Met Office predicting up to 50mm and warns of waters rising again as county reels from evacuations and policeman's death

Flood-damaged parts of the UK are bracing themselves for more heavy rain today after two days of downpours that inundated homes, swept away bridges, sparked evacuations and claimed the life of a policeman.

The Met Office predicts there will be another 15mm (0.5in) to 40mm (1.6in) of rain in Cumbria, north-west England, where PC Bill Barker died after a bridge collapsed. Cumbria police said about 100 people spent last night in emergency shelters after the biggest downpour in British history hit the county, with 314mm – more than a foot of rain – falling in 24 hours. Four bridges collapsed in the county and 11 remain closed due to fast-flowing floodwaters.

There are four severe flood warnings in force in Cumbria and 18 flood warnings across Scotland, northern England, the Midlands and Wales. There are flood watches in another 46 areas.

About 1,100 households across the county were affected with hundreds of people displaced and more than 1,000 homes left without power.

Both rivers that run through Cockermouth in Cumbria – the town worst affected by the flooding – burst their banks, blocking roads and forcing more than 200 people from their homes.

A thorough search of houses affected by the flooding began this morning but locals fear further downpours could hinder the rescue and clean-up operation.

A police spokesman said: "Nobody has been reported missing in the area at this time and the rescue effort is being scaled down.

"Less than 100 people remain in reception centres, with the rest having made alternative arrangements to stay with family and friends."

Ian Rideout, a Red Cross worker, said many of those rescued were suffering from shock. "The centre of Cockermouth looks like it has been completely destroyed – I've never seen anything like it. The water has caused so much damage that many of the homes here are completely ruined.

"We've been working non-stop and between the Red Cross and RNLI we've rescued in the region of 200 people from their homes.

"Last night I went up in one of the helicopters to get an idea of the full scale of the disaster and where we should focus rescue efforts. Almost straight away we found four people on the roof of their home who needed to be winched to safety.

"Most of the people we've rescued have been in shock. One minute it's raining heavily, then the next their home is filling with water and they're being evacuated by the Red Cross."

People in the town said they were worried that rain forecast for the weekend would bring more problems. Alan Smith said: "The thing with the river Cocker is it can fall as quickly as it can rise.

"It's come down four foot from last night but the fells are sodden and if we get any more rain it will just come straight off and into the river and the level will rise again.

"If we have persistent rain like last night and the day before we will be back to square one."

Gemma Plumb, a forecaster with MeteoGroup UK, said: "We could see up to 25mm fall on low ground and up to 50mm in high areas in the next 24 hours.

"When you have rain falling on saturated soil like this you will get an increased risk of flooding."

She said a band of "heavy and persistent" rain would move up from the south-west during the afternoon before moving away by the late evening.

The Workington MP, Tony Cunningham, said the flood was "of biblical proportions" and he was astonished by the destruction of the Northside bridge, which led to PC Barker's death.

Barker, who would have been celebrating his 45th birthday today, was killed as he directed motorists away from the bridge. It collapsed and he was swept away. His body was found on a beach in nearby Allonby.

The officer, from Egremont, served with Cumbria police for 25 years and leaves a wife, Hazel, and four children.

Mrs Barker said her husband was her "forever friend" and "an amazing dad", adding: "I have the comfort of knowing that Bill died doing the job he loved, and the fact that he was helping others is just typical Bill."

Cumbria police Chief Constable Craig Mackey said Barker was "a wonderful police officer and a real family man".

"Bill is a hero who died saving the lives of others and our thoughts are with his family at this devastating time. He was a much loved friend, colleague and an inspiration to everyone he knew – he will be sadly missed."

The prime minister, Gordon Brown, said Barker was "a very heroic, very brave man. I think we owe him a tremendous debt of gratitude for the service he has shown."

The environment secretary, Hilary Benn, said the flooding was the result of "an extreme weather event".

"I would urge everyone in the area to make sure you are taking all sensible precautions, heed the warnings of the emergency services, listen to local radio for updates and, most of all, keep safe," he said.

An Environment Agency spokesman told BBC Radio 5 Live that despite the forecasts of more rain he hoped the waters would recede enough for a clean-up operation to begin.

"I hope it is going to pass through very quickly and therefore whilst it might make life a bit unpleasant I don't think it will add to the flooding problems. We are looking forward to being able to perhaps begin to get people back to look at their houses as the clean-up operation begins and the flood levels I hope will begin to recede."

Unless they end in promises, and a treaty within months, Ed Miliband believes the Copenhagen talks will be a disaster. But can the British energy secretary, in Denmark for a frantic round of pre-summit diplomacy, win the argument?

It's breakfast time in the biggest of Copenhagen's Scandic hotels. Over the obligatory croissants and coffee – and, for those who want it, an off-beam version of the English breakfast – 42 international delegations are preparing to go into a second day of talks. Phones tweet; hushed conversations within teams of negotiators form a low conversational hum.

Look closely, and some of the outlines of modern geopolitics are clear. This morning, the Chinese and Indian delegations are seated together, and locked in conversation. Elsewhere in the hotel, the UK's representatives are doing their thing at an early "EU co-ordination" meeting. In a corner of the restaurant, meanwhile, the US special envoy on climate change – an elusive, austere-looking man named Todd Stern – sits completely alone.

From 7-18 December, the Danish capital will fill up with an extra 20,000 people, there to play their part in what officialspeak calls the 15th Conference of the Parties (or Cop 15), but the rest of us know as the Copenhagen summit: the great global coming-together aimed at securing a much more ambitious successor to the Kyoto treaty, and thereby marking a turning point in the human race's fight against climate change. This week's event, organised by the Danish government under the title Pre-Cop Consultations, is much more low-key, though the guest list includes a huge array of energy and climate change ministers, their aides and negotiating teams – called here to compare notes, have brief and not-so-brief "bilaterals", and somehow inject a slow-moving process with some political momentum.

Among them is Britain's own Ed Miliband, who will turn 40 six days after the summit closes, and has the road-worn air of man who has been travelling far too much. In the build up to December, he has been to China, Brazil, India, Mexico, South Africa and Bangladesh, as well as Poland, Russia, and France (before anyone asks, he and his team offset their flights).

On the flight from London, he underlines the gravity of Copenhagen by alluding to past summits, and describing it as "Bretton Woods plus Yalta multiplied by Reykjavik". In Scandic's restaurant, where he sits for the interview, he comes up with an even more mind-boggling analogy: "Imagine if you knew 189 people, and you got them all together and said, 'Here's how we want you to run a significant part of your lives in the next 30 or 40 years – and by the way, you have to unanimously agree that that's how you want to do it.'"

Give or take sleep, and the closed-off proceedings in the main conference room, I shadow Miliband for around 40 hours. On his first morning here, I hear the stiffened small-talk at early-morning bilaterals, best illustrated by the opening exchange between him and his German counterpart Norbert Röttgen:

"Congratulations on your first presentation in the parliament. I heard some reports that it was a triumph."

"It was OK."

"You're being hailed as a great environmentalist, which is good for your first week in the job."

"Second week."

What really defines my time in Copenhagen, though, is a thrice-daily ritual whereby I collar Miliband as he emerges from the formal negotiations, and try – in vain, usually – to get a firm idea of where the conversation has been going. Usually, he wears a pretty much unreadable expression, though it doesn't take any great effort to understand how much work – somewhat worryingly – has still be done. At the end of Day One, for example, I manage to extract a few brief words from 55-year-old Jairam Ramesh, India's stoic minister of state for environment and forests, who audibly sighs, and will only tell me that "there is still a long way to go".

This week, the news media's understanding of what Copenhagen might achieve has pinballed between pessimism and qualified hope. On Monday, headlines confirmed what most insiders knew, when Barack Obama served notice that a legally binding agreement at Copenhagen was now beyond reach, and he was signing up to the Danish government's plan to exit 2009 with a "politically binding" deal, and follow it with a full treaty in the very near future. By Tuesday, rather more optimistic coverage greeted America and China's joint promise that December would see a "comprehensive" agreement, though plenty of voices still counselled caution and doubt: as far as one Greenpeace spokesperson was concerned, the Sino-American declaration was vague enough to suggest the possibility of both "a real ambitious climate rescue deal" and "another meaningless declaration".

There are two tracks to the build-up to Copenhagen. Politicians travel, and meet, and keep their eye on the stuff that will define the summit's headlines. Meanwhile, negotiators who are devoting their entire working lives to the pre-summit process must regularly congregate in some of the world's major cities, and try to push their way through the detail. Britain's chief negotiator is Jan Thompson, an official on loan from the Foreign Office who, in red patent leather biker boots, looks like anything but. She and Pete Betts – a genial, straight-to-the-point kind of operator, who described himself as "a career bureaucrat" – are known to Miliband as "the two degrees", a reference to the rise in average global temperatures that the world has now resolved to avoid. Miliband says he has long conversations with them at least once a week; on their second night in Denmark, they are still talking animatedly well past midnight.

There is, of course, no end of stuff to discuss. The negotiations' key theme is an ongoing and complex face-off between developed and developing countries (needless to say, post-imperial baggage is unavoidable). For countries already panicked by the effects of climate change – most notably, the 43-strong Alliance Of Small Island States – the prospect of a potentially indefinite delay to a legal deal is evidently causing no end of fear. Such rising powers as China, India and Brazil are watched closely, but the story regularly comes back to the US, whose uncertain stance is partly down to its cagy exit from what Miliband calls "20 wasted years", and the delicacy of America's political system: for a president to come to Europe and dish out commitments before the requisite legislation had passed the Senate would be risky, to say the least.

"What is the art of politics?" he wonders (like a lot of New Labour politicians of his generation, Miliband has a habit of asking himself questions). "It's to simplify, not complexify [sic]. Yes, this is complicated. But actually, in the end, it does boil down to some relatively simple things: how much you're going to cut your emissions, how much finance you're going to provide, what you're going to do about deforestation, and what you're going to about technology. I often think that when people say, 'Oh, this is so complicated,' it becomes an excuse. You get, 'Oh, this is all too complicated – it'll take another five years.'"

But how does he gauge success? "Well, you go on trips, and you have a series of dreadful and depressing meetings where you think nothing is moving. And then you have a really good meeting when you can visualise a breakthrough … in Brazil, I said to the foreign minister, 'Are you going to put 2020 numbers on the table for Copenhagen?' And he said, 'Yeah'. And we all looked at each other and said, 'Well, they've never said that before.' And you come out of the meeting and think, 'That was a pretty significant moment.'"

After the first day's talks, there's a dinner at the Royal Danish Playhouse, which ends with a solo ballet performance titled The Egg. But before those delights, he has to go to a Danish TV studio, do British TV and radio spots, frets about how quickly he talks, and tries to face down scepticism at home.

The script he performs for Channel 4 News and BBC Radio is reiterated to me, with additions, later that night. Despite the uncertainty now hanging over any legally binding deal, Miliband says he wants a full enforceable treaty "within months" of Copenhagen, and says that even the end of 2010 is too late. As one of his advisers frantically scribbles down her version of the conversation (the departmental MiniDisc recorder is kaput), he sets out a simple version of what first has to materialise in December: "a set of commitments from developed and developing countries that can show emissions peaking by about 2020."

He also talks endlessly about the importance of "numbers", by which he chiefly means pledges of specific cuts in emissions from all the major developed countries, and hardened commitments on the funding of "adaptation and mitigation" – where richer countries spending billions on poorer countries' defences against a radically altered climate, and the technology needed to curb their output of greenhouse gases.

