The meeting is expected to see developed countries elaborate on their exact plans for raising the funding targets agreed in Denmark: producing a fund of $30 billion over the next three years, rising to $100 billion per year by 2020, to help poor countries adapt to climate change.

However, climate change activists remain despondent at the chances of the world’s nations co-operating seriously over the funding.

There is concern over the misleading use of targets, with old money being dressed up as new. Japan, for instance, has pledged $15 billion by 2012. But most of this comes from a previous commitment, agreed in 2008.

Following a week-long meeting in Bonn, Germany, this August, US deputy special climate envoy Jonathan Pershing voiced his concern that negotiations over climate change were stalling.

“I came to Bonn hopeful of a deal in Cancun, but at this point I am very concerned as I have seen some countries walking back from progress made in Copenhagen.”

In theory, it should not be hard to raise the funds. The British economist Nicholas Stern told delegates at Bonn that the working group set up to investigate how the $100bn a year could be raised was making good progress. The problems lie in diplomacy. Developing countries remain suspicious “that rich nations have big mouths, deep pockets and short arms”.

Green campaigners, however, are still critical of the Copenhagen agreements. lena Gerebizza, of Campagna per la Riforma della Banca Mondiale, recently announced that

“The $100 billion figure that many developed countries are discussing is not science-based and has no standing in the international negotiations.”

And although Gordon Shepherd, head of WWF’s Global Climate Initiative, remains hopeful that the Geneva Conference could be “highly influential if they get it right,” the WWF website is notably more circumspect:

“There is little transparency on the delivery of the promised short term funding that has been made available already, and there has been little visible progress towards a framework for delivery on longer term funding commitments.”

Raman Mehta, of ActionAid India, was firm in his insistence that climate change funding to developing countries must not be shackled with conditionality:

“A new global climate fund should be established under the authority of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change with equitable and balanced representation, effective participation of affected communities in all decision-making, direct access to funding by developing countries, and no economic or other policy conditionality.”

“The World Bank and other existing international financial institutions must not have any role in governing, managing, or directing the design of the fund.”

Unfortunately for Mehta, it appears that the World Bank, though not officially invited to Copenhagen, will be attempting to exert influence there.

Undoubtedly Lomborg’s flip-flopping came from a realisation his former position was going to be difficult to hold any longer – only underlined by the fact that he is just the latest contrarian voice to change tack.

Left Foot Forward recently highlighted that Britain’s most influential climate denier, the Daily Mail’s science editor Michael Hanlon, just changed tack in response to the breaking off, in Greenland, of an ice chunk three times the size of Manhattan.

Equally, Joe Romm has shown how CNN’s Chad Myers, somebody he describes as “one of America’s most influential global warming skeptics” just u-turned and admitted warming “is caused by man”.

Greenpeace responded to Lomborg’s about-face simply with a snide remark:

“Lomborg’s realisation that the climate is in crisis came a couple of decades too late for him to be taken seriously, but at least it confirms the happy maxim that nobody’s wrong all the time, apart from Melanie Philips.”

Others in the green community were simply bemused. One Grist blogger wrote admiringly of Lomborg’s media savvy:

“Who else could get such attention for adopting a position already held by millions of sensible people?”

But there can be no doubt his change in position can only really be seen as good news since it leaves the climate denial community more marginalized still.

Climate sceptics have faced a series of recent blows, most notably because articles detailing alleged scandals in the climate science community – Amazongate, Africagate and Pachaurigate – all had to be retracted, and apologies published. This in turn followed a series of independent reviews which each exonerated the climate scientists. Even the Washington Post – for a long time home to sceptic views – said in its editorial today:

“The overblown critique of climate science that emerged early this year continues to underwhelm.”

Left Foot Forward understands that Lomborg also resigned some weeks ago from the board of the climate sceptic journal, Energy and Environment, which is edited by the Global Warming Policy Foundation’s Benny Peiser. According to a posting on an online discussion forum for deniers, another of the journal’s editors, Boehmer-Christiansen, indicated at the time that Lomborg did not want to be closely associated with sceptics any more.

