With Arctic ice melting at a faster rate than ever before, raising sea levels and causing severe weather, action is needed before it’s too late, reports Stefan Rahmstorf

I’M just back from Achill, a wet windy outpost of mountains and cliffs, where it gets dark later than anywhere else in Europe.

Newly published this week

IN January 2007, a strange bird was seen on the sea off Farnham in Yorkshire.

Franklin, Tragic Hero of Polar Navigation, by Andrew Lambert, Faber and Faber, £20.

A PAIR of brown eyes stare, unseeing, at the hospital ceiling. A father leans over his brain-dead son and points to a graze on his chin.

THE father of a young man beaten unconscious by a gang still clocks up 140 miles most days to be at his son’s hospital bedside.

The parents of a 20-year-old student, who is in a critical condition after being savagely beaten, are today keeping a vigil at his hospital bedside.