More than 100 climate-change protesters were arrested yesterday as they allegedly plotted a sabotage attack on one of the country's biggest power stations.
Officers swooped on a private school where the group had gathered just hours before the raid was due.
Energy giant E.on last night claimed its Ratcliffe-On- Soar power plant in Nottinghamshire was the target. If the attack was successful, it would have disrupted supplies to tens of thousands of people across the East Midlands. E.on said: "This could have been a very dangerous and irresponsible attempt to disrupt an operational power plant."
Officers from neighbouring Derbyshire and Leicestershire forces were drafted in to help with the raids on the Iona school in Sneinton, Notts. Police arrested 114 protesters on suspicion of conspiracy to commit aggravated trespass and criminal damage.
The school itself, which teaches children based on the spiritual ideas of the Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner, has no involvement with the activists. It was used as a meeting place without the governors' knowledge.
Neighbour Tess Rearden said of the raid: "Police vans, riot vans were all up the street. It was bedlam."
Power stations across the country were warned last week of possible attacks over the Easter period.
Mass arrests after raid by climate-change protesters on power station is foiled
Scottish researchers study impact of climate change
Scottish researchers are to examine the impact of climate change on North Atlantic coastal communities.
The scientists from the prospective University of the Highlands and Islands (UHI) Environmental Research Institute are to undertake a three-year project to determine how global warming may impact these communities.
The Western Isles will be one of five sites chosen for the CoastAdapt study by the team from UHI and partners from Norway, Iceland, Northern Ireland and Ireland.
One of the aims of the project will be to create a climate witness network where people can inform CoastAdapt of any changes they find.
John McClatchey, senior research fellow at the institute, said in a statement: "CoastAdapt brings together researchers, local authorities and local people to provide support for communities to adapt to climate change and take advantage of any opportunities it might offer."
The project was launched in Inverness and is led by Comhairle nan Eilean Siar, the Westerns Isles Council, and is part-funded by the European Union Northern Periphery Programme.
Councillor Norman A. MacDonald said: "The loss of life and damage to property on the coastline caused by the storm which hit the Western Isles in January 2005 left local residents in shock.
"Although not attributable to global warming, this incident made people aware of just how vulnerable they are to a changing climate and rising sea levels. The project will help North Atlantic coastal communities adapt to these changes."
Other sites to be studied will be Tralee Bay in County Kerry, Ireland; Hammerfest in west Finnmark, Norway; and Arborg and Vik in southern Iceland.
All the communities have suffered in recent years from the affects of extreme weather, such as coastal erosion, estuarine flooding and intense rainfall.
Some of the sites have seen an increased avalanche risk as a result of heavier snowfall and structural damage caused by hurricane force winds.
Debate erupts over effects of climate change on disease
In recent years thousands of papers have been published projecting that increased temperatures will extend the range of disease vectors, increasing the amount of disease.
But now an ecologist argues that the effects of climate change will be more complex than has been acknowledged, and that there may even be a reduction in the incidence of some infectious diseases.
Kevin Lafferty, a research ecologist for the United States Geological Survey at the University of California Santa Barbara, makes his argument in the April issue of Ecology. The journal has published five articles in response, representing the "extreme and contrasting views Lafferty's paper elicited in its reviewers," according to Kenneth Wilson of the UK-based Lancaster University, who has written a further, discussion article for the journal.
Lafferty's paper "looks set to spark another heated debate among ecologists" and further afield "because of the funding implications and political fallout that might be generated by questioning the association between climate change and infectious diseases," says Wilson.
In his paper, Lafferty argues that temperature increases due to climate change are just one factor among many socioeconomic and environmental influences affecting diseases. Climate change is more likely to shift, than expand, the range of disease-causing bugs, and some areas might experience a decrease in disease, he writes. The discipline of ecology is essential for untangling these complexities.
"[The effect of climate change] might be relatively minor, particularly in many human infectious diseases where other factors such as economics are known to play a large role," he told SciDev.Net.
Higher-latitude, richer nations have the resources to control and treat malaria, for example, so just because their environment becomes more suitable for mosquitoes doesn't necessarily mean an increase in the number of malaria infections.
Factors such as day length, a seasonal rather than climatic factor, can affect rates of disease transmission, while precipitation can play a complex role in changing habitats for disease vectors. Human action such as land-use change and disease control methods also impact on the number of cases.
Lafferty says that simple summaries of the topic often conclude with a one-directional outcome: that infectious disease is going to increase in general.
"In no way am I saying we shouldn't be studying this issue, what I'm interested in doing is laying out a framework through which we can study it more effectively," he says. "I think we ought to be worried by overemphasising climate at the expense of other really important effects that we can do things about, like economics."
But in a response paper, Mercedes Pascual of the University of Michigan, United States, and Menno Bouma of the UK-based University of London, argue that even if the geographical range of, for example, malaria-carrying mosquitoes does not increase, it may extend into more populated and vulnerable areas. Populations in malarial countries tend to concentrate at low-risk, higher altitudes, they say, so the shifting of malaria uphill could increase the number of cases.
Pascual and Bouma are also concerned that Lafferty's conclusions could be interpreted as meaning that climate change does not play a role in changing the patterns of infectious diseases.
And some authors point out that there is already compelling evidence that climate change has increased some human diseases and caused dramatic disease outbreaks in amphibians, shellfish and corals.
But Sarah Randolph of Oxford University, United Kingdom, writes in her Ecology paper that "exaggerated simplistic rhetoric" about climate change's role "is morally indefensible if it distracts public health agencies from more effective ameliorative action targeted at the real causes".