Lomborg’s announcement came as The Independent reported on its front page that new scientific research suggests the world is facing 3.5 degrees of warming. Science writer, Mark Lynas, explains in the paper that such a level of climate change could mean,

“melting permafrost in Siberia and other high-latitude areas will be releasing millions of tonnes of the extra-powerful greenhouse gas methane, and there will be nothing we can do to stop it…

“the world’s most important and biodiverse tropical forest, the Amazon region, will be burning up and transforming into desert…

“Saharan-type temperatures, well over 50C, will be striking regularly in summertime continental interiors, from the southern United States to the south Asian subcontinent to the Middle East. Around the Mediterranean, forests will be tinder-dry and devastating wildfires an annual occurrence – Australia and California can expect much of the same. Deadly heatwaves, such as that which struck Europe in 2003 and Moscow in 2010, will be a normal summer.”

His absence, coinciding with Cameron’s, has propelled Nick Clegg and Danny Alexander into the spotlight during a week of difficult announcements for the government. Liberal Democrats are taking the rap for Tory decisions.

The eve of the holiday was marked by ‘titanic’ rows at a Cabinet away-day between the Chancellor and work and pensions secretary, Iain Duncan Smith. Duncan Smith was said to have twice threatened to resign over proposed cuts to his welfare budget.

Relations with defence secretary Liam Fox have also been strained of late, due to disagreements over the funding of Trident. Osborne’s holiday has been well timed to defuse these tensions.

Then came last week’s damning report from the Institute for Fiscal Studies, which seriously undermined the Chancellor’s earlier claims that the Budget was progressive. Clegg, thrust into the frontline, has been forced to backtrack on his previously voiced veneration of the IFS, and Osborne has so far managed to avoid having to defend his own budget.

Last Friday, Bloomberg gave Ed Balls a chance to respond to the Chancellor’s defence of his budget in a speech given to the news company ten days before. Balls stressed that deficit reduction will not increase consumer confidence, and the historical record of the 1930s and 1980s shows that fiscal retrenchment is likely to bring about economic stagnation.

Here’s an excerpt:

“Even in the days since the [Osborne] Bloomberg speech, we have seen increasing signs of economic slowdown in Britain, and UK consumer confidence, business optimism and mortgage starts are all down.

For all George Osborne’s talk of ‘deficit-deniers’ – where is the real denial in British politics at the moment?

We have a Chancellor who believes that he can slash public spending, raise VAT and cut benefits – he can take billions out of the economy and billions more out of people’s pockets, he can directly cut thousands of public sector jobs and private sector contracts, and none of this will have any impact on unemployment or growth.

Against all the evidence, both contemporary and historical, he argues the private sector will somehow rush to fill the void left by government and consumer spending, and become the driver of jobs and growth.”

Osborne’s response? Sweet nothing.

Next came Danny Alexander’s announcement, in an interview with the Observer, that taxes were unlikely to fall over the course of the Coalition government. The Chancellor’s absence appears to have been especially tactful here, as the news is expected to infuriate the Tory right. As David Blackburn on Spectator blog CoffeeHouse points out, this potentially raises difficult electoral problems for the government:

“The squeezed middle classes pose more of a problem for the coalition. Their benefits and tax credits will be cut, tax on their consumption is rising, tax on the gains of their long-term investments has risen and may rise again and there is to be no relief on their income tax.”

Several contentious cuts have also been announced. The replacement of NHS Direct with a lower-budget and lower-quality alternative comes dangerously close to impacting upon the supposedly ring-fenced health budget. Ed Balls’ playground-building scheme has also been named a victim of the cuts this week: 400 planned facilities are to be dropped.

Osborne’s name has actually re-entered the news today, with the leaked announcement that he is to slash Treasury staff numbers by 25% over the next four years. Once more, however, the Chancellor seems unavailable for comment.

A similar conclusion is reached when growth is analysed by looking at its expenditure components. Over three-quarters of the growth in the second quarter came about as a result of firms rebuilding their inventories. Net trade added nothing to growth and while consumer spending was a positive factor, investment spending detracted from growth.

