual size. For example, the adult arapaima looks after its young by keeping a shoal of them in its mouth to protect them. The fish is also rare in that it breathes oxygen from the water - and from the air.

"Unfortunately, the arapaima is easily harpooned because of its size and because it swims near the surface. As a result, it is suffering a serious loss of numbers in the wild. On the other hand, it is also being bred today in fish farms. I doubt if I could eat one though."

Jo Cooper, curator of anatomical collections in the museum's bird group

"Charles Darwin collected many bird specimens on his voyage on the Beagle. However, his research had only just begun when he returned to Britain in 1836. Still seeking evidence years later, he began studying domestic animals – and the pigeon turns out to be a surprising favourite. Darwin brought together many different breeds of the bird – which helped to demonstrate the general point that a wide variety of animals can be created from a single originating type. Between 1855 and 1858, Darwin devoted a large part of his time to pigeon breeding – just as fellow scientists, such as Charles Lyell and Joseph Hooker, were pressing him to publish his ideas about evolution. Just write something - 'pigeons, if you please' - but make sure you get your theory into print, Lyell urged.

"Then, in 1858, Darwin got a letter from Alfred Russel Wallace outlining his own version of natural selection, and he dropped everything to write On The Origin of Species. Crucially, this includes many observations about domestic animals – including the pigeon. Later Darwin left his pigeon specimens to the museum and these have turned out to be some of the best preserved items in all his collections. My favourite is a skeleton that has been carefully labelled, in Darwin's own handwriting, and dates back to 1856, just when his ideas about natural selection were crystallising. It is not on permanent display but it is usually included in most, behind-the-scenes tours of the museum."

• Natural History Museum
• Fossils
• Dinosaurs
• Wildlife

Hippocampus satomiae, little bigger than a pea, has been found on reefs in Indonesia

Little bigger than a pea, the smallest known sea horse, Hippocampus satomiae, was discovered at a depth of about 15 metres on reefs in Indonesia, from Derawan island to northern Sulawesi and Borneo. Like other pygmy sea horses, its size and camouflage make it difficult to spot. This species resembles, in texture and colour, the sea fans with which it lives. It has a pouch in which it carries its young, which are only 3mm in length. Animal names ending in -ae honour women, in this case Satomi Onishi, a diving guide who collected the first specimen.

Quentin Wheeler International Institute for Species Exploration, Arizona State University, www.species.asu.edu/

• Zoology
• Animals
• Wildlife

Report by Natural England warns of risk to species and habitats

England was given an uncomfortable reminder last week of the impact of its swelling number of inhabitants. Over the past two millennia, hundreds of its native plants and animals have been rendered extinct because the human population has risen from about one million to more than 51 million.

Victims have ranged from the great auk and the lynx to the humble blue stag beetle and Davall's sedge. More to the point, 480 of the 492 species made extinct since Roman times have disappeared in the past two centuries. Rates of eradication are rising, a trend that bodes badly for the future of the countryside, a report states.

Produced by Natural England, the government agency responsible for the countryside, "Lost Life: England's Lost and Threatened Species" focuses only on wildlife on English soil, although it has broad lessons for all of Britain. We live on "a fortress built by Nature for herself", Shakespeare claimed. If so, she is now paying a heavy price for its construction, as the study makes clear.

According to the report, a total of 24% of butterfly species and 22% of amphibians have been wiped out in England, along with individual types of wildlife such as Mitten's beardless moss; York groundsel, a weed only discovered in the 1970s; and Ivell's sea anemone, which was last seen in a lagoon near Chichester. Add to this the wolf, the wildcat and other large mammals and the level of devastation of our wildlife becomes chillingly apparent.

Indeed, the situation is far worse than the one outlined in the study, its lead author Dr Tom Tew, chief scientist of Nature England, admitted last week. The agency was as conservative and careful as it could in compiling the report, he told the Observer. "We wanted to avoid accusations of being alarmist." As a result, "Lost Life" underestimates, by a fair amount, the numbers of extinctions of animals and plants in England that have taken place in recent years. "There are many more species that we think we have lost, but we have not included them because they are not officially extinct." Examples include the golden eagle and the sturgeon. Both are occasionally seen in England but no longer breed here. In addition, the banded mining bee, the brilliant moon beetle and the lichen, Opegrapha paraxanthodes, have also been posted missing, presumed extinct.

