With its impressive size, striking plumage and rowdy displays, sighting a capercaillie is many birders’ dream. Only about 530 of the large woodland grouse survive in the wild, most in Scotland’s Cairngorms national park.

But in recent years, those tasked with saving the species from extinction have had to walk a line between calling attention to the birds’ plight and discouraging people from seeking them out.

Although it is illegal to disturb capercaillie during the breeding season from March to August, that hasn’t deterred birders and nature photographers, motivated by the possibility of a prestigious spot – or shot. Over the 2022 season, 17 people were found on or around the “lek”, where male birds gather to compete for the attention of females in spring, says Carolyn Robertson, the project manager of the Cairngorms Capercaillie Project.

That same year, a birdwatcher was caught on camera, flushing six capercaillie from the breeding site. The man was arrested, but let go with a verbal warning. By then the damage may have already been done.

Even fleeting disruption can “make the difference between birds breeding, or not,” says Robertson. “We know that it increases their stress levels, so there’s a high chance they didn’t come back to the area to breed that morning; they might not have returned for days.”

With so few birds remaining in the wild, human disturbance could be “catastrophic” for the species, Robertson says – but discouraging nature enthusiasts from seeking them out has proved challenging. “When people have taken photographs of capercaillie and put them online, they’ve been liked thousands of times. By the time we ask them to take them down, it’s got them so much kudos, they don’t want to do so.”

It reflects a new and increasing threat to vulnerable species and habitats around the world: social media. A new paper in the Science of The Total Environment journal has highlighted the negative impacts of online posting and photography on biodiversity.

By calling attention to rare flora and fauna – and in some cases their precise locations – nature enthusiasts posting about finds can cause others to flock to the same location, and even to deploy unethical tactics (such as playing back bird calls or using bait) to secure a sighting for themselves.

Robert Davis, a senior lecturer in wildlife ecology at Edith Cowan University in Western Australia and the paper’s lead author, says the research was “driven by collective rage” at having seen pristine natural spots and vulnerable species negatively affected by visitors.

“There’s actually probably never been a time in human history where you can share information so rapidly to so many people, and with that has come this immense pressure to systems,” he says.

Populations of the critically endangered blue-crowned laughingthrush, restricted to a small area of Jiangxi province in China, are believed to have changed their nesting habits in response to “severe” disturbance from wildlife photographers.

In 2022, packs of photographers turned up in Shetland, seeking a sight of the elusive lanceolated warbler, potentially causing the bird to abandon the area. This August, a photographer was fined more than £1,600 for disturbing a nesting European honey buzzard in Wales.

In Perth, where Davis lives with his wife, Belinda, a biologist and co-author of the paper, online attention has proved especially problematic for the state’s endemic orchids. “You can track it on social media, more and more pictures being put up of the same plant,” he says.

Sometimes, one post about a flowering orchid can result in hundreds of visitors to the site, Davis says, putting the plants at risk of being damaged or poached.

The eastern Queen of Sheba orchid, which can take 10 years to bloom and is found only in a small area of south-west Western Australia, is such a desirable find for orchid hunters that plants in the wild have had to be put under protection.

“They’ve had to fence that orchid, put cameras on it and have guardians for it,” says Davis. “That really exemplifies the extreme end.”

But asking people not to seek out and post about vulnerable species is often met with resistance, says Davis. “You get a lot of pushback from people saying: ‘Why are you the gatekeeper? Everyone has a right to see this – what’s the harm in just one person?’.”

“When something’s that rare, you could single-handedly push it to extinction.”

He acknowledges that the impact on vulnerable species is minor relative to the broader threats posed by habitat loss and invasive species. But social media perpetuates the problem, Davis says. “Ultimately, it fuels demand: the rarer something is, the more people want to see it.”

It highlights a mounting conflict between conservation aims, and those invested in seeing a species before it’s too late.

James Lowen, a natural history writer based in Norfolk, says standards among nature enthusiasts have been slipping, perhaps reflecting the ease of taking and sharing photographs online.

“There are now more people whose hobby is wildlife photography, rather than wildlife watching, and I suspect that they have not been brought up with the same attention to ethics and fieldcraft.”