A look at the detailed figures shows that firms reduced their inventories for six consecutive quarters between 2008Q4 and 2010Q1 as they chose to meet some demand from existing stocks, rather than from higher output. It is unsurprising, after such a prolonged period of de-stocking, that inventories were so lean that companies felt the need to start rebuilding them in the second quarter.

But this does not mean that underlying demand in the economy is strong. True, consumer spending increased at its fastest pace since the first quarter of 2008 and, as Ed Balls claimed today this does vindicate to some extent Labour’s economic policies. In particular, its efforts to support employment helped to limit the damage to incomes and consumer confidence caused by the recession.

Balls said:

“Those figures today show that Labour’s strategy was working… They don’t say anything at all about what is going to happen in the next period.”

There is still no sign of a sustained recovery in investment spending or of a boost to growth from trade. This is a problem for George Osborne because he is banking on a rebalancing of the economy in favour of exports and capital spending to support growth while he cuts public spending.

When the provisional growth figures were released a month ago, he claimed they showed the economy was strong enough to cope with large cuts in the budget deficit. But, excluding the one-off effect of inventory rebuilding, private sector demand increased by just 0.1 per cent in the second quarter.

And all the evidence suggests the prospect of an increase in VAT and massive cuts in public spending, together with worse economic news from the US and Europe, have caused business sentiment in the UK to deteriorate over the last two months. The growth outlook in the UK is very uncertain and it still looks to be too early to cut the deficit at the pace the coalition is proposing.

The article was published in December with the headline: ‘Questions over business deals of UN climate change guru Dr Rajendra Pachauri’. Today The Guardian has detailed the lies told and the smears made; referring to the independent KPMG report, destroying claims made by the newspaper.

It was not until this week that The Sunday Telegraph retracted the article. They have since apologised for smearing an innocent man with libelous claims, but only after Pachauri instructed lawyers to sue the paper. Richard North, one of the authors of the lengthy Telegraph piece still boasts on his blog of the Telegraph’s ‘non-apology’ and reiterates his original smears.

North has released false information a number of times in regard to the IPCC. He was also the source of the since discredited ‘Amazongate’ story. In that episode, it was The Sunday Times that published false and flawed claims against the IPCC in a piece carrying a note at the bottom saying, ‘additional reporting by Richard North’. That story has been traced to North’s blog in a post on Climate Safety.

The ‘Amazongate’ scandal led to The Sunday Times being forced to retract their article, and also saw them investigated by the Press Complaints Commission (PCC) – thanks to courageous climate scientist Dr. Simon Lewis, of Leeds University, who refused to back down after he was misrepresented. Lewis, like Pachauri, wouldn’t accept anything less than an apology.

Separately to all of this, a German newspaper also retracted the non-scandal ‘Africagate’ – yet again peddled by Richard North.

The Sunday Telegraph apology this week is just the latest set back for the climate denial movement in recent weeks. In other blows:

• Left Foot Forward reported how the Daily Mail u-turned on climate change, accepting: “Global warming is real and deeply worrying.” This followed similar moves by Canada’s National Post, America’s Washington Post and CNN’s Chad Myers;

• All official reports into ‘Climategate’ exonerated the scientists;

• The Times exposed Exxon spending £1 million on climate denial;

• The New Yorker published an exposé on the Koch oil barons bankrolling climate denial to the tune of billions;

• World-leading climate denial campaigner, Anthony Watts, was caught tweeting links to the BNP;

• Reuters ran an article entitled, “Are Conservatives waking up to global warming?” - detailing the recent series of u-turns by Conservative media and commentators; and

• The New York Times asked: “Perhaps now we can put the manufactured controversy known as Climategate behind us and turn to the task of actually doing something about global warming.”

With global reserves of ‘conventional oil’ running out, major oil firms are increasingly looking to do more deep sea drilling, including off the West of Shetland and in the Arctic, as well as exploit oil from tar sands in Alberta, Canada and other environmentally sensitive areas of the world.

The Guardian splashed on this today with its front page lead saying that BP have pulled out of a plan to join in with attempts to explore for oil reserves in so-called ‘Iceberg Alley’ near Greenland in the Arctic. The United States Geological Survey estimates that 90 billion barrels of technically recoverable oil lies in offshore reservoirs in the Arctic.