The report highlights a number of culprits, though it is emphatic about the worst offender: habitat loss. The great inroads made into the English countryside by farmers and builders has had a devastating effect on our wildlife, destroying food sources, shelter and homes for hundreds of species.

"Urban spread is one cause of habitat loss, of course, but farming has had the greatest impact by far," added Dr Tew. "We have ploughed over the landscape, ripped up woods and drained our wetlands – and rare mosses, damselflies and corncrakes have disappeared as a result." Intriguingly, analysis shows extinctions occurred in two main waves, both based on farming revolutions.

Dr Tew explained: "The first wave of extinctions occurred when the Victorians' post-industrial revolution started to take effect on land management. We started using steam tractors and devices like that. In addition, there were large numbers of men still employed as gamekeepers." The impact in use of this machinery and intensive landkeeping was a peak of extinctions between 1900 and 1910, a time when wildlife like the agile and moor frogs as well as the orache moth disappeared.

Then, after 1945, there was a major push to ensure food security, with the use of chemical fertilisers and pesticides increasing. Again this triggered a peak in extinctions that included those of plants like the purple spurge and insects like the Norfolk damselfly.

"Other factors are involved, of course – such as pollution and invasion by non-native species," said Dr Tew. "However, habitat loss remains the worst offender, although trends are beginning to shift. Climate change is beginning to have an effect, and by the middle of the century I am sure it will be accounting for the vast majority of future extinctions of English wildlife."

• Conservation
• Wildlife

The 39-year-old inventor who created a solar cell that can generate 100 times more power than an ordinary cell

"Small is beautiful" is a longstanding eco mantra – and its latest example is a stamp-sized incarnation of the solar panel. Even with its minute proportions, the new solar cell generates three to four times the amount of power (10-12 watts) that a conventional cell could at the same size. "But the real point," explains Matthias Kauer of the Sharp Solar Research & Development Laboratory, "is that once you add in a comparatively cheap bit of kit like a lens, this tiny cell can then generate 100 times more power than an ordinary cell."

It's exactly the power surge solar photovoltaic panels need. PV panels use a thin layer of semi-conducting material, usually silicon, to generate an electric charge when exposed to sunlight. They are often derided, the assumption being that they don't generate a useful amount of energy, but Dr Kauer is quick to point out that even the average panel is 15 to 20 times more efficient at converting solar energy than plants.

His solar cell is superior still. It's already 35.8% efficient in sunlight, and he's confident that in future years that can increase to 50%. At the heart of the pint-sized innovation is the new material in the cell. The day the research team found the right proportions of indium gallium arsenide nitride, the super cell began to come together. "Those breakthrough days are good," says Kauer. "I've had a couple in my 10-year career so far, and this one was major."

If only we lived in a sun-soaked country. "That's a common misconception," says Kauer. "The UK has as much sun as parts of Germany, where solar panels are commonplace." The average amount of sun hitting an area 30cm in diameter is equivalent to the power of 20,000 AA batteries. "The exciting thing is that we can keep gaining efficiency," says Kauer, "and one day have cars, planes, ships and entire cities running on free solar power." The outlook is sunny.

• Solar power
• Ethical and green living

Governments rich and poor have failed to support smallholder farmers in the developing world

Sovereign African governments are complicit in the new scramble for Africa ("How food and water drive a new foreign land grab in Africa", News). The result will be recently disenfranchised farmers working for wages. Oil supplies are being depleted and soon the major land grab in Africa will be to grow sugar cane and palm oil to keep the gas guzzlers running. The African governments may call it development but the fact is they are selling off their resources to line their own pockets – just as the chiefs once sold off their human resource.

Vali Jamal

Nairobi, Kenya

One billion people live with hunger and there are more than 100 million hungry people today than there were 18 months ago. This is in stark contrast to the global promise to halve world hunger by 2015.