Britain, via the EU, has already committed to cutting CO² emissions by 34% by 2020 on 1990 levels. EU governments have also promised €22bn-€50bn (£20bn-£45bn) a year for the developing world as part of a proposed €110bn global package, which, relative to claims that the total annual bill may be four times that, looks deeply disappointing. But right now that is not the main point: outside Europe, even if emissions targets are starting to come in, few developed countries have yet come up with figures for financial help for poorer ones – and in the case of the US, neither have been put on the table.

That fact alone makes one particular element of Miliband's rhetoric remarkable. "I'm willing to say to you, if we don't get any numbers at Copenhagen, it's a failure," he says.

I tell him that strikes me as a rather high-stakes position. "Yeah," he says. "But I don't think it would be successful if we haven't got numbers. What is it if we don't have numbers?"

The thing is, I suggest, politicians don't often say things like that. They tend to make a point of leaving wriggle room for themselves. "No," he says, sharply. "We're not leaving wriggle room. I recognise that fact. In the end, people are smart. They know when you've succeeded, and they know when you've failed. And I've known for many months that there's no point in going out and claiming Copenhagen is a miraculous triumph if there's no numbers."

There are, inevitably, aspects of the UK's policy and positioning that plenty of green voices do not like: a new enthusiasm for the uncertain technology known as "clean coal"; enthusiasm for funding half of Europe's post-Copenhagen commitment to the developing world via private-sector carbon trading; and the fact that the UK has so far only pledged £1bn a year in direct climate-related funding for poorer countries.

But here is the most striking thing. On the couple of occasions that I talk to British officials it is hard to avoid the conclusion that, relative to scores of countries, the UK is on the right side of the argument, and pushing hard. They talk about Copenhagen in the kind of dramatic terms that one perhaps wouldn't expect from civil servants. "If we can make this work," says a man from the Foreign Office, "multilateralism has a future. If not, multilateralism goes pear-shaped. And that will affect all kinds of things: food security, water security, energy security."

By early afternoon on the second day, a few delegations have started to peel away, and are preparing to return home. The hotel foyer is divided between an ever-increasing array of suitcases, the activities of a large number of Chinese journalists and ad hoc huddles of negotiators. Not long after 2pm, Miliband bids me goodbye and disappears into a bilateral with the Brazilians: his flight doesn't leave until six, which gives time for talks, and more talks.

Hovering near the negotiations' security barrier, I grab Kevin Conrad, the climate change envoy from Papua New Guinea. Conrad, a climate change star since 2007 when at the UN climate conference in Bali, he challenged the US: "If you are not willing to lead then leave it to the rest of us, get out of the way," looks urbane, preppy, but also visibly rattled. The previous afternoon, I had heard him vent his spleen to the British team as follows: "What can we do to re-energise this thing? It just feels like it's all going backwards."

"I remain frustrated," he tells me. "How do I put this? There's a calculated repositioning of aspirations, where it's being agreed that we're not going to anything that's binding, we're not gong to do anything substantive, and a lot of people blame everybody else for everything going too slow. And for a small island states like ours, that's very disconcerting." When would he like to see a legally-binding deal?

"We don't know why that can't happen now. And what gives us confidence that there won't be more excuses in a year? Or a year later? We are relocating people as we speak because their islands are now inhabitable … This is growing. It's not a theoretical problem."

He adds: "We want people to stick to the original objective – to come up with the substance of a global deal in Copenhagen. All the elements within the negotiations are moving forward, but we want those settled. We think politicians should come in and settle their differences, and close them off. What do we do? Do we just continue with the differences for another year?"

As if to make British hearts swell, however, when I ask him about his perception of Britain's role in Copenhagen, he says :"The UK, in my view, is one of the strongest and most articulate advocates for getting something done."

Having arrived back at home, I book in a call to a British official, which duly happens on Thursday afternoon, when they talk me through some of what was discussed: new moves from Brazil and South Korea, continued uncertainty about how progress on carbon emissions might be recorded, and whether Copenhagen's outcome might be a matter of one text, or "bits of text". Their closing verdict on two days in the Danish capital may be entirely innocuous, though to certain ears, they will only underline what a nervous moment this is. "No decisions," says the voice at the other end of the line. "But useful."

Writer John Harris and Guardian photographer Martin Argles shadowed the energy and climate change secretary, Ed Miliband, for 40 hours during his trip to an intergovernmental meeting in Copenhagen ahead of the main conference there in December

They keep our homes warm in style, and are a renewable energy source to boot. What's not to like about wood-burning stoves, asks Dominic Murphy

Why buy one? It's potentially carbon neutral. Although burning logs releases CO2, this is the same amount as was absorbed while the wood was growing. If a new tree is planted for each one burned, there is no overall increase in carbon emissions.

A bit old-fashioned, no? So what if there's a touch of Heidi about some. There are plenty more with a contemporary feel – 007 just back from the ski slopes, say.

Where do I start? Decide what sort of stove you want – "woodburner" usually refers to log burners, as opposed to those fuelled by wooden pellets. "Multifuel" stoves take logs or coal. Next, visit a local stove shop. Or call in an engineer registered with Hetas, the government-recognised solid-fuel specialists. Either way, it should mean an expert is on the case. They can advise on the size of burner, and give you an idea of installation costs and potential problems.

Do I need a chimney? Where there's fire, there's smoke, and that smoke has to go somewhere. If you don't have a traditional chimney, you could make a feature of a stainless-steel pipe running up through your home (pictured). Any existing chimney will need a smoke test to check it's safe, and it may need lining. It'll also need a good sweep – try chimneyworks.co.uk or guild-of-master-sweeps.co.uk.

And what about smokeless zones? Many large towns and cities have "smoke control areas" where smoke from homes is banned. However, you can still burn wood if the stove has an exemption certificate. Companies making such stoves include Chesney's; Dovre; Dunsley Yorkshire Stoves; Morsø; and Jøtul. To check your area, and for a list of exempt appliances, go to uksmokecontrolareas.co.uk.

Where do I find my stove? "Spoilt for choice" is an understatement: direct-fireplaces.com or stovesonline.co.uk have a wide range of popular brands. If you like the look of something here, check out the individual company website – they may have more to offer. Hwam is posh, while Westfire has some elegant models. Want classic? Try Chesney's or Charnwood. Hetas has a list of approved products on its website.

What should I look for? Good looks help – you'll be spending a lot of time in front of your stove. And the more efficient it is, the more heat for your cash – a top-end log stove can be 80% efficient, a pellet version 85%.

Can I install it myself? Theoretically, yes. But you'll need to comply with building regulations, and there might be problems with guarantees on a DIY job.

How much will it cost? A basic wood burner could cost less than £500, and you could get away with a burner and installation for £1,000. But the more sophisticated and efficient it is, the more you pay (£3,000 is not unheard of; some prices run into five figures). You'll have to budget for fitting it – not too bad if you already have a fireplace. And remember, you may need a chimney flue, which will cost about £1,000 for a two-storey house.

Can it heat the radiators and hot water? It's quite common for burners to have a back boiler, where they heat up water as well as the room. This can be part of an existing heating system or even warm the radiators on their own.

Where do I find wood? Try your local directory. Even in cities, someone somewhere is chopping down a tree. Alternatively, the National Energy Foundation lists suppliers. Wood carrying the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) logo guarantees your logs have come from responsibly managed woodland. It's important you burn logs that are dry and have been seasoned for at least a year. Wet wood will not only blacken the glass on the stove door, but won't burn efficiently.

Will it save on my fuel bills? According to Ian Tubby of the Biomass Energy Centre,"Assuming that it is £120 a tonne for seasoned, split logs, the price of logs and oil is pretty much the same." (And it's much cheaper if you split the logs yourself.)

New Forest

There is something enchanting about a group of scarlet-capped fly agaric fungi nestling within a circle of silver birches. The fungus is among the brightest of autumnal sights. With its red top seemingly sprinkled with finely chopped cheese, this poisonous species is associated with birch, and advances out on to the heaths as the trees colonise them. In time, this forms new woodland. If the amount of grazing needed across the forest is to be maintained, such invasive growth must be kept in check. That explains the large pile of birch logs stacked close to Wittensford, near Brook.

The freshly clipped tails of the ponies, clearly visible at this time of year, reveal that the drifts have taken place. These yearly roundups serve a number of purposes. The animals are given a health check, and any that fail are taken off the open forest to recuperate in enclosed pastureland. Foals are branded to establish ownership, and adults changing hands are rebranded. Tails, clipped in patterns that are distinctive for each of the agisters, indicate the area in which the pony belongs. The clipping also shows that the commoner who owns the animal has paid the dues for releasing it on to the open forest.

Until this year, the verderers' website provided details of the drifts. However, these crucial events they have increasingly become tourist attractions. They hold the thrill of the chase, with a touch of the wild west thrown in for good measure. Sadly, as with the failed red deer rut recently mentioned in G2, spectator pressures have become disruptive. A group of galloping ponies is a danger to be avoided. The memorable holiday photo does not reveal the chaos when the herd splits, nor the problems created for the herders. The sheer number of people around the pounds can panic the animals, making them much more difficult to handle.

The animals themselves are forest workers, but good stock control is essential. Too many ponies and the landscape becomes impoverished. Too little grazing and the animals go hungry. Only by careful management can the balance built up over hundreds of years be sustained. That's why this forest is always a work in progress.

Another skirmish has broken out in the long-running battle between climate scientists and so-called sceptics, and this one is likely to lead to more public confusion

Another skirmish has broken out in the long-running battle between climate scientists and so-called sceptics, with the hacking of email messages between some of the world's leading researchers on global temperature trends. But as usually happens in the blogosphere, this episode is generating more heat than light and is likely to lead to more public confusion over the causes of climate change.

For the past few years, a small group of climate change 'sceptics' have been poring over scientific journal papers that report historical trends in temperatures from around the world, as recorded by directly by thermometers and other instruments, and by 'proxies', such as tree rings. Their primary objective has been to seek out evidence that global warming has been invented by climate researchers who fake their data.

Among their main targets have been papers published by research teams led by Michael Mann at Pennsylvania State University and Phil Jones at the University of East Anglia, and particularly those featuring the famous 'hockey stick' graph, showing that average temperature in the northern hemisphere was relatively stable and constant for most of the last couple of millennia, but rose dramatically upwards in the last 100 years. This graph appeared prominently in the landmark Third Assessment Report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2001, which concluded that "most of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations".

The attacks on the hockey stick graph led the United States National Academy of Sciences to carry out an investigation, concluding in 2006 that although there had been no improper conduct by the researchers, they may have expressed higher levels of confidence in their main conclusions than was warranted by the evidence.

The 'sceptics' believe they have been vindicated and have presented the hockey stick graph as proof that global warming is not occurring. In doing so, they have ignored the academy's other conclusion that "surface temperature reconstructions for periods prior to the industrial era are only one of multiple lines of evidence supporting the conclusion that climatic warming is occurring in response to human activities, and they are not the primary evidence".

More importantly, these skeptics have not overturned the well-established basic physics of the greenhouse effect, namely that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas and increasing its concentration in the atmosphere causes the earth to warm. They also have not managed to make melting glaciers and rising sea levels, or any other evidence of warming, disappear into thin air. But they have managed to confuse some of the public about the causes of climate change.

Over the past five years, Mann and Jones in particular have been subjected not only to legitimate scrutiny by other researchers, but also to a co-ordinated campaign of personal attacks on their reputation by 'sceptics'. If the hacked e-mails are genuine, they only show that climate researchers are human, and that they speak badly in private about 'sceptics' who accuse them of fraud.

It is inevitable as we approach the crucial meeting in conference in Copenhagen in December that the sceptics would try some stunt to try to undermine a global agreement on climate change. There is no smoking gun, but just a lot of smoke without fire.

