Whisper it quietly, but a gender revolution is taking place at the global climate change negotiations.

As of 17 May, the six most influential positions within the UN process are all held by women, a significant increase on last year’s total of two.

U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon on Friday appointed former Irish President Mary Robinson and Kenyan diplomat Macharia Kamau as special envoys for El Nino and climate.

The El Nino weather phenomenon, which occurs every two to seven years, affects rainfall patterns and causes both drought and flooding.

In one case, a writer claimed a mini Ice Age would befall Earth in 15 years. In another, an op-ed touted global warming as saving countless people from freezing to death.

A new project called Climate Feedback, run by a French scientist living in California, took these and other stories to task, and in the past year has critiqued climate change stories in the New York Times, Rolling Stone, the Telegraph, Forbes magazine, the Wall Street Journal and more.

Temperatures have soared to a scorching 51 degrees Celsius in one Indian city, meteorologists said Friday, with the ferocious heat setting a new national record.

The amount of electricity generated from coal in the UK has fallen to zero several times in the past week, grid data shows.

The Obama administration announced on Thursday new rules to cut methane emissions from the oil and gas industry almost in half – tackling a powerful climate pollutant in the president’s final months in the White House.

The rules, stronger than earlier proposals, are aimed at reducing methane emissions from the US by 40% to 45% over 2012 levels by 2025 by requiring companies to capture gas from oil wells, and find and plug pipeline leaks. America is currently the world’s largest oil and gas producer.

The Canadian author and social activist Naomi Klein has criticized Australia’s climate change policies after winning the Sydney Peace prize for her work exposing the structural causes of the planet’s climate crisis.

A wildfire that partly destroyed the city of Fort McMurray has cut Canada’s oil output by as much as a third after forcing the oil sands industry to effectively shut down in the province of Alberta.

The majority of Alberta’s oil sands had stopped production and would only start back up when it was “absolutely safe”, said Rachel Notley, the premier, who predicted that production would restart soon.

Strong climate change policy is a vote-changing matter for a majority of Australians, a new poll shows, establishing the issue as an important battleground one week into the election campaign.

Britain’s biggest energy supplier British Gas is to offer households free power on Saturdays or Sundays as it attempts to halt an exodus of customers to cheaper rivals.

The Telegraph understands the energy giant is preparing a national campaign to launch the so-called FreeTime tariff this summer, in the hope of retaining customers and persuading them to let it install smart energy meters in their homes.