Governments rich and poor have failed to support smallholder farmers in the developing world. Between 1980 and 2006, aid to agriculture was cut almost in half with disastrous effects. Some 50m hectares of fertile land in developing countries have now been acquired or are being negotiated to grow food crops and biofuels, most of which will be exported to richer nations. To put that into perspective, ActionAid estimates that 50m hectares could be the equivalent of some 75-100m tonnes of maize if grown in East Africa. This would be enough to feed the 1 billion hungry people for about four months of every year. The right kind of investment can end hunger, but these landgrabs will only make things worse.

Meredith Alexander,

Head of Trade & Corporates,

ActionAid

London N19

What is wrong with turning Africa into the "food basket" for parts of the world that do not have sufficient land to feed their people? When farms in the UK sold out to the Dutch farmers, were we being "colonised" by the Dutch? Most of these African countries do not have the finance or technical knowledge to carry out development. The statement that hundreds of people lose their jobs is not quite accurate, as, although the farmer whose land has been "grabbed" may not till his subsistence farm, he is employed in the packing areas, tractor driving, irrigation etc, so all is not bad.

Peter Heal

Clare, Suffolk

Unlike in the past, African nations are not being compelled at gunpoint to cede their land to foreign invaders. The socio-political context of some African countries such as Ghana or Mali is propitious enough for civil society groups to ensure that before deals are signed, the locals' interests are safeguarded.

In Ethiopia, Sudan and other repressive African countries, the presence of foreign investors is not the problem. The problem lies in the existence of dictatorial governments. They know that they do not need the support or approval of their people to perpetuate themselves in power, as they rely on foreign aid, funds and support to do so. As a result, they do not hesitate to subordinate their people's interests and needs to those of foreigners.

Sylvie Aboa-Bradwell

Executive director, African Peoples Advocacy

Gillingham, Kent

The key to a land grab is its title. Who owns the land? Actually, nobody, and everybody. Customarily, land in Africa is not held in title by any single person, but by its population's consensual usage of it. The country's government might think it "owns" the land, but it certainly does not. What it does "own" is the power to arbitrarily decree to itself title to land previously untitled, and the power to enforce that title, to the great detriment of the people who are living on it, and who won't be living on it (and off it) for very much longer.

Then, where do they go, and what do they do? Lorenzo Cotula says: "Lack of transparency... opens the door to corruption." Get real, pal. The door's already wide open.

Hugh Edwards

Benbecula

Outer Hebrides

• Agriculture
• Farming

AFP - Atlantic bluefin tuna is in crisis and meets the criteria for a total ban on international trade, the head of the UN wildlife trade organisation said on Saturday in opening a 13-day meeting.

Leaked adjudication largely clears government over campaign that some thought 'scary, inaccurate and too political'

Read the full text of the ASA adjudication

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 misleading.

The vast majority of these complaints have now been dismissed by the authority.

The Advertising Standards Authority's only criticism was that a claim that "flooding, heat waves and storms will become more frequent and intense" should have be phrased more tentatively.

The environment secretary, Ed Miliband, said the authority had "comprehensively vindicated" the accuracy of the department's TV advert and had rebuffed those who attempted to use the advertising standards process to question the reality of man-made climate change.

"Science tells us it is more than 90% likely there will be more extreme weather events if we don't act.

"In any future campaign, as requested by the ASA, we will make clear the nature of this prediction."

• Climate change
• Climate change
• Climate change scepticism
• Advertising
• Television industry
• Newspapers
• Law

Ruling leaked to the Guardian mildly rebukes government over print and TV campaign

• Climate change
• Climate change
• Advertising
• Television industry
• Newspapers
• Law

AP - Investigators are confronted with a series of nagging questions as they try to unravel the case of a California real estate agent who said his Toyota Prius turned into a runaway death trap after the gas pedal became stuck.

AP - An American seized in Yemen in a sweep of suspected al-Qaida members had been a laborer at six U.S. nuclear power plants, and authorities are investigating whether he had access to sensitive information or materials that would be useful to terrorists.

Ian McEwan approaches the climate crisis in comic mode

Climate change is chiefly an engineering problem to Michael Beard, the central character in Ian McEwan's new novel. In a different sense, it is to McEwan too. A practised manipulator of his readers' expectations and responses, he has plainly thought hard about the difficulties of dealing in a work of fiction with something that comes trailing strong emotions and unhelpful narrative models.