• Bob Ward is Policy and Communications Director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics and Political Science

Four bridges collapse, main roads are blocked and hundreds are evacuated as 12 inches of rain falls in Cumbria in 24 hours

A policeman swept away and killed during the devastating flooding that hit north-west England was trying to save lives by directing motorists off a bridge across a swollen river.

PC Bill Barker, who would have been 45tomorrow , was praised by Gordon Brown as a "very heroic, very brave man" who had given his life saving others after Cumbria was struck by what the Environment Agency described as "unprecedented" rainfall.

Severe flooding in the county was driven by a combination of heavy rain, saturated ground and swollen rivers.

Hundreds were evacuated from their homes, four bridges collapsed and main roads were blocked after 314mm (12.4in) of rain fell in 24 hours – a record for England.

Flooding was also reported in north-west Wales and Dumfries and Galloway in Scotland.

However, Cumbria was hardest hit, with an estimated 1,100 homes there affected by flooding, according to police.

Workington MP Tony Cunningham said the flood was "of biblical proportions" and he was astonished by the destruction of the Northside bridge, which led to PC Barker's death.

"The force of the river was absolutely incredible. This is a stone bridge. To wash away a bridge of that size and dimension is incredible."

Fifty people were evacuated by RAF helicopters from Cockermouth, where the river Cocker joins the Derwent, after flooding cut off the town centre.

Police said PC Barker, a father of four, had gone out on foot to direct motorists off the Northside bridge, which crosses the Derwent in Workington, when it gave way and swept him into the water at 4.40am .

Jerry Graham, the assistant chief constable of Cumbria said: "Members of the public were trying to cross the bridge, it was obvious they were going to put themselves in danger. So PC Barker went out on to the bridge on foot to try and protect them. Unfortunately when they were on the bridge, it gave way just due to the volume of water and PC Barker went into the water and was swept away."

One local resident claimed PC Barker had gone to the aid of a driver who had got stuck on the stone bridge as it collapsed, but this was not confirmed by police.

Robin Taylor, 50, a maintenance engineer from Workington, said: "I was told the police officer had responded to an emergency call and gone to the bridge to help a car that had become stuck and, as he was leading them away, the pavement side of the bridge collapsed first and he was gone. It is really sad, I thought it was absolutely shocking."

The policeman's body, still in uniform, was found washed up on a beach . His widow, Hazel, described him as her best friend and an "amazing dad". She said: "I have the comfort of knowing that Bill died doing the job he loved, and the fact that he was helping others is just typical Bill."

Evacuated residents spent last night in emergency reception centres across Cumbria. Red Cross worker Ian Rideout said many of those rescued in Cockermouth were suffering from shock.

He said: "The centre of Cockermouth looks like it has been completely destroyed – I've never seen anything like it. The water has caused so much damage that many of the homes here are completely ruined.

"We've been working non-stop and between the Red Cross and RNLI we've rescued in the region of 200 people from their homes. Last night, I went up in one of the helicopters to get an idea of the full scale of the disaster and where we should focus rescue efforts. Almost straight away we found four people on the roof of their home who needed to be winched to safety.

"Most of the people we've rescued have been in shock. One minute it's raining heavily, then the next their home is filling with water and they're being evacuated by the Red Cross."

Water was feared to have seeped into the cellar at Wordsworth House in Cockermouth, the poet's birthplace, potentially damaging valuable archives.

The death of PC Barker highlighted the dangers for rescue workers. RNLI lifeboat operations manager, Brian Ashbridge, said a "massive current" sweeping down the Derwent made conditions challenging for crews searching the river basin.

"It's absolutely horrendous. There is a huge amount of debris around in the water at the moment as well, which adds to the difficulties."

The environment secretary, Hilary Benn, who was in Cockermouth to assess the flooding, said defences built after the 2005 floods that were designed to withstand a "one-in-100-years flood" were unable to cope with the volume of water.

Benn said: "What we dealt with last night was probably more like one-in-1,000 so even the very best defences, if you have such quantities of rain in such a short space of time, can be overtopped."

Last night, flood levels were dropping by around two inches an hour as police officers continued searching for any trapped residents. Many bridges were still under extreme pressure from fast-flowing flood waters and were being monitored.

The Association for British Insurers was reported as saying that early estimates suggested there would be between 500 and 1,000 claims, resulting in payouts of between £50m and £100m.

The heavy rainfall was caused by a slow-moving front of air which rolled in from the Atlantic, according to the Met Office.

A spokesman said: "It was warm air coming from the Azores, so being warm it had the potential to hold a lot of water. When it hit land it was forced to rise and then cool, to produce the heavy rain."

Experts warned of a funding shortfall that could thwart official plans to prevent future floods. Nick Reeves, executive director of the Chartered Institution of Water and Environmental Management, said he welcomed the flood and water management bill, announced in the Queen's speech on Wednesday, which gives local authorities responsibility for surface water flooding for the first time and puts the Environment Agency in overall charge of flooding. But he expressed concern that most local authorities still lacked resources.

• Breadmaker to stop Canadian imports in the new year
• Move welcomed by National Farmers' Union

Britain's farmers were given a boost today when bread maker Hovis announced that it plans to use only British wheat across its entire range.

The switch is due to take place early next year. At present, the brand is using between 25% and 50% British wheat, with the remainder imported from Canada.

However, as trials of growing a strain of Canadian red wheat in Britain over the past five years have proved successful, it is able to move to sourcing wheat from local farmers – with an extra 600 farmers now growing wheat for Hovis loaves.

In total, about one in eight wheat fields across Britain is being used to grow this wheat, in preparation for the switchover.

Jon Goldstone, marketing director at Hovis, said: "We used to import £18m worth of Canadian wheat, £18m which will now go to British farmers; this is a significant amount of cash."

Peter Kendall, president of the National Farmers' Union, welcomed the move. "This shows real commitment to UK farming, and its skill, professionalism and reliability, by a well known and respected UK company," he said.

Other big brands such as Warburtons and Kingsmill continue to import wheat from countries including Australia and Canada. However, Warburtons announced today that it is launching a loaf using 100% British wheat which will be available from March.

It is not only bakers that are focusing on local produce. Chef Gary Rhodes and caterer Compass Group launched a "Truly British" and "truly local" campaign in October to encourage the use of locally sourced produce.

Rhodes said: "For too long there have been a number of misleading claims in the marketplace around British and local sourcing. In some cases, companies have claimed they source locally when in fact they source from a local wholesaler and there are no guarantees that the products are genuinely British or local.

"I support Compass's Truly British and truly local criteria because it is all about local provenance and traceability.

"Britain has a wonderful variety of produce, much of which has strong regional characteristics. "

"Truly British" status is awarded to products that can be traced to a British source. "Truly local' applies to products from small, local companies that are made from local ingredients and are supplied to a Compass site within a 50-mile radius. Where a product is made by a local company but does not contain local or British ingredients, then it will be referred to as "locally produced".

The twin rivers that bring thousands of tourists to Cockermouth turned on the town after the heaviest rainfall ever recorded in Britain, driving 250 people out of their homes.

Torrents flung cars across the picturesque centre, sweeping through Wordsworth's birthplace and ransacking one of the largest concentrations of small, independent shops in the north.

"See that oven," said Keith Fair, who opened an upmarket kitchen shop in Market Square two years ago. "That was in the window last night. Now it's on its side, halfway out of the back door."

"We were lucky – sort of," says his fitter Jim Woodford, a burly six-footer who had to cling to railings before flinging himself on the rescue boat. He points at the broken roof of a four-storey Georgian building. "The RAF's Sea King was up there this morning, winching out a group of people in their 70s and 80s."

Like many in Cockermouth, the pensioners had refused to believe that their cosy homes, painted in seaside pastel and newly strung with Christmas lights, might be death traps if water inundated the ground floors. The town has had three floods in the last 10 years and hosted an Environment Agency forum on six defence options only last month.

"But there's been nothing remotely like this," said Jeremy Petman, head brewer at Jennings, whose riverside malt store was awash with two waterlogged skips of spent hops. "This was a different scale. There'll be no brewing now for a long time."

Evacuee Lilian Lister agreed, adding in her wartime experiences in Cumbria's blitz for good measure. Now 91, she said that residents in her sheltered housing gradually realised that dry floors upstairs weren't enough. "We'd no power, no heat and no way of getting out for food," she said.

Like the rooftop group in Market Square, she and her neighbours were evacuated as Land Rovers from 42nd Brigade drove into the town to help four inshore lifeboats and a civilian army of volunteers. The jeeps added to the clatter of the Sea King and chainsaws deployed to deal with a small forest of uprooted trees; the most spectacular being stuck like a spear through the iron railings of Main Street bridge, rearing up almost vertically with its roots in the water and the trunk jammed against the 19th-century stone. Another was impaled in a circle of seats in Market Place and the town's Christmas tree, put up only last week, leaned against the statue of Richard, sixth Earl of Mayo.

"If the statue had gone, we'd really have felt that was it for Cockermouth," said June Priestley, drying out in the Bitter End, Cockermouth's other brewery, a micro attached to a pub on high ground. The landlady, Susan Askey, said: "We're safe here but that doesn't spare us from what's happened. I've spent the morning trying to track down what's happened to an elderly relative. Thank goodness I've just discovered where they've taken him, and he's safe."

Other families took hundreds of phone calls from anxious friends and family further away, with all roads cut at one stage except the narrow Whinlatter Pass from Keswick. The main A66 route was blocked by a new, third lake between Derwentwater and Bassenthwaite, whose temporary shores were lined with abandoned cars.

At the high school, on Cockermouth's highest ground, nurse Gill Aitchison was among scores of volunteers looking after other elderly victims, some of them groggy after a night on mattresses in the commandeered hall. A man sat in tears after returning briefly to collect clothes from his mud-plastered flat.

As the rivers slowly withdrew to their debris-littered courses, other volunteers started a huge clean-up with everything from mops to a farm slurry spreader. Hauled in by a tractor, the machine's heavy-duty pump sucked a swimming pool's worth of water from the cellars of Jan Mansergh's lingerie shop.

"My family are farmers," she said, "and as soon as they saw what was happening, they were on the phone offering help." The alley off Main Street filled with the stink of sewage.

"That's the river water," Mansergh said. "Don't ask what's in it, but everything in Cockermouth is going to need cleaning again and again."

Hundreds of emails and documents exchanged between world's leading climate scientists stolen by hackers and leaked online

Hundreds of private emails and documents allegedly exchanged between some of the world's leading climate scientists during the past 13 years have been stolen by hackers and leaked online, it emerged today.

The computer files were apparently accessed earlier this week from servers at the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit, a world-renowned centre focused on the study of natural and anthropogenic climate change.

Climate change sceptics who have studied the emails allege they provide "smoking gun" evidence that some of the climatologists colluded in manipulating data to support the widely held view that climate change is real, and is being largely caused by the actions of mankind.

The veracity of the emails has not been confirmed and the scientists involved have declined to comment on the story, which broke on a blog called The Air Vent.

The files, which in total amount to 160MbB of data, were first uploaded on to a Russian server, before being widely mirrored across the internet. The emails were accompanied by the anonymous statement: "We feel that climate science is, in the current situation, too important to be kept under wraps. We hereby release a random selection of correspondence, code and documents. Hopefully it will give some insight into the science and the people behind it."

A spokesperson for the University of East Anglia said: "We are aware that information from a server used for research information in one area of the university has been made available on public websites. Because of the volume of this information we cannot currently confirm that all this material is genuine. This information has been obtained and published without our permission and we took immediate action to remove the server in question from operation. We are undertaking a thorough internal investigation and have involved the police in this inquiry."

