Conservative billionaires used a secretive funding route to channel nearly $120m (£77m) to more than 100 groups casting doubt about the science behind climate change, the Guardian has learned.

The funds, doled out between 2002 and 2010, helped build a vast network of thinktanks and activist groups working to a single purpose: to redefine climate change from neutral scientific fact to a highly polarising “wedge issue” for hardcore conservatives.

There’s a new frontline on the battlefield between the two baddest armies of environmental change—global warming and biodiversity loss. The question is whether or not to relocate endangered species to ecosystems they’ve never inhabited in order to save them from the real or predicted loss of their natural ecosystems from climate change.

Glacier National Park has lost two more of its namesake moving icefields to climate change, which is shrinking the rivers of ice until they grind to a halt, a government researcher said Wednesday.

Warmer temperatures have reduced the number of named glaciers in the northwestern Montana park to 25, said Dan Fagre said, an ecologist with the U.S. Geological Survey. He warned many of the rest of the glaciers may be gone by the end of the decade.

Scientists have recorded a massive spike in the amount of a powerful greenhouse gas seeping from Arctic permafrost, in a discovery that highlights the risks of a dangerous climate tipping point.

Experts say methane emissions from the Arctic have risen by almost one-third in just five years, and that sharply rising temperatures are to blame.

As the Copenhagen meeting on climate change opens, we are getting mixed signals. At one extreme are the “disbelievers,” who say that serious consequences from global warming, if it is really happening, are still decades away so why should people be saddled with higher energy costs now. If the polls are correct the disbelievers now constitute a majority of the American electorate.

At the other extreme are the climate scientists who are telling every media outlet that will listen that the proposals being discussed at Copenhagen are nowhere near enough to save mankind from destruction. Some are saying that a five degree Centigrade increase in the average global temperature may be enough to do in mankind. Food will no longer grow in sufficient quantity to keep all 8 billion of us fed.