That threat is having to be actively managed now, among countless others. The recent rediscoveries of the Norfolk snout moth, believed to be extinct, and the ghost orchid, not seen since 2009, generated much excitement from enthusiasts – but their precise locations have had to be obscured, for fear of further disadvantaging the species, says Lowen.

“It’s a really tight balance to walk: social media is great for drawing people’s attention, but there needs to be a level of discretion.”

Lowen himself removed capercaillie from the most recent edition of his book, 52 Wild Weekends, to reflect the impact of human disturbance on their breeding success. “We all want to see capercaillie, and to see them display – they are remarkable creatures … but absolutely, birders should stay away.”

The Cairngorms Capercaillie Project, meanwhile, has sought to harness the power of social media to save the species. Last year, it launched the “Lek It Be” campaign, urging people not to go looking for the bird or to post photographs online.

Robertson says it has already had a positive effect, with 55% fewer birders, photographers and guided groups observed around lek sites this season.

While the bird-watching community has backed the campaign, photographers have been less responsive, Robertson says – perhaps reflecting their different motivations. “Birders will talk about it, and tick a list … but [photographers] need that output, the shot – that’s what they’re there for,” she says.

Now the worst offenders may find themselves on the other end of the lens. Last year, the Cairngorms Capercaillie Project posted a video of two men caught looking for capercaillie on the lek, to discourage others from doing the same. The intent wasn’t to publicly shame them, Robertson says. “It’s about developing a social norm. We just don’t look for capercaillie any more – we leave them in peace.”

Find more age of extinction coverage here, and follow the biodiversity reporters Phoebe Weston and Patrick Greenfield on X for all the latest news and features

Botanists are partnering with flying paramotorists to survey rare vegetation in one of the most fragile and inaccessible landscapes in the world.

Paramotoring is a slightly eccentric way of getting around, but with a small engine strapped to their back and suspended from a paraglider, paramotorists can travel faster than walking, in a way that is far more environmentally friendly than heading into fragile ecosystems driving a 4×4. The travel method is lower in CO₂ emissions too, according to a study in the journal Plants, People, Planet.

Following a partnership between scientists from the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and from conservation group Huarango Nature, and professional paramotorists, a team of researchers were able to study plants in the coastal fog oasis deserts of Peru, a habitat that botanists have not previously been able to explore.

Known as “lomas” in Peru and “oases de niebla” in Chile, fog oases stretch some 3,000km along the Pacific coast of South America. These delicate ecosystems are home to more than 1,700 plant species, many of which are rare or endemic, and include some that rely on moisture from the Pacific fogs to survive in a land of virtually no rainfall.

Off-road vehicles can increase erosion and destroy such habitats, so four paramotorists were trained by Kew and Huarango Nature scientists in how to identify, collect and georeference the target plant species.

In November 2022, the scientists and the paramotorists from the French not-for-profit Forest Air and the Brazilian paramotor team Aita surveyed more than 15,000 hectares during a seven-day mission combining and comparing land and air efforts.

On average, the paramotorists completed their missions 4.5 times faster than the 4×4-driving ground crews. On longer missions, the ground team produced three times more CO₂ than the flying teams. Paramotorists were also able to survey specific regions not distinguished by drones or unmanned aerial vehicles.

The paramotorists made negligible impact on the fragile desert surface, leaving only a few footprints on take-off and landing. Conversely, the authors demonstrated that 4×4 vehicles damaged an area equivalent to a football pitch for every 5km driven.

Dr Justin Moat, the senior research leader at RBG Kew, said it would have taken a major expedition to reach large areas of endemic vegetation in the Peruvian desert. “Meanwhile, the paramotorists had flown great distances and returned with plant specimens and aerial photographic evidence of the vegetation within the space of two hours,” he said.

Mike Campbell-Jones, the president of Forest Air, said: “As a pilot, with many years’ experience, I have never been so motivated on a mission task or learned as much about our planet as seeing one of its most fragile ecosystems through the eyes of a scientist. The flights we made on this expedition as the Forest Air team were the most memorable of my long and colourful life.”

A notorious murderer who battered a teenage boy to death after raping him has been killed while serving a long jail stint for the “brutal and horrific” attack.

Aymen Terkmani has died in the maximum-security Lithgow correctional centre after an assault on Wednesday that left the 31-year-old critically injured.

The inmate was given medical help but paramedics declared him dead, Corrective Services New South Wales said on Thursday.