In one email, dated November 1999, one scientist wrote: "I've just completed Mike's Nature [the science journal] trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie, from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline."

This sentence, in particular, has been leapt upon by sceptics as evidence of manipulating data, but the credibility of the email has not been verified. The scientists who allegedly sent it declined to comment on the email.

"It does look incriminating on the surface, but there are lots of single sentences that taken out of context can appear incriminating," said Bob Ward, director of policy and communications at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics. "You can't tell what they are talking about. Scientists say 'trick' not just to mean deception. They mean it as a clever way of doing something - a short cut can be a trick."

In another alleged email, one of the scientists apparently refers to the death of a prominent climate change sceptic by saying "in an odd way this is cheering news".

Ward said that if the emails are correct, they "might highlight behaviour that those individuals might not like to have made public." But he added, "Let's separate out [the climate scientists] reacting badly to the personal attacks [from sceptics] to the idea that their work has been carried out in an inappropriate way."

The revelations did not alter the huge body of evidence from a variety of scientific fields that supports the conclusion that modern climate change is caused largely by human activity, Ward said. The emails refer largely to work on so-called paleoclimate data - reconstructing past climate scenarios using data such as ice cores and tree rings. "Climate change is based on several lines of evidence, not just paleoclimate data," he said. "At the heart of this is basic physics."

Ward pointed out that the individuals named in the alleged emails had numerous publications in peer-reviewed scientific journals. "It would be very surprising if after all this time, suddenly they were found out doing something as wrong as that."

Professor Michael Mann, director of Pennsylvania State University's Earth System Science Centre and a regular contributor to the popular climate science blog Real Climate, features in many of the email exchanges. He said: "I'm not going to comment on the content of illegally obtained emails. However, I will say this: both their theft and, I believe, any reproduction of the emails that were obtained on public websites, etc, constitutes serious criminal activity. I'm hoping the perpetrators and their facilitators will be tracked down and prosecuted to the fullest extent the law allows."

When the Guardian asked Prof Phil Jones at UEA, who features in the correspondence, to verify whether the emails were genuine, he refused to comment.

The alleged emails illustrate the persistent pressure some climatologists have been under from sceptics in recent years. There have been repeated calls, including Freedom of Information requests, for the Climate Research Unit to make public a confidential dataset of land and sea temperature recordings that is "value added" by the unit before being used by the Met Office. The emails show the frustration some climatologists have had at having to operate under such intense, often politically motivated, scrutiny.

Prof Bob Watson, the chief scientific advisor at the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said, "Evidence for climate change is irrefutable. The world's leading scientists overwhelmingly agree what we're experiencing is not down to natural variation."

"With this overwhelming scientific body of evidence failing to take action to tackle climate change would be the wrong thing to do – the impacts here in Britain and across the world will worsen and the economic consequences will be catastrophic."

A spokesman for Greenpeace said: "If you looked through any organisation's emails from the last 10 years you'd find something that would raise a few eyebrows. Contrary to what the sceptics claim, the Royal Society, the US National Academy of Sciences, Nasa and the world's leading atmospheric scientists are not the agents of a clandestine global movement against the truth. This stuff might drive some web traffic, but so does David Icke."

• Missing police officer named as Bill Barker
• Hundreds evacuated as riverbanks burst

A policeman swept away during devastating flooding was trying to save lives by directing motorists off a bridge across a swollen river.

PC Bill Barker, who would have been 45 tomorrow, was praised by the prime minister, Gordon Brown, as a "very heroic, very brave man".

His body, still in uniform, was found on a beach today. The father of four went missing after a bridge in Workington collapsed amid what the local MP described as the kind of flooding seen only "once every 1,000 years".

Barker went missing when Northside bridge, on one of the main routes into Workington, collapsed at about 4.40am.

It is one of two bridges to have collapsed in the town, where conditions are described as "extremely dangerous" after torrential rain caused rivers to burst their banks.

Assistant Chief Constable Jerry Graham said: "He was directing motorists off the bridge, saving lives, when the tragic incident occurred."

Cumbria police Chief Constable Craig Mackey said Barker had served with the force for 25 years and described him as "a wonderful police officer and a real family man".

"Bill is a hero who died saving the lives of others and our thoughts are with his family at this devastating time," said Mackey. "He was a much-loved friend, colleague and an inspiration to everyone he knew – he will be sadly missed."

Barker's wife, Hazel, said he was her "best friend, my forever friend, and an amazing dad".

"I have the comfort of knowing that Bill died doing the job he loved, and the fact that he was helping others is just typical Bill," she said. Brown said: "He was a very heroic, very brave man who will be sorely missed by everybody who was close to him.

"I think we owe him a tremendous debt of gratitude for the service he has shown."

Severe flooding has caused the evacuation of hundreds of people in Cumbria, which saw record levels of rainfall. The Environment Agency's gauging station at Seathwaite Farm recorded 314mm in the 24 hours up to 12.45am – a record for England. More than 200 people were forced to leave their homes in Cockermouth. Twenty-five people were still being winched to safety in the area, where both rivers had burst their banks and were running through the town, Cumbria police said.

Chief Superintendent Steve Johnson said: "We currently have helicopters taking people from Derwent Mills, where we have 25 people between the age of 85 and two years of age who have been sheltering there overnight.

"We still can't get to them through the floodwaters so they are now being rescued making use of helicopters.

"Some of them are infirm, some of them are vulnerable and they need medication and they need help."

The armed forces were called in to help emergency services cope. Police said all but 10 properties in Cockermouth had been searched with no further casualties found. Police and armed forces were trying to reach the remaining buildings.

Residents said they feared more rain tonight would bring renewed flooding.

Alan Smith said: "The thing with the River Cocker is it can fall as quickly as it can rise.

"It's come down four feet from last night but the fells are sodden, and if we get any more rain it will just come straight off and into the river and the level will rise again."

The Environment Agency said Cockermouth and Keswick had been hit the hardest. Its Floodline service has received more than 12,000 calls from members of the public over the last 48 hours and issued more than 43,000 flood alerts via phone, text, email and fax.

"We have seen unprecedented rainfall, with what we believe is a record amount for a 24-hour period in England," said the agency chairman, Lord Smith. "Towns and villages across Cumbria have been evacuated with floodwater driven by heavy rainfall, saturated ground and swollen rivers."

The Workington MP, Tony Cunningham, said the flooding was "of biblical proportions" and on a scale seen "once every 1,000 years".

He told Sky News: "The scale and the force of the devastation in Cockermouth is huge.

"I went down to the bridge last night and I've never seen the river Derwent as wide as it was. The force of the river was absolutely incredible. This is a stone bridge; to wash away a bridge of that size and dimension is incredible."

Emergency 999 calls made from some flood-hit areas were not getting through, the police said. People in Workington, Cleator Moor and Harrington were advised to call 0845 330 0247 to reach all emergency services. Police have opened a casualty bureau to deal with concerned members of the public seeking news of friends and relatives. People are advised to call 0800 056 0944 or 0207 158 0010.

Problem of biodiversity loss has been 'eased off centre stage' by focus on climate change, according to Prof Edward Wilson, the ecologist described as 'Darwin's natural heir'

The diversity of life on Earth is undergoing an "immense and hidden" tragedy that requires the scale of global response now being deployed to tackle climate change, according to one of the world's most eminent biologists.

Prof Edward Wilson, an ecologist who has been described as "Darwin's natural heir" and hailed by novelist Ian McEwan as an "intellectual hero" and "inspirational" writer, told the Guardian that the threat was so grave he is pushing for the creation of an international body of experts modelled on the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The IPCC, which is credited with convincing world leaders that the threat from climate change is real, includes about 2,500 scientific expert reviewers from more than 130 countries and was awarded the Nobel peace prize in 2007 along with Al Gore. Wilson's proposed organisation – which he names the Barometer of Life – would report to governments on the threats posed to species around the world.

Wilson said the problem of biodiversity loss had been "eased off centre stage" because of the focus on climate change.

"We don't hear as much public concern, protestation and plans by political leaders to save the living environment. It doesn't get anything like the attention the physical environment has," he said.

Since the beginning of the last century, 183 species are known to have become extinct, including the Tasmanian tiger, the Caribbean monk seal and the toolache wallaby. But this number is a gross underestimate of the true number of extinctions, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature species programme.

Wilson was speaking ahead of the 150th anniversary of the publication of the Origin of Species on Tuesday. The 80-year-old scientist will deliver a lecture via video link to an audience at London's Royal Institution on Darwin's legacy and "the future of biology".

The extent of scientific ignorance about the diversity of life on Earth is vast. Scientists have catalogued about 1.9 m species, but estimate there are about 20m-30m in total (excluding microbes).

Wilson said the scale of the mass extinction now under way was even harder to comprehend.

At the start of the Neolithic period – about 9500BC – scientists estimate that species were becoming extinct at a rate of 20-30 per year. Since the population explosion of modern humans, that is estimated to have increased to 20,000-30,000. Most have never been documented by scientists. And in a couple of decades, Wilson reckons this will have increased to 200,000-300,000. Wilson's proposed international initiative, which he has developed with Simon Stuart, the chairman of the Species Survival Commission, would document this species loss and work out how to tackle it.

"Darwin would be simply appalled by what humanity had done to the richness and diversity of natural life," said Randal Keynes, one of Darwin's great-great-grandsons, who is helping to coordinate the 150th anniversary with the British Council. "He would be in the lead of campaigning on the preservation of biodiversity."

Some of the species that played a central role in the formulation of Darwin's theoryof evolution by natural selection are now either extinct or severely threatened. The Floreana mockingbird, that lives on the island of the same name in the Galapagos, was one of a handful of related species that first gave Darwin the idea that species could change (it is a myth that finches were the crucial group).

Reflecting on the similarities and differences between mockingbirds on different islands and on the mainland, Darwin gave the first vague hint of his later theory in his notes on the Beagle voyage that "such facts would undermine the stability of species".

Today, the Floreana mockingbird is classed as "critically endangered" and exists in two populations numbering 200 and 49. The giant tortoise that Darwin encountered on the same island – Geochelone elephantopus – was driven extinct by hungry whalers who enjoyed eating its meat in soup.

Wilson said conservation efforts around the world were far from adequate. "Right now we are just piddling around with efforts here and there, some of them strong and dedicated, the aggregate of which is not even close to what we need.""The benefits for humanity [of a concerted international effort on biodiversity] would be enormous ... the discovery of the rest of life on Earth and fuller evaluation of it is going to result in all sorts of very valuable knowledge," said Wilson, pointing at new crops, products and biotechnology advances.

A year of celebration of Darwin's achievements (and his 200th birthday) is drawing to a close and will segue neatly into the International Year of Biodiversity in 2010.

"The public recognition of the importance of biodiversity as an issue is very poor, very low," said Kenyes, "I think Darwin would want everyone to pick up that agenda and give it all the support they can."

Roger Helmer says Anglican hierarchy has dropped the gospel in favour of 'the new religion of climate alarmism'

A Tory MEP has accused the Church of England of having "abandoned religious faith entirely and taken up the new religion of climate alarmism instead".

Roger Helmer, who resigned from the Tory frontbench in Europe when the Westminster leadership dumped its promised referendum on the Lisbon treaty, used a magazine article to urge the Church to "get back to the gospel".

Referring approvingly to the work of another writer who said bishops were spending more time "preaching climate change than the gospel of salvation", Helmer wrote: "The recent multi-faith conference at Windsor suggests that other world religions are taking the same line on climate change. This is particularly ironic at a time when the world is cooling and when more and more scientists around the world are breaking cover to challenge the theory of man-made global warming. Perhaps world religions should have more faith in God, and less in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change."