The explanation of BP’s pull out is most likely to be that the government of Greenland wanted to avoid fuelling the PR disaster. They have already faced media attention after granting licenses for deep sea drilling in the area to Exxon Mobil, Chevron and the UK-based company, Cairn Energy.

A Gulf-style ‘blow out’ in the Arctic would almost certainly be more devastating than the BP spill. The short summer window when conditions allow for drilling mean there simply isn’t time for a relief well to be completed – meaning a blow out in the area could see oil gushing for two years, with oil becoming trapped under thick ice.

With freezing weather, seas so much colder, and conditions much more challenging than in the Gulf of Mexico, the risks attached to any dangerous deep sea drilling are also higher. The risk of collision between oil rigs and icebergs means that companies already have to literally tow away some icebergs, water-cannon away others, and in some cases, move the rig quickly enough to get out of the path of the biggest icebergs.

The US Minerals Management Service estimates that there is a one in-five chance of a major spill occurring over the lifetime of activity in just one of the blocks of leases in the Arctic Ocean. The risk of an even more terrible accident than the BP spill, and the likelihood of any emergency response being hampered by the severe nature of the area and its remote location, explains why ‘extreme oil’ like this is turning into a major frontline for environmental campaigners.

Green groups are concerned that warnings from scientists of the need to leave much of the world’s remaining fossil fuel reserves underground are simply being ignored, but they’re also particularly concerned that Baffin Bay, near Greenland, where Cairn is already doing exploratory drilling. It is a particularly fragile habitat, home to 80 to 90 per cent of the world’s narwhals. The region also boasts blue whales, polar bears, seals, sharks, cormorants, kittiwakes and numerous other rare and migratory birds.

On Sunday, it was revealed that UK taxpayers are financially assisting Cairn Energy’s risky drilling projects through a £100m loan from the Royal Bank of Scotland. Among the 66 companies backed by RBS are well-known names like BP, Shell, ConocoPhilips, Tullow Oil, Trafigura and Cairn Energy.

Despite this, Cairn has refused to release their plans outlining how they’d respond in the event of a spill. Their CEO, the former Scottish Rugby player Sir Bill Gammell is on the record having said: “I learned a lot about the oil business from George W Bush” – somebody he worked with earlier in his career, after attending school with one Tony Blair.

Greenpeace have already begun a world wide campaign to go beyond oil, and the environmental group – who I should say I work for – has also already sent a ship to the Arctic to confront Cairn Energy, the first company to begin drilling there. Closer to home, pressure is mounting for the UK government to follow President Obama’s lead and introduce a moratorium on deep sea drilling in UK waters, something recently recommended by EU Energy Commissioner, Günther Oettinger.

The Liberal Democrat leader had said:

“I was really delighted at the Institute of Fiscal Studies when they compared the three parties’ manifestos this week said very, very clearly, and very directly, that our proposal to lift the income tax threshold to £10,000 is the best incentive to work.”

The deputy prime minister is now, however, challenging the IFS’ finding that the Budget, very, very clearly, and very directly, is “clearly regressive“. Mr Clegg told Channel 4 News:

“Much of the IFS analysis was about benefits, but we want to get people off benefits and into work.

“That is a plan for real fairness, that is progressive and I think that is a richer understanding of what fairness is about than a single snapshot, that doesn’t – that simpy doesn’t – provide the full picture of what we’re trying to do over the coming months and years.”

Mr Clegg is in good company today criticising the IFS’ work. Mark Wallace, formerly of the TaxPayers’ Alliance and now a political consultant has today claimed that the IFS “swing to the left”. While Phillip Blond in a Sky interview claimed that the research was unreliable since it excluded the impact of “capital gains tax increases on the rich”.

James Browne, senior research economist at the IFS, told Left Foot Forward:

“The capital gains tax measures that were excluded only came to about £800m compared to £4.1 billion in welfare measures excluded by the Treasury in their assessment.”

But while Clegg continues to defend the fairness of his Budget despite the evidence, a number of Conservatives are seeking to move the goal posts.