Prison authorities and NSW police are investigating.

Terkmani was serving a minimum 33-year sentence for the 2015 murder and sexual assault of 16-year-old Mahmoud Hrouk.

The teenager’s brother spotted his bloodied, half-naked body through the window of an abandoned home in Sydney’s Fairfield East the day after Mahmoud told his mother in a cut-off call that he was with his “friend Aymen”.

Terkmani’s sentencing judge, the NSW supreme court justice Lucy McCallum, said in 2017 that the then-21-year-old had subjected the youth to “unspeakable violence”.

“The offender subjected the victim to the most brutal and horrific attack, inflicting injuries too numerous to list and too gruesome to describe,” McCallum said as she sentenced him to a maximum term of 45 years.

Prosecutors had called for Terkmani to receive a life sentence.

The US Senate has voted unanimously to hold the CEO of Steward Health Care in criminal contempt for failing to comply with a congressional subpoena – marking the first time in more than 50 years that the chamber has moved to hold someone in criminal contempt.

On Wednesday, the Senate voted to hold Ralph de la Torre in contempt of Congress after the 58-year-old head of the Massachusetts-based for-profit healthcare system – which declared bankruptcy earlier this year – ignored a congressional subpoena and failed to appear at a hearing over the hospital chain’s alleged abuse of finances on 12 September.

During Wednesday’s session, Bernie Sanders, Vermont senator and chair of the Senate’s health, education, labor and pensions (Help) committee, said: “The passage of this resolution by the full Senate will make clear that even though Dr de la Torre may be worth hundreds of millions of dollars, even though he may be able to buy fancy yachts and private jets and luxurious accommodations throughout the world, even though he may be able to afford some of the most expensive lawyers in America, no, Dr de la Torre is not above the law.

“If you defy a congressional subpoena, you will be held accountable, no matter who you are or how well-connected you may be,” Sanders said.

Similarly, Bill Cassidy, Louisiana senator and ranking member of Help, said: “Steward’s mismanagement has nationwide implications affecting patient care in more than 30 hospitals across eight states.

“Through the committee’s investigation, it became evident that a thorough review of chief executive officer Dr Ralph de la Torre’s management decisions was essential to understand Steward’s financial problems and its failure to serve its patients,” Cassidy said of De la Torre, who was paid at least $250m by Steward Health Care as the hospital chain’s administrators struggled with facility problems, staffing shortages and closures.

Investigations by the Boston Globe revealed that as more than a dozen Steward Health Care patients died in recent years after being unable to receive adequate treatment, De la Torre embarked on various jet travels and private yacht excursions across the Caribbean and French Riviera.

The Boston Globe also revealed that De la Torre frequently used the hospital chain’s bank account as his own, including to make purchases to renovate an €8m ($8.9m) apartment in Madrid and to make donations of millions of dollars to his children’s private school.

In July, the outlet reported that the justice department was investigating Steward Health Care for potential foreign corruption violations. It also reported that a federal grand jury in Boston was investigating the hospital chain’s financial dealings including its compensations for top executives.

During Wednesday’s session, the Massachusetts senator Ed Markey condemned what he called a “culmination of a financial tragedy over the past decade”.

“Steward, led by its founder and CEO Dr Ralph de la Torre and his corporate enablers, looted hospitals across the country for their own profit, and while they got rich, workers, patients and communities suffered, nurses paid out of pocket for cardboard bereavement boxes for the babies to help grieving parents who had just lost a newborn,” said Markey.

“Dr de la Torre is using his blood-soaked gains to hide behind corporate lawyers instead of responding to the United States Senate’s demand for actions. But while he tries to run and hide, Dr de la Torre is revealing himself for what he truly is – a physician who places personal gain over his duty to do no harm,” he added.

The US House speaker, Mike Johnson, has demanded that Ukraine fire its ambassador to Washington as the feud between Donald Trump and Volodymr Zelenskyy escalated and Republicans accused the Ukrainian leader of election interference.

In a public letter, Johnson demanded that Zelenskyy fire the Ukrainian ambassador, Oksana Markarova, over a visit to a munitions factory in Scranton, Pennsylvania, last week where the Ukrainian president thanked workers for providing desperately needed shells to his outgunned forces.