The Bishop of Leicester, Tim Stevens, said Helmer had not aired these views when he debated climate change in Leicester cathedral and asked whether "this was merely courtesy, or was it because the opportunity for a platform meant more to him than exposing his views to scrutiny or challenge from a live audience".

Helmer is one of a growing band of European politicians threatening to cause trouble for the Tory frontbench in the first few months of any government it may form. He and his eurosceptic colleagues insist they will not drop their campaign for a referendum on Lisbon.

Analysis by the leftwing website Next Left has shown that the top 10 Tory bloggers are climate change sceptics. This week Helmer convened a conference of climate change deniers at the European parliament. Speakers included Ross McKitrick, a Canadian professor who has said data indicating global warming has been fiddled; Tom Segalstad, a Norwegian geologist who says human-released CO2 would not have a large effect on the climate; Fred Goldberg, co-author of the polemic The Global Warming Scam; Hans Labohm, a Dutch professor who challenges the existence of global warming; and Professor Fred Singer, who wrote the documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle.

High-octane drama of polar bears tumbling to a bloody death may leave viewers feeling manipulated by propaganda

The high-pitched whine of a low-flying jet engine fills the air as the camera tracks across images of shimmering glass buildings, the Towers of Mammon in an unidentified urban CBD. No, this is not the opening credits of The Apprentice, and dropping out of the sky is not UK Business Czar "Sralan" Sugar in his helicopter, but huge, hairy half-tonne polar bears. Their falls are (presumably deliberately) reminiscent of jumpers from the 911 towers and with visceral violence the poor ursine beasts crash cruelly into the concrete and tarmac with sickening thuds.

The effect is shocking; the message brutal: every short haul flight you take emits four hundred kilogrammes of carbon dioxide – the equivalent weight of an adult polar bear.

This is the new promotional film from anti-aviation expansion campaigners Plane Stupid. It's the latest in a series of climate change "shock ads" ranging from Greenpeace's now slightly dated Friday the 13th in which a hijacked plane is flown into Sizewell nuclear power station while a family playing on the beach stands agog, to the government's own recent Bedtime Stories short that ran as part of the wider, ongoing ACT on CO2 campaign.

We expect Greenpeace and Plane Stupid to be a bit more challenging in their approach, but in Bedtime Stories, as my colleague Henry put it rather eloquently it's as if the "green police" are climbing into bed with your children and telling them that, unless daddy turns the TV off standby, Mr Snuggles the dog sleeps with the fishes. Stop climate change or the puppy gets it is not exactly the best motivational message ever.

And this inevitably begs the question do these shock tactics actually work to shift the public's attitudes and behaviours? Conventional psychological theory suggests that shock ads used to work because their message wormed its way so deeply into our consciousness that we're eventually compelled to act on it. However we swiftly become desensitized and I'm pretty sure everyone is aware of the over-hyped plight of the plucky polar bear in the context of climate change and the role of flying in fuelling the phenomenon.

But maybe the ad works by ramming home this link between high-carbon short haul flights and the fate of the Arctic? Certainly it's controversial imagery will garner press interest, after all I'm writing this analytical blog for starters, and for campaigning organisations with limited budgets and only one bite at the media cherry this is crucial. However I'm still not sure it will change behaviour, the danger is that by pumping up the high octane drama of an ad, you increase the risk of viewers feeling manipulated and dismissing it as pure propaganda. Or lapsing into highly questionable failures of tact and taste in pursuit of 'edginess'.

Far more effective I believe are the Airplot campaign by Greenpeace, led by the positive, party-style property-buying intervention in Sipson or the Trains vs Planes virals from the Campaign for Better Transport.

Shock ads work best when the consequences of the behaviour we wish to change are immediate, tangible and personal such as using a condom to prevent STDs or not drink driving. They are less effective when the "costs" are long term, uncertain and shared such as with passive smoking or climate change. This is why health campaigns like Change4life on obesity have concentrated on helping people do something positive rather than dwelling on the negative outcomes of inaction.

As climate evidence mounts up and the likelihood of anything meaningful coming out of the formerly crucial Copenhagen negotiations in December diminishes with every passing day the temptation to become shriller, angrier and more shocking in climate campaigning communications will only grow. The risk is that this will simply step up the vilification of public behaviour, leading to people increasingly ignoring the very real threat of climate change and their responsibility in driving it. Now that really would be shocking.

• Ed Gillespie is co-director of sustainable communications agency Futerra.

Bloody deaths of CGI polar bears in Plane Stupid ad designed to highlight carbon impact of air travel

Airline pollution activists Plane Stupid are on a collision course with the advertising regulator after launching a graphic cinema campaign that sees CGI polar bears falling to bloody deaths to highlight the impact of carbon emissions.

Plane Stupid's ad, which breaks in cinemas and online today, features dozens of animated polar bears falling from the sky onto a city centre, bouncing off skyscrapers and landing in the street and on the roof of a car, accompanied by blood-spurting special effects.

The only sound, apart from the bone-crunching thump of the impacts, is the steadily increasing whine of a jet airliner's engines.

Plane Stupid's campaign, developed by the ad agency Mother, aims to show the impact that global warming is having on polar ice caps.

The group is aiming to point out that even short flights to the continent have a major impact on carbon emissions. Plane Stupid said that the ad was inspired by the fact that an average European flight produces 400kg of carbon, which it claims is the same weight as an average female polar bear.

"We wanted to confront people with the impact that short-haul flights have on the climate," said Robert Saville, a director at Mother. "We used polar bears because they are a well understood symbol of the effect that climate change is having on the natural world."

The polar bears were created by special effects company MPC using its proprietary fur software, "Furtility", to look as realistic as possible.

The ad breaks across UK cinemas today, through the film media company DCM. It will only show in movies with a 15 certificate or above.

• To contact the MediaGuardian news desk email editor@mediaguardian.co.uk or phone 020 3353 3857. For all other inquiries please call the main Guardian switchboard on 020 3353 2000.
• If you are writing a comment for publication, please mark clearly "for publication".

Winning entries of a photographic competition celebrating the birth of Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution

Is there such a thing as a fair trade Christmas tree, and should I be worried about 'unethical' trees?

Is there such a thing as a fair trade Christmas tree, and should I be worried about "unethical" trees?

Tanni Foster, by email

You can tell Christmas is almost upon us because the annual debate about the merits, or otherwise, of getting a Christmas trees has already begun in earnest, as evidenced below.

I won't dwell here on that particular debate because I have discussed the various options a number of times before (in 2008, 2005 and 2004).

But what does interest me is the brand new option of whether buying a fair trade Christmas tree is a sensible thing to do. So thank you to "Iamtheurbanspaceman" and "fairtradefan" for having already kicked the debate off in the comments.

First, I agree with Iamtheurbanspaceman that we need to be careful about remembering to make the distinction between "fair trade" and "Fairtrade". To see the latter on a label (with its telltale familiar mark) implies that the item has the endorsement, in the UK at least, of the Fairtrade Foundation, and, more widely, the Fairtrade Labelling Organisations International. However, "fair trade" is a term that tends to be used far more loosely and doesn't always guarantee the same rigorous standards of certification as demanded by the FLO. It doesn't, therefore, mean that the term is worthless. It just means you might want to ask some more probing questions of the retailer about why a particular product carries the term.

Here's how Traidcraft explains the difference between the two, often interchangeable, term:

"Fairtrade" is an accreditation, labelling system which certifies that products bearing the Fairtrade Mark meet a range of specific criteria. "Fair trade" expresses a rather wider vision of development, covering a much wider range of products than can be certified, and embracing campaigning and awareness raising activity, as well as trading in food products.

I do think it's a bit strong, as Iamtheurbanspaceman states, that any "Scandinavian company claiming to produce 'fair trade' trees is scandalously misusing the term". But I think they are right to question the merits of importing trees from Denmark just so the purchaser can have the warm glow of knowing the trees were "grown from seeds ethically sourced in Georgia".

That's not to disparage the positives of the fair-trade movement in general – I think it often makes perfect sense to buy fairly traded items – but in this particular example it seems to be outweighed by the environmental lunacy of importing whole trees from oversees to stick in our front rooms for two weeks when we could easily source one much more locally.

By all means, let's try to encourage a better deal for the Georgian seed pickers, but why not nurture those seeds into trees here in the UK, as opposed to Denmark?

On 14 November Leo originally wrote:

Yes, it's that time of year again - the time when many of us angst over what type of Christmas tree to buy, or whether we should even buy a tree at all.

Please share here your own thoughts on this prickly issue, either in the comments below or by emailing me. What do you do each year? Have you ever managed to settle on what you would consider to be an "ethical" Christmas tree? Meanwhile, I will head off in search of a fair trade tree.

• Shortage threatens low-carbon targets, argues business group
• Gap comes as demand for scientists and engineers increasing

Britain lacks the skills or training facilities to make the successful transition to a low-carbon economy that its international commitments require, an influential group of businesses and non-governmental organisations warns today.

In a report that will dent Britain's image ahead of the Copenhagen climate conference, the Aldersgate Group says that in spite of the UK's pledge to meet a European Union 2020 target for carbon emissions, the government's skills strategy is inadequate to meet those needs.

The report, Mind the Gap – skills for the transition to a low carbon economy, says it is now imperative that ambition and delivery are accelerated.

John Edmonds, former TUC chief and Aldersgate Group Project chair for the report said: "The skills gap in the UK economy is well documented, with one in three firms already hampered by a shortage of skilled staff, from those needed to install new technology to scientists and engineers.

"Investment in low-carbon skills is vital if the UK is to build a more resilient and sustainable economy. In the next two years a commitment to green training will accelerate the growth of new jobs and help us out of recession."

The skills shortage comes at a time when demand for engineers for major infrastructure projects is increasing, as Britain attempts to address expansion in offshore and onshore wind, carbon capture and storage, nuclear power, flood defences, high-speed rail and upgrading the water infrastructure, the report says. "Many of the required skills identified in the report are not unique to a low-carbon economy – it is a shortage of precisely these skills that has held back the UK economy for decades. In this respect, reskilling for a low-carbon economy involves a policy of no regrets. The UK needs to fix these skill shortage problems in order to prosper in the modern world," Edmonds added.

The report says that the most significant driver for low-carbon skills is a robust industrial policy that encourages investment in low-carbon technology and resource efficiency.

Germany has shown how an active industrial and skills policy can help stimulate widespread economic growth and job creation. Responsibility for progress must be shared between government, businesses, trade unions, professional bodies and the workforce, it adds.

Germany, in the decade since it launched its "feed-in tariff" policy for boosting the take-up of renewable energy technology – has created at least 250,000 jobs in the sector – more than 10 times as many as exist in Britain.

Peter Young, chairman of the Aldersgate Group, said: "This report shows that our training institutions must be able to look beyond our current industrial and business structures and plan for the skill requirements of the future. Most of our recommendations are aimed at government because business members said they needed certainty from government if they are to invest."

In the first of our new 'Friday debate' blogposts, Lia Leendertz puts the case for human waste as the missing ingredient in our compost heaps

A compost toilet. Photograph: 4RB/Flickr/Some rights reserved

Following the success of our controversial blogpost of last Friday, here at the Guardian gardening blog we've decided to introduce a weekly 'Friday debate' slot. the idea's simple: someone gets the chance to sound off about a horticultural bete noir or bugbear, and everyone else can chime in with their view. I'm kicking things off with this post about human waste. Have a read then be sure to leave your thoughts in the comments below.