Last week, George Osborne claimed that the Budget was fair when examined on an “intergenerational” basis – a claim refuted at the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Roundtable; Treasury minister Mark Hoban today invoked the Thatcherite idea of trickle down economics as a basis for the fairness of the Budget; and as Sunder Katwala outlines Spectator editor Fraser Nelson has called for the requirement to measure the impact of the Budget and other Government decisions on minority groups to be scrapped.

Theresa May wrote to George Osborne and other collegues ahead of the Emergency Budget to remind ministers of their legal responsibility to show that the impact of decisions on disadvantaged groups have been considered. (This is also, of course, one of the core political commitments of this government, given its commitment to “progressive austerity”).

The Fawcett Society has begun legal action which will find out whether the government did undertake an assessment of its budget’s impact on women. House of Commons library analysis has suggested women were disproportionately affected by the Budget.

Fraser Nelson, editor of The Spectator, has blogged comparing Treasury minister Mark Hoban’s serial refusal to answer the question this morning to the famous Paxman-Howard Newsnight interview. Nelson says that the hapless minister’s ordeal “was more than car crash radio”:

When Labour retreated, it sewed several landmines in the political territory it was about to cede. One of them was Harman’s Equalities Act, which mandates government “to consider how decisions might help to reduce inequalities associated with socio-economic disadvantage”…

Their calculation was that if they did this quietly enough, and in technicalities, the Cameroons would not wise up to it because of their aversion to detail. Cameron should have repealed the Equalities Act instantly.

The “equality landmines” language had earlier been coined by Nelson’s Spectator colleague Peter Hoskin, noting that: “in highlighting this, May was only doing her job”.

But there is a major political problem for those on the right who would challenge the Equality Act. It is indeed part of the Labour government’s legacy – but it is also (in theory at least) part of the new “progressive” centre-ground of British politics. If Nelson’s analysis does represent the Tory view of the Equality legislation, it is an argument which can not speak its name.

The final reading of the Bill in the Commons was passed by 332 votes to 8, with only six Conservative MPs opposing it. Phillip Davies, Mark Pritchard, Ann Widdecombe and Nicholas Winterton were the only Tory refuseniks, with Peter Bone and Philip Hollobone acting as tellers. They were joined in the no lobby by Dai Davies (Labour) and the DUP trio of Jeffrey Donaldson, Nigel Dodds and Sammy Wilson.

The Conservatives did vote against the Bill on second reading but Theresa May stressed on final reading that this did not signify opposition to it, but was rather on a “reasoned amendment”, which had in fact emphasised several areas where the Bill should have done more to reduce inequality.

Nelson puts the failure to spot this “landmine” down to a lack of attention to detail among the Cameroons, yet he is in fact challenging a central and deliberate part of the Tory leader’s “brand decontamination” strategy.

As for the Liberal Democrats, their only substantive criticism was that the Equality Bill did not go much further. Lynne Featherstone, now Equality Minister, could hardly now accept a u-turn on what she told the Commons last year:

“My party welcomes the Bill and the way that it brings all sorts of legislation together. We oppose the Government on almost nothing in it, but believe that it should have gone further. I have great concerns that the things that were not included in the Bill, or in respect of which the Bill does not go far enough, will not see the light of day if there is a change of Government.”

The Coalition government has two options. It could accept and uphold the legal obligrations on the government now has, as Theresa May advises her colleagues they must do. As well as fulfilling their legal duties, this would politically make them “heirs to Harriet Harman” – and so part of a new centre-ground consensus that reducing inequality is a core responsibility of government.

If the Coalition rejects these legal obligations as inappropriate, then it must surely take Fraser Nelson’s advice – “Cameron should have repealed the Equalities Act instantly” – and declare its intention to repeal the legislation. The Conservatives could then return to the Thatcherite argument that “equality is a mirage”, or at least make the case that inequality will trickle-down to the poor in the end, bringing much rejoicing in the Coffee House as repentant centrists see the true blue light.

Were the Act simply a “scorched earth” piece of politically correct nonsense from an out-of-touch outgoing administration, couldn’t a new administration simply accept the grateful cheers of the nation for a restoration of common sense by striking it from the statue books. But they surely can not be for the Equality Act and against it at the same time. Politically, that is simply howling at the moon.