In contrast to the politics of global warming, for example, the science can't easily be debated dramatically without giving undue weight to the denialist camp, which he's unwilling to do. On the other hand, apocalyptic urgency, which shadows so much of the rhetoric around the issue, is equally unattractive to McEwan, a long-term fan of Norman Cohn's The Pursuit of the Millennium. Finally, and maybe most intractably, there's the problem of response-fatigue. Pressing invitations to think about global warming aren't thin on the ground. McEwan's solution is both elegant and surprising: instead of applying doom and gloom, he reaches for a lighter, more comic mode than usual.

Beard, a short, fat, philandering physicist, serves as the novel's scientifically informed focal consciousness and as a quasi-allegorical figure. In this, he resembles Henry Perowne, the neurosurgeon at the heart of Saturday (2005). But here too comedy gets McEwan round a problem. The earlier novel's unironic stance towards its central figure, along with its vanilla-flavoured politics, grated badly on many readers, who saw it – whatever its technical merits – as a novel about a smug, rich man who's almost proud of his inability to decide if invading Iraq is a good idea. Beard shares Perowne's distaste for zeal: though never in doubt about the basic science of global warming, he begins the novel suspicious of the "Old Testament ring" to environmentalists' forewarnings. This time, however, it's made clear from the start that we won't be asked to admire this mildly preposterous character, a generator of ironies as much as an observer of them.

The first of the book's three sections begins in 2000. Beard is 53, his best days long behind him. A Nobel laureate for his early theoretical work ("the Beard-Einstein Conflation") on the photoelectric effect, he sits on committees, lends his name and prestige to institutional letterheads, and fills the role of "Chief" at a research centre outside Reading that has been set up to allow the Blair government to be seen as doing something to combat climate change. For Beard, this phenomenon is merely "one in a list of issues, of looming sorrows, that comprised the background to the news, and he read about it, vaguely deplored it and expected governments to meet and take action . . . But he himself had other things to think about." The most insistent of these things is his fifth wife Patrice's affair with the builder who did up their house in Belsize Park, an affair she's embarked on in a mood of buoyant vengefulness after coming across evidence of Beard's numerous infidelities.

In order to escape Patrice's icy good cheer, and the attentions of a young physicist at the centre, Tom Aldous, who keeps trying to interest him in artificial photosynthesis, Beard signs up for a trip to the Arctic. This entirely selfish decision is greeted as a great step forward by the centre's idealists and its time-serving co-boss. Beard heads north in the company of various arts-world luminaries. "Everyone but Beard was worried about global warming and was merry"; only the semi-sceptical physicist is appropriately sombre. There's an echo of Perowne's somewhat priggish disapproval of the anti-war protesters' levity in Saturday, but Beard's moroseness springs less from intellectual consistency than the fact that he has nearly frozen off his penis by emptying his bladder in subzero temperatures. This uncomfortable episode, and the journey it takes place on, is the first of McEwan's customary set-pieces in the book, and it's as though he's decided to give full rein to the comic overtones held back in 2007's On Chesil Beach.

Returning to London, Beard is quickly embroiled in more of McEwan's traditional tropes – a life-altering accident and a suspenseful sequence, again given a comic spin. Then a new section starts, set in 2005. Divorced and even fatter, Beard has reinvented himself as a clean-energy entrepreneur. He has, it turns out, been sacked from the centre after making some off-the-cuff remarks on the low numbers of women in high-level physics jobs. McEwan draws fruitfully on his own experiences with the press here and has some satiric fun at the expense of arts academics, though Beard's troubles, modelled on Larry Summers's at Harvard, aren't quite believable in an English setting. The physicist has also acquired a new girlfriend and an addiction to salt and vinegar crisps; weirdly, McEwan uses these last items to have him experience a well known anecdote – another set-piece – and then has an irritating know-all pop up to explain what a well known anecdote it is.