There has been a lot of talk on this blog and elsewhere recently about the merits of urine. Wee in a bale, says The National Trust, and many people agree that this is a Good Thing. Urine is acceptable, all of a sudden. It is having a cuddly moment and (nearly) everybody wants to make better use of it. But in all the talk that ensued, there was one very obvious thing that got barely a mention. What is that big, smelly elephant in the room? It's poo.

Poo is something few of us would ever consider using in the garden. It's disgusting, disease ridden and we just have to get rid of it, as quickly as possible. Wee may be enjoying its moment in the sun, as it were, but poo is beyond the pale. But should it be?

I have just finished reading the brilliant Humanure Handbook and I have been radicalised. I picked this book up in my local garden centre thinking it would be interesting, but wouldn't really affect me, personally. In fact it has rocked my world.

Author Joseph Jenkins's central point is this: poo is a resource, and we should make use of it. He points out that we create nutrients to grow our food, we then eat the food, we defecate, and then throw our excrement "away", creating waste and pollution problems that we then have to go to extreme lengths to clear up. The circle is broken, the nutrients are lost. He proposes that we close the circle and stop thinking of poo as waste, instead composting it and utilising all that goodness.

When I started reading I immediately thought of all sorts of caveats that would make this possible: you would need to do it on a large scale, of course, in a specially constructed composting toilet, outdoors, and you wouldn't use the compost for food crops. In other words, it doesn't really apply to me. But that's not what Jenkins has in mind. What he outlines is a small-scale operation that anyone could carry out with almost no investment. You poo into a sort of deluxe bucket, in the comfort of your own home. You cover this with a cover material (such as sawdust) which prevents odour (he swears it prevents odour). When the bucket is full, you take it out to the compost heap and throw it on, before covering it with more cover material. You add all of your kitchen scraps, weeds, bits of twig and whatever else you usually compost. The use of such a nitrogen-rich material as human manure creates the ideal conditions for thermophilic bacteria to thrive, which heat up and sanitise the compost so that it can, after aging, be used on any and every crop. He has done it himself for 25 years, and has done exhaustive tests and research, all outlined in great detail in the book, that prove that his compost and the food he produces with it have no trace of disease-carrying organisms.

It's a wonderful, thorough, thought-provoking book that I cannot recommend highly enough and this is the sort of gardening technique that appeals to me hugely, in that it's simple, anyone can do it, but its reach is huge and it could just have the potential to save the world. No wasting of water, no smell, no pollution, no disease problems, and plentiful nutrients and organic matter to apply to your garden. There is really no reason not to do it. But the big question is: would you?

If you'd like to contribute a Friday debate, please email gardening editor Jane Perrone with details of who you are and what you'd like to write about.

From howler monkeys to Siamese crocodiles – this week's best images from the natural world

Technique developed by the Romans has potential to give up to 3 million people access to clean water in the drylands of Africa, says winner

An ancient water-saving technique thousands of years old that could save millions of people from drought last night won the ringing endorsement of an audience at the Geographical Society in London.

Sand dams, which are constructed out of concrete barriers 1-5m high and backfilled with sand, were voted as the best idea from five different proposals. Each idea had a champion who argued how they would use the virtual prize of $1bn at the Earthwatch debate entitled From tsunami to drought to solve the world's water crisis.

When seasonal rains fall, water collects behind the dam. The sand acts like a sponge and filters the water and slows evaporation. Clean water can be drawn for up to several months after the rains have fallen through pipes underneath the dams or by digging a hole in the sand.

Simon Maddrell, the executive director of Excellent Development, won the prize after pitching his idea to three experts - John Burton from the World Land Trust, Mark Shearer from Project Dirt, and Rick Bauer, a water expert from Oxfam - who quizzed each of the presenters in a "Dragons' Den" style panel.

Maddrell said that the technique was developed by the Romans in 400BC but was proving very effective today. The charity has built 250 sand dams in Africa already, providing water for 250,000 people. Maddrell said the sand dams had the potential to give up to 3 million people access to clean water in the drylands of Africa, and would be of particular benefit to women.

"Women in Africa do most of the farming. Sometimes they have to spend up to 5-6 hours a day just collecting water. Sand dams near to their village would reduce this to an hour a day. They are quite simply a miracle."

Other ideas competing for the notional prize were a Global Water Partnership Fund to measure and monitor water use around the world presented by Tom Le Quesne from WWF-UK; a demonstration project to build a waterway between Milton Keynes and Bedford presented by Professor Paul Leonard; a technical strategy presented by Professor Howard Wheater of Imperial College, and a plan to scrap subsidies to water companies from Robert Pendray, a 20-year-old student at Merton College, Oxford.

The Cumberland News and its sister papers are rising (please forgive pun) to the occasion today in their online reportage of the floods in Cockermouth. Its live webchat service, Cumbria under water, is keeping everyone informed about developments with minute-by-minute updates from readers, police and reporters.

It also provides links to video clips uploaded to Youtube, such as this view of the River Kent at Kendal, another that shows the flooding in Keswick, and the one above that shows the high street in Cockermouth.

Now staff at the CN group's Times & Star are engaged in producing a special edition - having already published and distributed their normal issue - about the floods, though it may take time to get it to readers (three newsagents in Cockermouth were deluged by the floods).

I ought also to mention that The Guardian is running a live blog here.

Cumbrian market towns bear brunt of heavy rain and strong winds sweeping across northern England, north-west Wales and western Scotland

A police officer has been killed in Cumbria after severe flooding caused bridges to collapse and hundreds of homes to be evacuated, as RAF helicopters winch stranded people to safety.

8.25am:
Here are the latest developments:

• Cumbria police say 10 residents are unaccounted for in Cockermouth, and one policeman is missing in Workington after a bridge collapsed in the town.
• A major rescue operation was launched last night to evacuate more than 200 people in Cockermouth in Cumbria.
• The army had been called out to help with door-to-door work in flood-hit areas.
• The severe weather has led to extraordinary scenes in Cumbria and Wales and prompted travel chaos in northern England and Scotland.

8.40am:
A distressing press release has been issued by Cumbria police. It reads:

Unfortunately Cumbria police can confirm that one of our police officers is unaccounted for after a bridge collapsed at Northside in Workington. A search operation is underway and we have assigned a liaison officer to support the family. This is an extremely difficult time for the officer's colleagues, who are still committed to supporting the community and dealing with the flood situation.

It also warns people to stay off bridges:

Members of the public are continuing to be urged not to use bridges as vantage points to view the flood waters. This could be extremely dangerous and the public are advised to stay away from bridges and use caution and common sense.

Two bridges in Workington have collapsed including Navvies footbridge, Southside Road Bridge and Northside Bridge on the A6597.

8.43am:
The Environment Agency currently has six severe flood warnings in place, 25 flood warnings and 51 flood watches in place across the country.

The severe flood warnings are for:

River Kent at Burneside, Bournville, Bridge St, Carling Dale, Ivy Cresent, New Road and St.
River Kent at Burneside, Steeles Row and Carling Steps.
River Greta at Keswick, Crosthwaite and Limepots Road, High Hill and Church Lane Areas.
River Cocker at Cockermouth.
River Eamont at Eamont Bridge, Kemplay Foot, Skirsgill Lane and Southwaite Green Mill.
River Cocker at Southwaite Bridge.

8.47am:
Amateur video shows the scene in Cockermouth last night.

8.50am:
Cumbria police have issued a clarification about the number of people missing.

Ten minutes ago a spokeswoman said 11 people were unaccounted for. But in a new email she said:

Police can confirm that Emergency services are looking at 10 properties that we have not been able to reach in Cockermouth. There is still a search underway for the missing Police Officer that was released earlier.

In a phone call with my colleague Adam Gabbatt a spokesman said that at this stage it was "impossible" to say how many people were unaccounted for.

9.37am:
Four bridges have now collapsed in Cumbria according to PA, as Workington Tony Cunningham said the flood was "of biblical proportions",

Speaking to Sky News he said: "I went down to the bridge last night and I've never seen the River Derwent as wide as it was.

"The force of the river was absolutely incredible. This is a stone bridge, to wash away a bridge of that size and dimension is incredible."

9.46am:
More rain is forecast for north west England on Sunday, according to the Met Office.

9.52am:
The MoD has given more details of the rescue effort. A spokesman said:

The armed forces have been assisting the Cumbrian emergency services through the night in dealing with the severe flooding in and around Cockermouth. Cumbria Police are leading and coordinating the overall rescue effort.

Three RAF search and rescue helicopters from bases at Valley, Leconfield and Boulmer and two RAF mountain rescue teams are assisting at the scene. Two engineering teams are constructing hard-standings to allow forward operating bases for the helicopters.

This morning, personnel from RAF Spadeadam with Land Rovers are providing the police and fire services with additional mobility in the town and Carlisle Castle barracks is being used as a forward base and rest centre for the emergency services.

9.58am:
An extraordinary aerial view has emerged of a destroyed bridge in Cockermouth.

10.00am:
The Environment Agency said its gauging station at Seawaite Farm recorded 314.4mm (12.3 inches) in 24 hours - a record for England.

Environment Agency chairman Lord Smith said: "This is an extremely serious incident - our thoughts are with those people whose homes have been flooded.

"We have seen unprecedented rainfall, with what we believe is a record amount for a 24-hour period in England."

10.07am:
"Steady, steady, you're with the survivor". A radio recording has emerged of an RAF Sea King helicopter rescuing a stranded woman in Cumbria. "She's completely wet" a man is heard to say.

10.24am:
Cumbria Police have opened a new helpline for those concerned about friends and relatives in the county. The numbers are: 0800 0560944 or 0207 1580010.

10.31am:
"Ambleside is flooded" says the maker of this YouTube clip who sounds like he's on helium.

10.40am:
A lifeboat searching for the missing police officer was forced back because of bad weather after three hours this morning, the RNLI told PA.

RNLI lifeboat operations manager Captain Brian Ashbridge said: "There is a massive current coming down through the Derwent so, although the sea isn't very rough, conditions for the RNLI volunteers searching in the river basin have been very challenging.

"It's absolutely horrendous. There is a huge amount of debris around in the water at the moment as well, which adds to the difficulties."

10.44am:
Environment Agency staff are working round the clock. Catherine Ross tweets: "My husband works for the Environment Agency and hasn't been home in 2 days. He & colleagues are working tirelessly to manage floods".

10.55am:
More from the RNLI on the rescue operation for the missing police officer.

Workington RNLI Lifeboat Operations Manager Captain Brian Ashbridge said:

There is a massive current coming down through the Derwent so, although the sea isn't very rough, conditions for the RNLI volunteers searching in the river basin have been very challenging. It's absolutely horrendous. There is a huge amount of debris around in the water at the moment as well, which adds to the difficulties.

In a phone call a spokeswoman revealed that one of the rescue boats was damaged by the debris.

It is about to be relaunched after running repairs, she said.

11.08am:
This clip shows the extent of flooding in Cockermouth yesterday. The comments section includes a remarkable cry of help on behalf of people stranded in a hotel in the town.

It says:

my boyfriend and about 35 others are stranded in the Trout Hotel which is 4ft underwater. they are on the upper levels and need to get out of there ASAP many are soaked and there is no heating or electricity!

11.15am:
Cumbria police are due to give a press conference at lunchtime on the rescue efforts and the search for the missing officer.

11.35am:
The Environment Agency is urging people to check its free phone flood warning service on 08459 881188. If you're looking for information on Cockermouth this is what you eventually get after a number of keypad prompts.

11.42am:
Rescue hovercrafts are on their way to Cumbria from Gloucestershire.

