Stagecoach has resumed testing of an amphibious bus service in Glasgow after technical problems halted the first trial.

The "amfibus" was grounded less than an hour after taking to the River Clyde on Monday when an airbag popped out from part of the suspension.

The £700,000 Dutch-made vehicle can carry up to 45 passengers. The vehicle runs like a normal coach on the road but when in water uses a hull to float and is powered by twin jets.

India has deferred the commercial cultivation of what would have been its first genetically modified (GM) vegetable crop due to safety concerns.

Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh said more studies were needed to ensure genetically modified aubergines were safe for consumers and the environment.

The GM vegetable has undergone field trials since 2008 and received approval from government scientists in 2009.

But there has been a heated public row over the cultivation of the GM crop.

Farmers' fields are a far bigger source of water contamination in China than factory effluent, the Chinese government revealed today in its first census on pollution.

Senior officials said the disclosure, after a two-year study involving 570,000 people, would require a partial realignment of environmental policy from smoke stacks to chicken coops, cow sheds and fruit orchards.

Despite the sharp upward revision of figures on rural contamination, the government suggested the country's pollution problem may be close to - or even past - a peak. That claim is likely to prompt scepticism among environmental groups.

Sir Richard Branson and fellow leading businessmen will warn ministers this week that the world is running out of oil and faces an oil crunch within five years.

The founder of the Virgin group, whose rail, airline and travel companies are sensitive to energy prices, will say that the ­coming crisis could be even more serious than the credit crunch.

"The next five years will see us face another crunch - the oil crunch. This time, we do have the chance to prepare. The challenge is to use that time well," Branson will say.

"Our message to government and businesses is clear: act," he says in a foreword to a new report on the crisis. "Don't let the oil crunch catch us out in the way that the credit crunch did."

Climate scientists who worked on the UN panel on global warming have hit out at "sloppy" colleagues from other disciplines who introduced a mistake about melting glaciers into the landmark 2007 report.

The experts, who worked on the section of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report that considered the physical science of global warming, say the error by "social and biological scientists" has unfairly maligned their work. Some said that Rajendra Pachauri, the panel's chair, should resign, though others supported him.

The IPCC report combined the output from three independent working groups, which separately considered the science, impacts and human response to climate change, and published their findings several months apart.

When I was a child growing up in Zimbabwe, my grandmother used to go to the same one-acre plot of land each day and work long and exhausting hours. 

When I asked her why she put herself through this, she replied: "This is how I wake up every day, this is how I survive."

I am now in my twenties and my grandmother is still out there on her plot each day.

She continues to till her field with a hand hoe, using seed saved from previous harvests, and applying a teaspoonful of fertiliser per maize plant. Her working hours and type of inputs have remained the same over the years; however, the yields have been declining drastically.

The British government's climate change guru, Lord Stern, has had his emails sabotaged in a possible "hacking attack" Channel 4 News can reveal. 

Lord Stern, author of the influential Stern Review on the economics of climate change and vocal advocate of the danger of man-made climate change, recently left government to head the London School of Economic's Grantham Institute for Climate Change.

The Institute confirmed to Channel 4 News that Lord Stern's email account was targeted last week. A trojan horse computer virus was embedded in his account which then sent itself to other contacts in the economist's inbox. 

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), chairman of the Senate's green jobs subcommittee introduced legislation with nine cosponsors to encourage the installation of 10 million solar systems on the rooftops of homes and businesses over the next decade.

One of the more common, and thoroughly, dislikeable practices associated with climate change 'skepticism', creationism/intelligent design and with the peddling of other branches of pseudoscience, is that of quote-mining.

Quote-mining is the practice of scouring scientific papers and reports for quotes that can be readily presented out of context in support of the quote-miners preferred position or argument irrespective of whether those quotes provide a fair reflection of the actual contents of the paper. It's actually a practice that recognised as a logic fallacy, not to mention a form of false attribution and it's neither a clever nor a particularly honest practice for anyone to engage in.

Sadly, there's currently a perfect illustration of the fallacious use of quote mining to be found at Devil's Kitchen; one that relates - unsurprisingly - to one of the key chapters in the IPCC's AR4 report on Climate Change.

The NYT has published arguably its worst climate story ever, "U.N. Climate Panel and Chief Face Credibility Siege," by Elisabeth Rosenthal.

Dr. Robert J. Brulle of Drexel University, whom the NYT itself quoted last year as "an expert on environmental communications," emailed me that the piece is "the worst, one sided reporting I have ever seen."  When I called him up, he went further saying:

In this article, the New York Times has become an echo-chamber for the climate disinformation movement.

You might think it impossible for any newspaper -- let alone the one-time "paper of record" -- to run a story raising "accusations of scientific sloppiness" about the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that never quotes a single climate scientist.

The attacks, dubbed `Operation Titstorm', began this at 8AM morning, targeting the websites of Senator Stephen Conroy and the Australian Parliament House, taking them both down with Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) for a period of time.