Beard's main business, however, is to lecture a group of institutional investors on alternative energy. The novel carefully undercuts both his virtue and his dignity: he spends his time at the podium trying not to vomit, having eaten a dodgy smoked salmon sandwich, and parts of his pitch are either plagiarised or hypocritical fabrications. All the same, his actual arguments are compelling, and it's hard not to root for him as, in the final section, he prepares to throw the switch on a prototype array of next-generation solar panels in New Mexico. It's now 2009, and Beard, fatter still and trying to ignore a worrying melanoma, has further romantic entanglements and professional complications on his plate. As various chickens from the first two sections start coming home to roost, still in comic mode, McEwan builds up considerable suspense about the fate of Beard's enterprise, a revolutionary technology that, you end up half-believing, might save the world.

In the course of his trip to the Arctic circle, Beard hears some unfamiliar guitar music, "reflective, with a touch of lightness and precision, like something of Mozart's". Solar seems to aim for something similar and, as you'd expect, precision isn't a problem in its brisk tour d'horizon of the ironies arising from climate change. McEwan swiftly persuades the reader that he can write authoritatively not only about science but the culture of scientific institutions, too. He also revels in clever, sometimes over-neat reversals. At one point, Beard's business partner starts to worry that the climate might not be changing after all. "It's a catastrophe," Beard assures him. "Relax!"

Lightness, however, comes less easily to McEwan, whose style depends on deliberateness and a certain ponderousness. The ominous lining up of causes and effects and the patient tweaking of narrative tension don't always mesh well with the aimed-for quickness and brio. Some of the humour is quite broad: there's a rather clunking motif concerning polar bears, and Beard gets involved with a stereotypical Southern waitress who's called, in the way of trailer-trash types, Darlene. He emerges as a figure of some comic dynamism, but the pages on his childhood and youth, though brilliantly done, articulate poorly with the knockabout parts of the plot. Once it became clear that the book's world is comic, I also found myself wondering if it wouldn't have benefited from being more loosely assembled, with shorter, discontinuous episodes and Beard functioning along the lines of Updike's Bech, Nabokov's Pnin or the consciousness in Calvino's Cosmicomics.

At the same time, the overarching plot pulls off a clinching novelistic coup, using comedy to sneak grimmer matters past the reader's defences. Beard's argument about the correct response to climate change, an argument that McEwan has also made, is that we have no choice but to hope that technological ingenuity, enlightened self-interest and the market's allocation of resources can get us off the hook; personal virtue counts for little. For a while it seems as though the slobbish, self-centred Beard might actually bring about such an outcome, and the reader starts to hope he'll manage it. But Beard – self-deluding, a serial breaker of resolutions, hopelessly addicted to overconsumption – also stands for humanity in general. When he gets his comeuppance, it's a powerful reminder that reality isn't a comic novel, and in its deepest implications, this book isn't one either.

• Climate change
• Ian McEwan

After 13 years with the UN, former Irish president Mary Robinson is coming home to her debt-ridden country – not to retire, but to fight for 'climate justice' for all the world's poor

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 recently. "And she was a good northern Protestant, and she didn't turn up." Robinson tried to fix it herself, but at her first engagement her efforts were scornfully dismissed: "You'd think she'd have got her hair done to come and see us!" When she got to the airport to give a final press conference, there was a hairdresser waiting – the Northern Irish security forces were so upset about the incident they'd organised one.

Robinson told the anecdote not in order to complain about being a woman in the public eye, judged on appearance alone, but as an example of unexpected thoughtfulness across political lines. Striking, too, is her sympathy with the woman who didn't arrive to do her job, and her understanding of the power of the simple gesture, both to entrench division, and to heal it: there are those who argue her handshake helped pave the way to the IRA ceasefire the next year. Certainly it was brave; some unionists may also have recognised that her characteristic commitment to a fair hearing worked both ways – in the early 1980s she resigned from the Labour party because she felt unionists had not been adequately consulted about the Anglo-Irish agreement. But in the week when the security forces who helped her then are finally answering to Stormont, rather than Westminster, the anecdote also underscores just how far Northern Ireland has travelled in the past 17 years.