Chief Fire Officer of Gloucestershire Fire & Rescue Service, Terry Standing, said: "I spoke to the Cumbria Chief Fire Officer and he felt that hovercraft assistance would be of tremendous value in helping with the serious flooding that has hit Kendal and Cockermouth."

11.49am:
A new Guardian video shows more flooding scenes from Cumbria.

11.52am:
Gordon Brown has spoken to the chief constable of Cumbria to offer support. He said:

Our thoughts are with all those who have been impacted by these floods, and our thanks go out to all the emergency services [and all other agencies involved in the response] who continue in their extraordinary efforts to help the people affected.

11.54am:
More than 1,600 homes in the north Lakes area are without power, a spokeswoman for United Utilities told BBC radio Cumbria.

11.59am:
The Guardian's Northern editor Martin Wainwright is on the A66 on his way to Cockermouth. He says the town is famous for its independent shops which are likely to have been hit hard by the floods.

Some help is at hand. The Federation of Small Businesses (FSB) has opened its £500,000 Disaster Recovery Fund to members which have been adversely affected the flooding.

12.03pm:
A Sky News reporter in Workington reports local concerns that a railway bridge across the Derwent could be swept away at high tide at 2pm. The bridge has been seen creaking. The missing police officer was standing on a road bridge in the town before he was swept away when it collapsed.

12.10pm:
The Cumberland News and Star is running a live webchat to keep its readers informed, much to the approval of local press champion Roy Greenslade.

12.17pm:
A Facebook group called Cumbrian Floods 2009 has been set up. One recent updates says the banks of Derwent have burst again.

12.22pm:
Hill farmers in Cumbria are battling to move stock to higher ground, Farmers Weekly reports.

Dead sheep and cattle have already been spotted close to Cockermouth, one of the areas worst-hit by the River Derwent overflowing, it adds.

Sheep farmer Andrew Nicholson said he had never witnessed anything like it:

I have a bunch of cattle about a mile away from home but because the bridge has gone I've had to travel eight miles to feed them today - and that's going to be how it is all through the winter until the bridge is repaired.

12.31pm:
The Guardian's northern editor Martin Wainwright is struggling to reach Cockermouth, he has just described to me his epic journey across the fells.

It's like driving up a waterfall he says as new lakes are emerging in in the Lake District.

12.37pm:
The missing police man has been named as PC Bill Barker.

Assistant Chief Constable Jerry Graham said:

I'm devastated by the events of the last few days and particularly the news this morning that one of our officers is unaccounted for following the collapse of a bridge at Northside in Workington. However, I am so proud of the way our communities and the emergency services are working together in the face of this crisis.

The officer who is unaccounted for is PC Bill Barker, who has served the communities of Cumbria with the Constabulary for 25 years. He was directing motorists off the bridge, saving lives, when the tragic incident occurred. He is a valued colleague and friend of many officers and staff within the Constabulary - and to those in West Cumbria where he lives and serves.

A full and thorough search is underway and we are not losing hope of finding him. We have a dedicated officer who is supporting the family during this distressing time.

This is an extremely difficult time for everyone involved in the rescue operation and all officers and staff continue to work valiently to ensure the public remains safe.

12.47pm:
The next high tide in Workington is at 1.17pm according to Tide Times.

1.12pm:
Sad news emerging from Cumbria ... a body has been found.

A Cumbria police spokeswoman said:

Police can confirm that the body of man has been found on a beach in west Cumbria. It is reported that the man is wearing police uniform and officers are at the scene. Formal identification has not been confirmed.

1.27pm:
Martin Wainwright has now reached Cockermouth and has caught up with resident Teresa Halder.

"It just came up so fast... it was just horrendous," she says. "The heart of the town has been taken out. Lots of individual businesses are going to go to the wall because of this."

1.40pm:
Keith Fairs, a shopkeeper from Cockermouth, describes the damage to his kitchenware showroom and how he had to be rescued through a skylight.

1.49pm:
Bill Barker the policeman now feared dead was a family liaison officer trained to deal with disasters and comfort families, Cumbria police revealed.

The Northside Bridge on which Barker was standing was swept away at 4.40am.

Assistant Chief Constable Jerry Graham told a news conference:

Members of the public were trying to cross the bridge, it was obvious they were going to put themselves in danger.

So Pc Barker went out on to the bridge on foot to try and protect them. Unfortunately when they were on the bridge, the bridge gave way just due to the volume of water and Pc Barker went into the water and was swept away."

I'm very sad to have to report we've recovered a body on the beach of an individual. That has not been identified. Our thoughts go out to Pc Barker and his family.

"I've heard nothing but good reports about him today. He was a family man with four children.

2.01pm:

Martin Wainwright describes the damage to Jennings brewery in Cockermouth. "We won't be brewing for a long time," the head brewer told him.

Around the corner there's the "spooky sight" of a tree speared vertically into a bridge.

2.32pm:
Rescue workers for both the RNLI and the Red Cross describe the floods as the worst they have ever seen in Britain.

2.39pm:
The Cumberland News and Star has a lists the travel disruption.

These are just the roads:

A66 Keswick closed both ways between A591 and A595
A596 Workington Bridge Workington closed both ways between Calva Brow and B5296 Harrington Road
A597 New Bridge Road Northside Bridge Workington closed both ways
A594 Cockermouth closed both ways between A595 and A596
A591 problems around Low Wood, Ambleside
Southwaite Bridge Road Cockermouth closed both ways at Southwaite Mill
B5292 Lorton Street Lorton Bridge Cockermouth closed both ways between Station Road and Lorton Road closed
High Cross Broughton in Furness closed both ways at Broughton
A591 Troutbeck closed both ways at White Cross Bay
A593 Coniston closed both ways between B5285 Hawkshead Old Road and A5095 Borrans Road
A595 Holmrook closed both ways at B5344
A591 Kendal Bypass Levens closed both ways between A590 and A6
A592 Newby Bridge closed both ways at A590
A6 Kendal closed both ways between A685 Appleby Road and B6261
A6 Eamont Bridge closed both ways between Skirsgill Lane and B6262
A6 Church Street Milnthorpe closed both ways between B5282 Park Road and Pool Darkin Lane
B5320 Pooley Bridge closed both ways at A592
B5289 Portinscale, Keswick closed both ways between A66 and A5271 High Hill
Hardknott Pass closed both ways due to carriageway repairs.

2.44pm:
More bridges have collapsed according to the latest update on the damage from Cumbria Police.

It says:

• Flooding has left more than 250 people sheltering in rescue centres in Cockermouth and Keswick.
• More than 1,400 homes are also without power.
• The bridge at Braithwaite, Keswick has collapsed with water being diverted by rubble across the A66.
• Camerton bridge at Workington and a small suspension bridge between Pooley Bridge and Dalemain is also down.

3.00pm:
Here's a picture of Jennings brewery mentioned by Martin (at 2.01pm) before the flood. Concern has been expressed about its fate.

The Publican has more on how staff at the brewery were evacuated.

3.13pm:

Richard Moss, the BBC's political editor for Cumbria and the north east, blogs on the deluge in his home town.

Even as a TV journalist it can still seem surreal to see places you know feature in the national news.I've had that feeling overnight with the floods that have engulfed Cumbria, and Cockermouth in particular.

I lived close to the town for more than 20 years, growing up and going to school there.My parents and my daughter still live nearby.

So to see the town centre turned into a river was both surreal and worrying.

3.18pm:
Up to 20 people are believed to be still trapped in their homes in Cockermouth, The Westmorland Gazette reports.

3.22pm:
The police have now confirmed that the body swept up on a beach was that of Pc Bill Barker.

3.37pm:
Martin Wainwright has made it to a school which is being used as the evacuation centre in Cockermouth. He puts me on to Lillian Lister, a sheltered housing resident in her 90s who was evacuated this morning

"It was like wartime again. We're alright it's just upsetting when you're getting old," she says. (Apologies for the garbled end to the audio).

3.47pm:
Gordon Brown has paid tribute to Bill Barker. He described him as a "very heroic, very brave man".

3.56pm:
Cumbria Police chief constable Craig Mackey has paid tribute to his colleague.

He said: "Bill Barker was a hero who died trying to help others.

Barker leaves a wife and four children. He would have celebrated his 45th birthday tomorrow.

Speaking in Nottingham, where the Cabinet was meeting, Gordon Brown said Barker was "a very heroic, very brave man who will be sorely missed by everybody who was close to him. I think we owe him a tremendous debt of gratitude for the service he has shown."

The prime minister added: "This is what we mean by emergency services - they are called upon to act in the most difficult of circumstances and this is a day where we pay tribute to everything that is done by our emergency services."

(That's it for now. Thanks for your comments. There will be more updates soon, including reports from Martin Wainwright and Helen Carter in Cumbria, on our flooding and weather pages.)

Shetland

The gales have died away to a steady wind and at last the rain has stopped. The silvery lines of the drainage channels carry away as much as they can but still there are pools of standing water everywhere. Beyond the sound of the wind is the constant muted roar of a sea no longer wild but still powerful. Unexpectedly, the morning brightens as, to the south, the cloud thins and – from a sky as lovely as a moonstone – a veiled sun shines weakly, illuminating the haze of saltwater suspended in the air around the margins of the bay and lighting the day to an unreal milky beauty.

In the lull, everything is stirring, needing to feed and yet seemingly anxious. Sodden rabbits emerge from their burrows and begin to graze busily, starting at every passing gull. A small flock of fieldfares land briefly. They stand upright, alert, looking about intently, and then take off again almost immediately. The greylag geese who have taken up winter residence nearby are no longer feeding tight up against the old croft, where they found a little shelter, but are wandering further afield. Disturbed by my approach, their heads come up and, uttering nervous calls, they begin to stalk across the field with increasing speed. I expect them to take flight at any second, but they turn and head back towards the ruin.

Down by the beach, the Burn of the Waters, rushing seaward, is impossible to cross. My step stones have disappeared, the burn is running twice as fast and wide as usual. I detour up to the road, where the water pouring under the bridge just about remains contained by its banks. The beach itself is still being pounded by the breaking waves, flinging spray high into the air, but their ferocity has subsided and old greying foam has left a tidemark along the stones. At the end of the beach, the higher black rocks are covered by a denser whiter mass of foam like discarded fleece.

Today we present a special edition of our daily news podcast focusing on next month's crucial United Nations summit on climate change. Many fear that if world leaders fail to reach a deal in Copenhagen, there will be years of wrangling without agreement.

Activist and commentator George Monbiot is pessimistic about Copenhagen's chances of success, even though time is running out both in terms of the science of global warming and in the expiry of the Kyoto pact.

It was hoped that this week's meeting in Beijing of the US and Chinese leaders would fire some momentum into negotiations. But Suzanne Goldenberg, our Washington-based US environment correspondent, says anything Barack Obama promises in Copenhagen will then have to be approved by Congress, which may not be easy.

And in Beijing, Jonathan Watts, our Asia environment correspondent, says that many people in China – even scientists – are sceptical about man-made climate change.

Deniers also have a presence in the UK. It emerged this week that the top 10 Tory bloggers are climate change sceptics. But Greg Clark, the shadow energy secretary, rejects suggestions that they will dent the Conservatives' commitment to the environment.

Sounding a more optimistic note is the former Treasury economist Nicholas Stern, who says there are good reasons to hope for a meaningful agreement next month.

And James Randerson, editor of environmentguardian.co.uk, outlines what a successful outcome at Copenhagen might comprise.

A global emergency funding scheme to drastically reduce the destruction of tropical rainforests over the next five years was announced by the Prince of Wales today, with the US pledging $275m (£165m) towards rainforest protection.

The plan relies on developed countries paying rainforest nations such as Brazil and Indonesia to reduce rates of deforestation and thereby cut carbon emissions.

