The adverts, commissioned by Ed Miliband, the energy secretary, used the rhymes to suggest that Britain faces an inevitable increase in storms, floods and heat waves unless greenhouse gas emissions are brought under control.

The ASA has ruled that the claims made in the newspaper adverts were not supported by solid science and has told the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) that they should not be published again.

Armed with generous incentives from the Spanish government to jump-start a national solar energy industry, the city set out to replace its failing coal economy by attracting solar companies. Farmers sold land for solar plants. Boutiques opened. And people from all over the world, seeing business opportunities, moved to the city.

But as low-quality, poorly designed solar plants sprang up on Spain’s plateaus, Spanish officials came to realize that they would have to subsidize many of them indefinitely, and that the industry they had created might never produce efficient green energy on its own.

In September the government abruptly changed course, cutting payments and capping solar construction. Puertollano’s brief boom turned bust. Factories and stores shut, thousands of workers lost jobs, foreign companies and banks abandoned contracts that had already been negotiated.

Alongside austerity measures such as cuts to public sector pay and a freeze on state pensions, why not sell a few uninhabited islands or ancient artefacts, asked Josef Schlarmann, a senior member of Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats, and Frank Schaeffler, a finance policy expert in the Free Democrats.

The Acropolis and the Parthenon could also fall under the hammer, along with temptingly idyllic Aegean islands still under state ownership, in a rush to keep bankruptcy at bay.

Professor Kenneth Rogoff, now a respected Harvard academic, also argued that substantial sovereign debt loads will force major global economies to tighten monetary policy, leading to further worldwide « shockwaves. »

« Greece is just the beginning, » he said. « We usually see a bunch of sovereign defaults [in the years following a banking crisis]… I predict we will again. It’s very hard to call the timing but it will happen. »

As well as his time at the IMF – he was chief economist from 2001-2004 – Prof Rogoff is best known for predicting the collapse of a number of major banks in the summer of 2008, which came true with the implosion of Lehman Brothers, and the need for rescues of both Halifax Bank of Scotland and the Royal Bank of Scotland.

« There are literally tens of thousands of people who are suffering unnecessarily, » says lead author Nathan Cherny of Shaare Zedek Medical Center in Jerusalem, Israel.

Opioid-type drugs are potent painkillers. In fact, the World Health Organization lists two of them, codeine and morphine, as « essential medicines » that should be available worldwide.

Cherny and his colleagues asked cancer pain specialists, including doctors, nurses and social workers from 40 European countries plus Israel, to review access to opioids in their countries.

Malmo’s Jews, however, do not just point the finger at bigoted Muslims and their fellow racists in the country’s Neo-Nazi fringe. They also accuse Ilmar Reepalu, the Left-wing mayor who has been in power for 15 years, of failing to protect them.

The future looks so bleak that by one estimate, around 30 Jewish families have already left for Stockholm, England or Israel, and more are preparing to go. With its young people planning new lives elsewhere, the remaining Jewish households, many of whom are made up of Holocaust survivors and their descendants, fear they will soon be gone altogether.

The philosophy behind the move is that accidents, as well as congestion, are reduced when motorists show greater individual responsibility, rather than mentally switching off to behave like automata. Common sense and courtesy prevail against the mindlessness of sitting at a red light for no reason other than that the state tells us to. Discretion and give-and-take also work well for pedestrians. Traffic lights are a spur to frustration which can spill over into road rage.

The publication of inaccurate data on the potential of wave power to produce electricity around the world, which was wrongly attributed to the website of a commercial wave-energy company. Claims based on information in press releases and newsletters.

It can also be revealed that claims made by the IPCC about the effects of global warming, and suggestions about ways it could be avoided, were partly based on information from ten dissertations by Masters students.

The IPCC also made use of a report by US conservation group Defenders of Wildlife to state that salmon in US streams have been affected by rising temperatures. The panel has already come under fire for using information in reports by conservation charity the WWF.

Prof John Beddington admitted the impact of global warming had been exaggerated by some scientists and condemned climate researchers who refused to publish data which formed the basis of their reports into global warming.