The idea that budgets will be made in the courts and not by elected politicians is rather mythologised. The government will need to show that it had a process which ensured the equality impact was studied seriously. The downside is political embarrassment if it comes to light that policy decisions were made when others would have been fairer.

The Coalition don’t have the votes, since the Tory right is not about to march the Liberal Democrats through the lobbies to repeal the Equality Act. But this is not just about the facts of Coalition life. It is very difficult to see that the Tory right would prevail on this with a Tory majority government. The Tory frontbench does not agree with them or, at least, to the extent that it does, it can not say so publicly.

Lynne Featherstone had also, on Second Reading, specifically argued that the public duty measures in the Bill were“very weak” and should have been stronger – particularly to ensure that a future government could not simply pay lip service to the idea of inequality:

“These are uncertain political times, and it causes me concern that future Ministers might be anti-equality. Powers left to a Minister in future will be powers for a Minister to undo what has been done today, if they should, by any chance, not share an equal conviction in the equality legislation …  It would be easy to knock the proposed measures, as we heard to some degree from the Conservatives.

“However, legislation in the equalities field has been the advance guard of change … [We have to change the culture] … The Bill is an important foot solider in that regard. It sends out a clear and determined message about how the world will have to change. However, legislation must will the means, not just the ends, and we have to ensure that what we put down in law is matched by the will and resources to ensure its delivery.”

Now that Featherstone has responsibility for this policy area, it is inconceivable that she would accept the government arguing that these legal responsibilities are too onerous.

Whilst a single weather event cannot be attributed to climate change, a number of scientists are highlighting that current experiences fit with the climate trends they have been predicting. This is not evident in most mainstream media reporting – so here I examine what has been reported and how this matches what scientists expected.

In Greenland, an iceberg three times the size of Manhattan has broken off the Petermann Glacier. Professor Jason Box of The Ohio State University wrote on his blog:

“This is the largest single area loss observed for Greenland. Petermann is one of a few remaining floating glaciers in the Northern Hemisphere and among the largest…

While it is unreasonable to pin an individual cracking event of a glacier on global warming, even if enormous, the retreat of Petermann glacier is most certainly part of a pattern of global warming.”

The same story was reported by the Associated Press:

“In the Arctic Ocean itself, the summer melt of the vast ice cap has reached unprecedented proportions. Satellite data show the ocean area covered by ice last month was the second-lowest ever recorded for July.”

The floods that hit Pakistan have affected around a fifth of the country’s land mass. Pakistan’s Prime Minister says 20 million people have been made homeless and Maurizio Giuliano, UN humanitarian operations spokesman told the Guardian that at least 36,000 people are believed to have potentially fatal acute watery diarrhoea (AWD) were being treated for cholera.

Roads, irrigation canals and electricity generating stations have been destroyed. The impact on the country’s agriculture is expected to cause food shortages and price spikes. The UN has said the final toll could exceed the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, the 2005 Kashmir earthquake and the 2010 Haiti earthquake combined.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reported in 2007 that rains have grown heavier for 40 years over north Pakistan and predicted greater flooding this century in south Asia’s monsoon region.

The report also predicted a doubling of disastrous droughts in Russia this century and cited studies foreseeing catastrophic fires during dry years. It also said Russia would suffer large crop losses. Russia is experiencing its gravest heat wave for over a millennium, according to Russia’s Met Office. Wired Magazine recently reported that:

“The Russian heat wave has persisted since late June, with daytime temperatures at least 12 Fahrenheit degrees above normal — and often much more — for over a month. In Moscow alone, an estimated 300 people a day have died. The temperatures in Russia threaten wheat harvests and have sent global prices rising in a manner reminiscent of the lead-up to 2008’s global food riots.”

Wildfires covering some 672 sq miles prompting Putin to introduce an export ban on grain. This in turn has triggered a spike in food prices. The knock-on effect of this is already evident in Indonesia, where the cost of flour has already risen by 10%.

Reacting to the floods in Pakistan, and to the heat in Russia, Omar Baddour, chief of climate data management applications at World Meteorological Organisation (WMO), told Reuters:

“We will always have climate extremes. But it looks like climate change is exacerbating the intensity of the extremes”.