And not just Northern Ireland. Robinson is 65 now, and has spent 13 years in New York, first as UN commissioner for human rights, then, after pressure from the Bush administration contributed to her resignation (they were unimpressed by her warnings that the "war on terror" would compromise human rights and saw her as so pro-Palestinian that the conservative National Review accused her of war crimes) as president of Realizing Rights, the advocacy organisation she founded in 2002. But she is moving back to Ireland this year. A rather bruised Ireland, granted, in the grip of recession and rumours of bankruptcy (the Celtic Tiger, she says forthrightly, was an episode of "sheer selfish stupidity"), but an Ireland whose moral place in the EU, whose liberalised laws and reputation as a modern state, she helped to shape.

We meet at Trinity College in central Dublin, in a bare office at the top of the arts faculty building. She looks tired, but is both gracious and completely controlled – she has the rare quality of seeming approachable, even good company, while also making it clear that certain lines are not to be crossed. Many in Ireland, used to the populist bonhomie of working-class male politicians such as Bertie Ahern, have always found her cool, even haughty. And it is true she is an extremely assured presence. Her sentences – full of world leaders, capital cities, global initiatives, sometimes too full of development and human rights jargon – unspool smoothly and clearly into the silence.

Robinson is obviously looking forward to coming home – not least because it will bring her closer to her four grandchildren – but she will not be retiring. Instead, she will be concentrating her efforts on trying to bring about what she calls "climate justice": trying to ensure that those most affected by global warming (generally those who had least to do with producing it) receive some redress. This is a natural progression of her work in New York: at the UN she widened the brief of the human rights commission to include, for example, security, but in the way that women tend to mean it, not men – security of food, safe water, healthcare, shelter. She was criticised at the time for fatally diluting her mandate but she's still having none of it. "I don't at all subscribe to the notion that you weaken human rights by making it relevant to globalisation and corporate responsibility," she says. "Human rights is about holding those with power to account for abuse of power."

Increasingly, however, she has understood that there is little point fighting on all these fronts if "the development of the poor communities that we were working with is being undermined by the impacts of climate change". She makes no bones about her disappointment in Copenhagen – "there wasn't the political leadership there should have been" – and argues that it was not just a specific failure, of one summit, but rather a kind of canary in the coalmine for the shape of the world to come. Partly this is for the obvious reason of not cutting emissions in time – "You know, you can fail to get a Doha agreement, and it may or may not be serious. The failure to get agreement in Copenhagen has put the whole world more at risk" – but partly because, coinciding with the economic crisis in the west, it was such a graphic illustration of a "huge shift in power and allegiances. We face a world where, increasingly, those with economic power don't have, traditionally, strong values in human rights." For the many millions of vulnerable people in the world it's a toxic combination, and she is aware that there isn't time to lose.

These vulnerable people do, however – as she means to point out forcefully in her climate justice work – have an unprecedented weapon in their armoury: they will "form the bulk of population growth, from the 7 billion we'll probably reach this year, to 9 billion-plus in 2050, in 40 years' time. And so for the first time, I think, in human history, the richer parts of the world are dependent for our future survival on what happens in the poorest parts. It's no longer about compassion and philanthropy – it is in our future self-interest to ensure that the poorest have access to low-carbon strategies."

The trouble is, of course, that their governments are generally too overburdened, indebted and distracted by the present to fight this particular fight, but after Copenhagen Robinson does not think governments are the way to go, if they ever were.

The answer, for her, is "civil society": "I mean churches, I mean business, I mean trade unions, I mean the normal environmental groups, development groups, human rights groups, youth groups – as never before we have to build up the pressure." It's a big, frustratingly vague notion – which, she knows well, has often been touted as the solution to intractable problems, not least in Northern Ireland, where it had distinctly limited success – but she seems hopeful, nevertheless.

Robinson likes to trace her profound sense of fairness, and her belief in the possibility of social change, back to when she was a child in Ballina, County Mayo, and visiting her paternal grandfather, who lived down the road. A retired lawyer, he still had "a passion for law – in the sense of the small guy, the tenant against the landlord, etcetera. My grandfather was of the age and disposition where he had no idea how to talk to a child. So he talked to me as if I was an adult, and I loved it. I felt so important."

Her parents were both doctors, although her mother gave up medicine when she had five children in quick succession, of whom Mary was the third ("that was my interest in human rights, being wedged between four brothers"). Robinson insists her mother never expressed regret about this, but "it led me to understand that the real key is to have choices. And that there really isn't the necessary range of choices for women." She went to a convent school, and was happy there, but higher education – finishing school in Paris, a law degree at Trinity Dublin, then a master's at Harvard during the Vietnam war – shook all the assumptions she had grown up with.