In an interview, Prof Beddington, called for a new era of honesty and responsibility from the environmental community and said scientists should be less hostile to sceptics who questioned man-made global warming.

His words were refected in a New Scientist editorial that also argued that climate scientists should « welcome in the outside world » for more scrutiny.

Rajendra Pachauri’s Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), based in New Delhi, was awarded up to £310,000 by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the lion’s share of a £2.5m EU grant funded by European taxpayers.

It means that EU taxpayers are funding research into a scientific claim about glaciers that any ice researcher should immediately recognise as bogus. The revelation comes just a week after The Sunday Times highlighted serious scientific flaws in the IPCC’s 2007 benchmark report on the likely impacts of global warming.

The IPCC had warned that climate change was likely to melt most of the Himalayan glaciers by 2035 – an idea considered ludicrous by most glaciologists. Last week a humbled IPCC retracted that claim and corrected its report.

The revelation caused embarrassment for European Union negotiators at the Copenhagen climate change summit yesterday, where they have been pushing for an expansion of their system across the globe to penalise heavy emitters of carbon dioxide.

Yesterday, the UK delegation released a paper calling for the “expansion of carbon markets”, in order to use the profits for a fund to help developing nations tackle climate change.

Moody’s Investors Service said Tuesday the weakening public finances in the U.S. and Britain may “test the Aaa [triple-A] boundaries” for their ratings. While analysts say there is no immediate risk of a cut in the ratings of major developed economies, the less stable fringe players are already feeling the heat.

In Europe, Ireland, Portugal and even France are under pressure to rein in rising budget deficits. And deeply troubled Greece has become the first euro-currency country to be whacked. Athens’ debt was downgraded a notch Tuesday to triple-B plus by Fitch Ratings. That’s only three levels above junk status and means Greece will have to pay investors more to buy its bonds.

Investors appear most worried about the British bonds, which now cost the same to insure against default as Portugese government bonds that have a rating two notches lower, and investors are now musing aloud about the possibility of a downgrade unless the country begins cutting debt.

The new analysis of the data will take three years, meaning that the Met Office will not be able to state with absolute confidence the extent of the warming trend until the end of 2012.

The Met Office database is one of three main sources of temperature data analysis on which the UN’s main climate change science body relies for its assessment that global warming is a serious danger to the world. This assessment is the basis for next week’s climate change talks in Copenhagen aimed at cutting CO2 emissions.

The Government is attempting to stop the Met Office from carrying out the re-examination, arguing that it would be seized upon by climate change sceptics.

Why should research funding institutions and taxpayers fund scientists who deliberately delay, obfuscate and deny open access to their research? Why should scientific journals publish peer-reviewed research where the submitting scientists have not made every reasonable effort to make their work – from raw data to sophisticated computer simulations – as transparent and accessible as possible? Why should responsible policymakers in America, Europe, Asia and Latin America make decisions affecting people’s health, wealth and future based on opaque and inaccessible science?

The data were gathered from weather stations around the world and then adjusted to take account of variables in the way they were collected. The revised figures were kept, but the originals — stored on paper and magnetic tape — were dumped to save space when the CRU moved to a new building.

The admission follows the leaking of a thousand private emails sent and received by Professor Phil Jones, the CRU’s director. In them he discusses thwarting climate sceptics seeking access to such data.

Those were the words of an English High Court judge, Mr Justice Burton, on November 3rd as he ruled that green beliefs deserve the same protection in the workplace as religious convictions. A person’s right to believe in anthropogenic climate change, and not be hounded out of his job because of it, is now enshrined in law.

The revelation that ministers have failed in their campaign to persuade the public that the greenhouse effect is a serious threat requiring urgent action will make uncomfortable reading for the Government as it prepares for next month’s climate change summit in Copenhagen.

Only 41 per cent accept as an established scientific fact that global warming is taking place and is largely man-made. Almost a third (32 per cent) believe that the link is not yet proved; 8 per cent say that it is environmentalist propaganda to blame man and 15 per cent say that the world is not warming.