Pushing their way into the heart of a forest that has existed for 12,000 years, where some 60 treehouses have been built over the past six years, thousands of police officers began cutting trees to reach a central community called “Oaktown.”

In recent weeks, environmentalists have drawn attention to the mine, which is operated by the energy company RWE in the Hambach Forest, east of the city of Aachen, in an effort to highlight the disparity between Germany’s pledges to reduce its carbon emissions and uphold its commitments to the Paris climate accord and the country’s heavy use of its only significant natural resource, soft coal, or lignite.

Mr Guterres painted a grim picture of the impacts of climate change that he says have been felt all over the world this year, with heatwaves, wildfires, storms and floods leaving a trail of destruction.

Despite the fact that the world agreed on a plan to tackle climate change in Paris in 2015, Mr Guterres said the world is way off track to achieve the modest goals of the pact.

Mr Guterres says he is committing himself and the UN to the effort of transforming the political landscape to tame the threat of climate change. He pointed to the forthcoming report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change on how to keep the world from warming by more that 1.5 degrees C, which he says will be a sobering assessment.

Since October 2015, customers have had to pay at least 5p for each single-use bag - with all retailers employing more than 250 people made to take part in the scheme.

Many of the seven major supermarkets have already stopped selling single-use carrier bags in their stores. Sainsbury's 5p bags are thicker and stronger, so they are not considered to be single use, while Tesco only sells 10p bags for life.

The National Audit Office (NAO) says over half of the packaging reported as recycled is actually being sent abroad to be processed.

The NAO's report found only 25% of the firms most likely to misbehave over re-processing or exporting waste are inspected, while just 40% of planned compliance visits were actually carried out.

In the 1990s, Chinese markets saw that discarded plastic could be profitably recreated into exportable bits and bobs—and it was less expensive for international cities to send their waste to China than to deal with it themselves.

The European Union was the top exporter, followed by North America and Japan.

To help stop global warming, cancel that round-the-world holiday. Tourism has expanded so rapidly that it now accounts for 8 per cent of the greenhouse gases we belch into the air. That is up to four times previous estimates.

The team’s new estimates are higher because, as well as direct emissions from air transit, they also included indirect emissions. These include emissions from food production for tourists eating lavishly while on holiday, hotel upkeep and maintenance, and souvenirs. In 2013 this added an extra 1 to 2 gigatonnes.

The 34-year-old was rushed to an emergency room in New York after developing "excruciating" pain from eating the Carolina Reaper, according to a report in the British Medical Journal this week.

According to Paul Bosland, professor of horticulture at New Mexico State University and director of the Chile Pepper Institute, has said the grub can theoretically cause death, but in most cases people's bodies "would react sooner and not allow it to happen".

Dragon's Breath was created by a farmer for the Chelsea Flower show and is so potent that it had to be kept in a sealed container when it went on display.

Scientists have established that the whole structure on the Italian island of Sicily is edging in the direction of the Mediterranean at a rate of 14mm per year.

This instrumentation is sensitive to millimetric changes in the shape of the volcanic cone; and with 11 years of data it is now obvious, he says, that the mountain is moving in an east-south-east direction, on a general track towards the coastal town of Giarre, which is about 15km away.

It is hard to study these mystery microbes because most can’t be grown in labs. They need the conditions of their natural habitat – be it a hydrothermal vent or our intestines – to survive.

Metagenomics has already made big finds. In September, Philip Hugenholtz and his team at the University of Queensland, Australia, used it to identify 1749 novel microbial species. But that was just the tip of the iceberg.

Just like humans, plants can succumb to the effects of general anesthetic drugs, researchers report this week in the Annals of Botany. The finding is striking for a variety of reasons—there’s the pesky fact that plants lack a central nervous system, for one thing.

The anesthetics temporarily caused the plants to go still and unresponsive. The Venus flytrap's spikey trap didn’t slam shut when poked. The shy plant was no longer shy; it’s leaves stayed open when gently brushed. Similarly, the sundew plants didn’t bend to capture dead fruit flies and the pea plant’s tendrils drooped and curled up instead of whirling in normal upward fashion.