When she became auditor of the law society in Dublin in 1967, her inaugural address was on law and morality in Ireland and took on every sacred cow: contraception, women's rights, abortion, gay rights, "including the status of children", she says, "which is just being, finally, addressed now." Two years later, aged 25 and already Trinity's youngest law professor, she ran for a seat in the Irish senate. Her first bill as a mini-skirted young senator aimed to overturn the ban on the import, distribution and sale of contraceptives. Condoms were posted through her letterbox, and in her home village the bishop denounced her from the pulpit. Her parents, despite being doctors and thus presumably apprised of the individual effects of bans on abortion and contraception, believed in the teachings of the Catholic church and were upset by her attempts to change the law; they were even more upset when she announced she was to marry Nick Robinson, a Protestant lawyer who went on to become a political cartoonist. Although this has been described as a religious objection, she recently corrected this impression in an interview with Irish television presenter Gay Byrne: her parents were, she said, "engaged in over-love" – she was their only girl, good at school; nobody, let alone a man known to have had lots of girlfriends, was good enough, and they declined to come to the wedding. In the event the estrangement lasted only three months – the marriage has now lasted for 40 years – but it simply underlined, again, her stubbornness, and her willingness to stand up for what she felt was right.

Which is not a recipe for popularity. When she ran for seats in the lower house, she failed. She came second in the presidential election, winning only when votes from the third-place candidate were transferred. But there were reports of people dancing in the streets when she won, and she, most of all, knew what she had done: "I was elected by the women of Ireland, who instead of rocking the cradle, rocked the system." Famously, she lit a lamp in her window, as a welcoming sign to the vast Irish diaspora; deliberately – there was no lack of steel in her campaign, and she quickly showed a willingness to exploit the gaffes of often incompetent rivals – she made herself less private and austere, acquiring suits by Irish designers, trying, above all, to be more open and approachable, more, she told Byrne, like her own warm, gregarious mother. "And the more I did that, the more I got back an extraordinary response." Her approval ratings climbed to 90% and stayed there.

What she quickly realised then, and has honed carefully, ever since, is that there is a real need for a moral authority outside the compromise and horse-trading of conventional politics; she knows, too, that it is an extraordinarily difficult thing to get right.

Furthermore, when Nelson Mandela asked her to join the Elders, a group of 12 eminent leaders chaired by Archbishop Desmond Tutu (who, rather sweetly, they call "the Arch") she says she felt it was "quite an arrogant idea". But when "we went to our first planning meeting in South Africa, and Nelson Mandela – Madiba – joined us – that put an end to my doubts, because he was so strong, and he looked around and said, 'It's your task to listen very carefully, be humble. Don't go into a place thinking you know more than the people there.'"

Finding a way to empower civil society is all the more important, she thinks, because the world's largest democracy seems, at the moment, so fragile. "Obama's trying to provide [leadership], but I think that the American political system is becoming dysfunctional, and that's really, really worrying." (Also wobbly, though without quite the same impact on the rest of the world, is Northern Ireland: delicate power-sharing between arch-rivals like the DUP and Sinn Féin is a great achievement, she says, but it makes it "difficult to position those who want to hold that to account … it's not a straightforward democratic process at the moment. It's a tentative post-conflict process.")

She is very aware that something like moral authority was claimed by the neo-con project and its bid to export democracy by force, and that "moral authority" is what is claimed by systems, such as religion, that subjugate women in the developing world. "We made a very strong statement on that," she says.

Finally, she knows that know it is an ever-changing, delicate thing. "When I was president it was two kinds of things – one was to change the role of the office, to develop its potential under the constitution, and then try to exert it. And when I was serving as high commissioner, it was another kind of moral authority, because of the absence of an enforcement mechanism. It was going to where the victims were suffering violations and speaking from their perspective. And now I find it again with the Elders. And the reason why I'm so honoured and passionate to do it is because I feel a terrible sense of urgency. I really do."

• Ireland
• Human rights
• Nelson Mandela
• Climate change
• Poverty