Currently, the lucrative trade in logging, cattle grazing and palm oil, means tropical forests are worth substantially more dead than alive to developing countries. The plan, agreed by 35 governments of the Informal Working Group (IWG) and published at a meeting at St James's Palace, aims to make trees worth more alive. The group hopes to achieve a 25% reduction in annual deforestation rates by 2015. The felling of forests causes almost a fifth of global carbon emissions.

However, environment groups last night said the "devil was in the detail" and expressed concern over whether the scheme could achieve its aims. There were calls for the UK government to pledge money to the scheme.Tony Juniper, special adviser to the Prince's Rainforests Project (PRP) and former director of Friends of the Earth, described the agreement as a breakthrough and said: "This is the first time there has been a consensus among governments on a mechanism to deal with the underlying causes of deforestation, which are mainly economic."

Funding for the plan, which was set up by world leaders after a meeting convened by Prince Charles in London in April, would cost between £13.5bn and £22bn over the next five years. The money will initially be sought from governments.

Addressing delegates, including Ed Miliband, the energy and climate change secretary, and Guyana's president, Bharrat Jagdeo, Prince Charles said: "I have been enormously encouraged to hear the findings from the IWG report. It does seem that we have arrived at a consensus on how emergency funding might be deployed in the near future."

Miliband said a deal at next month's crunch UN climate talks in Copenhagen on funding for reducing deforestation – a key theme – was "now closer than it's ever been".

Issues of land rights, indigenous people, risk of corruption and verification have dogged the deforestation talks.

An example of how the scheme could work was given as the historic agreement between Norway and Guyana last week, in which Oslo pledged $250m to the forest nation by 2015 to continue to prevent deforestation.

Simon Counsell, executive director of the Rainforest Foundation, said:  "We have to be very careful that any emergency funding will result in a real reductions in deforestation or forest damage. The example of Guyana could show that it is possible to be paid and not reduce, or to even increase emissions from forests. The Norwegian-funded scheme assumes a fictitiously high baseline deforestation rate, so Guyana would not actually have to reduce deforestation at all in order to be paid."

In the memorandum of understanding between the two nations, the base annual rate of deforestation set by Norway for Guyana is 0.45 per cent. However Guyana's actualy rate of deforestation is currently below
that, at between 0.1 and 0.3 per cent, which means that the South American country could be paid if it increased deforestation up to 0.45 per cent.
At the ceremony, US Ambassador Louis Susman read out a letter from chair of the US Senate Subcommittee on State, Foreign Operations and Related Programs, Senator Patrick Leahy, to the prince in which he pledged to contribute $275m to a forest protection fund in 2010.

Greenpeace executive director John Sauven said: "The US Government has today promised a substantial amount of money for forest protection, and now there is real pressure on the British Government to do the same."

But UK officials said the Government had already put money on the table, with £50 million going to efforts to save the Congo Basin Rainforest in Africa, and £115 million contributed to World Bank schemes to cut
deforestation.

• This article was amended on Friday 20 November 2009. In the story above the final four paragraphs were added after initial publication.

Woolly mammoths and other giant ice-age mammals faced extinction 2,000 years before deadly speartips were invented

Woolly mammoths and other large, lumbering beasts faced extinction long before early humans perfected their skills as spearmakers, scientists say.

The prehistoric giants began their precipitous decline nearly 2,000 years before our ancestors turned stone fragments into sophisticated spearpoints at the end of the last ice age.

The animals, which included mammoths, elephant-sized mastodons and beavers the size of black bears, were probably picked off by more inept hunters who only much later developed specialised weapons when their prize catches became scarce.

"Some people thought humans arrived and decimated the populations of these animals in a few hundred years, but what we've found is not consistent with that rapid 'blitzkrieg' overkill of large animals," said Jacquelyn Gill, a PhD student at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who led the research team.

Archaeological evidence shows that humans developed advanced spearheads around 13,000 years ago. The Clovis people of North America crafted speartips with deep grooves that made wounds bleed freely. With these, hunters did not have to kill their prey on the spot, but could wait for the beasts to bleed to death.

The rise of the Clovis culture was thought to coincide with the demise of the woolly mammoth and other slow-moving giants on the continent, leading many researchers to suspect the animals died at the ends of the hunters' spears.

Gill's team rules this out by putting a more accurate date on the decline and fall of woolly mammoths and more than 30 other large mammals that dominated the landscape as the ice sheets retreated from North America. Among them were giant sloths the size of SUVs.

To date the animals' slide to extinction, the scientists examined sediment cores from a lake in Indiana. The deepest sediments were laid down in the distant past, while more recent sediments were nearer the surface.

Specifically, the scientists measured levels of a fungus that is known to thrive in the excrement of giant herbivorous mammals and nowhere else. They reasoned that more fungal spores meant more dung, which in turn reflected a larger population of roaming mammals. The sediments also held ancient pollen and charcoal dust, which gave the team clues about the predominant plant life and frequency of wildfires.

Writing the US journal Science, the researchers describe how the amount of mammal dung started to fall around 14,800 years ago, long before advanced spearheads became commonplace. The animals had been almost completely wiped out a thousand years later.

"We know there were people who pre-dated the Clovis culture who were butchering mammoths in the area. What we're suggesting is the declines happened before the Clovis toolkit was adopted. These earlier people had tools, but they probably weren't as sophisticated," said Gill.

Chris Johnson, a population ecologist at James Cook University in Queensland, Australia, said the shortage of mammoths and other easy targets might have forced early humans to improve their weapons. "People were still hunting them but this was more challenging, so they developed somewhat better tools for the job," he said.

Another theory, that the larger beasts were wiped out by an asteroid strike around 13,000 years ago, also looks unlikely in view of the latest study. By improving their hunting techniques, early humans seem to have played a major role in finishing off the woolly mammoths and nine other mammal species that weighed over a tonne.

The study is among the first to reveal the environmental consequences of such a catastrophic decline in species. Pollen and charcoal recovered from the sediment cores show that wildfires became far more common and that the variety of plant life changed dramatically, as the nutritious and easily digestible trees and shrubs that were eaten by the mammals grew back.

"For the first time we've got a linkage between this major ecological event, the disappearance of these large animals, and evidence of the environmental consequences," said Jack Williams, a co-author on the study.

Act on Copenhagen is a web tool aimed at allowing students to add to a manifesto that will be handed to Ed Miliband next month

The UN climate talks in Copenhagen have certainly caught the public imagination. On the environment desk here at the Guardian it has been a struggle to keep up with the different demands, manifestos, pamphlets and protests from charities, businesses, environmentalists and other civil society groups.

But what if there was a way of somehow bringing those disparate voices together into a people's manifesto: a document that incorporates the important demands from folk who care about the outcome of this summit but one that filters out the peripheral noise? The UK's Department of Energy and Climate Change (Decc) reckons they might have a way of doing that.

Along with the National Union of Students, Decc has set up a living document using an online web-tool called mixedink. The tool is aimed at students to allow them to contribute to a collaborative manifesto that will be handed to Ed Miliband, the climate change minister, on 5 December in London – the day of the Wave protest which bills itself as the UK's biggest climate change march.

Contributors will be able to add to the document's "general vision" plus sub-sections about adaptation, finance, forestry, governance, mitigation and technology. The tool allows you to mix and match bits of other submissions and combine them in new ways with your own text. Alternatively, you can scrap what is there already and write your own. You can also rate other peoples efforts by voting for what you like. There is a handy video on the site that explains how it all works.

Here's the current working text for the finance section as an example:

One of the highest priorities at Copenhagen is to find ways to pay for action to both reduce the amount of greenhouse gases we produce and to adapt to climate change. In the long-term most of the cash is likely to come from the private sector, and a deal must find ways to encourage this. However, public funding will also be needed to make sure the world acts fast enough. The UK wants to see extra money made available to tackle climate change, with measures in place to make sure it is spent effectively.

The UK will be working with our international partners to develop our proposals in more detail and prepare for Copenhagen. But international agreements between governments are only part of the effort we need to be successful in tackling climate change. Action at all levels: international, national, in business, in local communities and in our homes, can make a difference.

Ed Miliband said: "Young people and the generations that follow will be most affected if we don't avert the most dangerous impacts of climate change, and they will be instrumental in re-shaping the way we all live in the future.

"There are only two and a half weeks to go before I join my counterparts from around the world in Copenhagen. This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity for students to contribute their shared vision for their shared future."

Web democracy in action? The proof will be in what comes out of the exercise. There's a danger that it might be hijacked of course, and by its nature it will skim over the rich diversity of opinions on how to tackle climate change. At best it will produce a powerful consensus statement with contributions from hundreds or even thousands of people. At worse it will be a bland, uncontroversial treatise of familiar ideas that leaves out the difficult solutions. Perhaps getting involved is the only way to stop that happening.

Forecasters warn of more rain and wind amid school and road closures

Heavy rain and strong winds swept across northern England and southern Scotland todayas forecasters warned more bad weather was on the way.

Cumbria bore the brunt of the storms with the village of Shap deluged by 38mm (1.5in) of rain in 12 hours.

Rivers across the region burst their banks and the Met Office said between 50mm and 70mm of rain could fall in parts of the county before 6am tomorrow. Twenty one schools were forced to close for the day.

Alan Goodman, the Met Office adviser for north-west England, said: "We're looking at an extreme weather event. There's bound to be river flooding."

It rained continuously in Shap from 6pm on Wednesday until 6am today. In Keswick, 30mm fell during the same period while 173mm was recorded at Seathwaite in 24 hours ending mid-morning.

The Environment Agency said the Cumbrian towns of Cockermouth, Kendal and Keswick were of most concern while officials worked through the night in Carlisle to put up temporary flood defences for 400 properties. The agency admitted there were still risks to pockets of the city which saw almost 2,000 properties flooded in January 2005 at a clean-up cost of about £400m.

Forecasters warned of further bad weather to come in northern England, north-west Wales and western Scotland with winds in parts of western England and Wales gusting at up to 70mph .

The agency had 31 flood warnings and 62 less serious flood watches in place for England and Wales with Cumbria likely to continue to be badly affected.

Large parts of Keswick and Cockermouth were under water as the rivers Cocker, Greta and Derwent overflowed and water levels rose 300mm in less than an hour.

Trains were delayed and drivers told to avoid unnecessary journeys as police shut the A595 and long delays hit the A590 after almost 480mm of rain fell at Lindal in Furness. The A591 between Keswick and Grasmere was flooded and littered with debris.

Mike Smythe, of Cumbria county council, advised householders in low-lying areas to think about protecting their valuables. "The outlook is bleak in terms of flooding," he said. "Make sure your valuable documents, like certificates, insurance documents and wedding photos, are safe."

Emergency plans have been drawn up for Carlisle, Keswick and other lowland areas vulnerable to flooding if rivers such as the Eden and Greta burst their banks.

Roads have already been closed and some homes evacuated in Lancashire and the Pennine areas of Yorkshire, where towns near the rivers Calder and Irwell have been hit.

"Unfortunately for those areas, the rain is not expected to move very far today," Rachel Vince, a forecaster with MeteoGroup UK, the weather division of the Press Association, said.

The rain was expected to ease off as it moved into south-east England.

An Environment Agency spokesman also warned of a tidal surge in the northern Irish Sea that could cause an increased flood risk along the west coast from Aberystwyth northwards.

Parts of north Wales were also badly affected. Thousands of acres of farmland were awash in the Conwy Valley, where water levels were reported to be the highest for a quarter of a century.

In Lincolnshire, the agency urged "rogue" dam builders to stop their activities amid fears they were increasing the risk of flooding.