The Jakarta Globe reports that Indonesia is experiencing its most extreme weather events in recorded history with high waves, high winds and excessive rainfall. Indonesian coral reefs have also experienced severe damage – so-called “bleaching” – with reports of around 80% of species there dying and this has been linked to climate change. A spokesman for the country’s Meteorology, Climatology and Geophysics Agency (BMKG) said: “The combination of global warming and the La Nina phenomenon makes everything exceed normalcy.”

The United States too are experiencing tornadoes, floods, heat waves and other out of the ordinary extreme weather events. In May of this year, Tennessee experienced its worst rain deluge for more than 1000 years. Our sister site in the US, ThinkProgress, has also mapped some of the other weather events around America this summer and how they match up to the predictions of the 2009 U.S. Global Change Research Program report.

In China, scores of people have been left dead by mudslides triggered by heavy rainfalls. The IPCC’s report predicted more frequent flooding in this century, and said that rains have increased in northwest China by up to 33 percent since 1961.

In the southern hemisphere, Australia has experienced its hottest decade on record with a recent ‘Big Dry’ of droughts, fires and dust storms.  The Independent spoke of Australia’s ‘global warming ground zero’:

“In the Riverland, one of the nation’s major horticulture areas, dying vines and parched lemon trees attest to critical water shortages. Farmers have had their water allocations slashed during the recent crippling drought; 200 sold up, and many of those who hung on are struggling.”

Elsewhere, Oxfam says that Niger is currently being hit by a “double disaster” of heavy rains and flooding – compounding food shortages caused by a prolonged drought. The Niger River has reached its highest level for more than 80 years and left nearly 70,000 people homeless.

There are a number of instances when scientists have predicted extreme weather events; sometimes when events have taken place and yet received little or no mainstream media attention.

Hoban was interviewed in the wake of the independent IFS analysis that the June Budget was regressive and would hit the poorest household the most, repeating the line that the Government “went through a very detailed distributional analysis at the time of the Budget”.

Listen to it:

The originial IFS report published shortly after the Budget detailed how the Treasury’s own distributional assessment examined only the impact of Budget measures to 2012-13 and included measures announced by Labour in the March Budget. The IFS’ June study concluded that the Budget was regressive if considered in isolation and over the course of the entire Parliament.

The new report, released today, assesses the full impact of the Coalition’s Budget over the entirety of the parliament, and outlines that, including housing benefit, disability allowance and tax credit changes, the Budget is “clearly regressive”.

Here is a transcript of the Hoban and Webb exchange on the fairness of the Budget:

Justin Webb: Can I just ask you this quick question: have you conducted an assessment which you are required to do by law by the equalities act of 2010 to find out what affect this budget has on ethnic minorities, disabled, other vulnerable groups?

Mark Hoban: Look Justin we went through a very detailed distributional analysis at the time of the Budget, it was the most extensive piece of work that anyone has done…

JW: But have you conducted this assessment?

MH: And it looked across a wide range of households in a way that other governments haven’t done, and I think the choice that we faced…

JW: So hold on, can I just get straight from you, have you conducted this legal assessment or not?

MH: Justin, we have gone through the most detailed and rigourous assessment of the distributional impact of this Budget than any government…

JW: So you’ve not, you’ve not actually done the assessment that you’re required to do under the 2010 act?

MH: We’ve gone through the most rigourous assessment of the impact of this Budget on families…

JW: But Not this formal assessment?

MH: We’ve gone through, Justin this is the best and most detailed piece of work any government has done on the impact of their Budget on families and households…

JW: Can I just get it clear from you, you’ve not done the formal assessment that some people think you are required to do under the equalities act 2010?

MH: Justin I think you know you are looking at detail rather than actually at recognising the fact we had to take some difficult decisions in the Budget to tackle the deficit we inherited from Labour, the choice we faced was either to take action now or to do nothing…

JW: But people are going to conclude that you’ve not conducted that, I mean you call it a detail, people are going to conclude now that you haven’t conducted it and that’s a fair conclusion.