Johnson complained that Markarova had organised the visit to the Scranton Army Ammunition Plant as a “partisan campaign event designed to help Democrats”. The event was attended by the Pennsylvania governor, Josh Shapiro, a Democrat who has campaigned in support of Kamala Harris.

“The facility was in a politically contested battleground state, was led by a top political surrogate for Kamala Harris, and failed to include a single Republican because – on purpose – no Republicans were invited,” Johnson wrote in a letter on congressional letterhead addressed to the Ukrainian embassy.

“The tour was clearly a partisan campaign event designed to help Democrats and is clearly election interference,” the letter continued. “This shortsighted and intentionally political move has caused Republicans to lose trust in Ambassador Markarova’s ability to fairly and effectively serve as a diplomat in this country. She should be removed from her post immediately.”

On the same day, Trump in a campaign event in North Carolina attacked Zelenskyy directly and accused him of “refusing” to negotiate a peace deal with Vladimir Putin.

“The president of Ukraine is in our country. He is making little nasty aspersions toward your favourite president, me,” Trump said. “We continue to give billions of dollars to a man who refuses to make a deal: Zelenskyy.”

The accusations against Zelenskyy came after a controversial interview with the New Yorker in which he questioned Trump’s plan to end Ukraine’s war with Russia and sharply criticized Republicans’ vice-presidential candidate, JD Vance, as “too radical”.

Vance had earlier said a peace in Ukraine could entail Russia retaining the Ukrainian land it had occupied and the establishment a demilitarised zone with a heavily fortified frontline to prevent another Russian invasion.

“His message seems to be that Ukraine must make a sacrifice,” Zelenskyy said in the interview with the New Yorker. “This brings us back to the question of the cost and who shoulders it. The idea that the world should end this war at Ukraine’s expense is unacceptable. But I do not consider this concept of his a plan, in any formal sense.”

After addressing the United Nations general assembly on Wednesday, Zelenskyy is expected to travel to Washington to present his “victory plan” to Joe Biden at the White House.

In his letter, Johnson also referred to Ukrainian officials criticizing Trump and Vance in remarks to the media.

“Additionally, as I have clearly stated in the past, all foreign nations should avoid opining on or interfering in American domestic politics,” he said. “Support for ending Russia’s war against Ukraine continues to be bipartisan, but our relationship is unnecessarily tested and needlessly tarnished when the candidates at the top of the Republican presidential ticket are targeted in the media by officials in your government.”

Other top Republicans had criticized Zelenskyy this week after his remarks about Trump and Vance were published.

“I don’t mind him going to a munitions plant thanking people for helping Ukraine. But I think his comments about JD Vance and President Trump were out of bounds,” said the Republican senator Lindsey Graham, according to US-based Punchbowl News.

“With conservatives, it’s going to hurt Ukraine,” Graham said.

Vladimir Putin has escalated his nuclear rhetoric, telling a group of senior officials that Russia would consider using nuclear weapons if it was attacked by any state with conventional weapons.

His remarks on Wednesday came during a meeting with Russia’s powerful security council where he also announced changes to the country’s nuclear doctrine.

The comments marked Russia’s strongest warning yet to the west against allowing Ukraine to launch deep strikes into Russian territory using long-range western missiles.

The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, has been asking for months for permission to use British Storm Shadow missiles and US-made Atacms missiles to hit targets deeper inside Russia.

Putin said that Russia would consider using nuclear weapons if Moscow received “reliable information” about the start of a massive launch of missiles, aircraft or drones against it.

Putin also warned that a nuclear power supporting another country’s attack on Russia would be considered a participant in aggression, issuing a thinly veiled threat to the west as foreign leaders continue to mull whether to allow Ukraine to use long-range weapons.

Putin said the clarifications were carefully calibrated and commensurate with the modern military threats facing Russia. “We see the modern military and political situation is dynamically changing and we must take this into consideration. Including the emergence of new sources of military threats and risks for Russia and our allies,” he said.

Zelenskyy’s chief of staff, Andriy Yermak, dismissed the new nuclear doctrine, saying: “Russia no longer has any instruments to intimidate the world apart from nuclear blackmail. These instruments will not work.”

Several influential foreign policy hawks have previously pressed Putin to adopt a more assertive nuclear posture towards the west, lowering its threshold for using nuclear weapons in order to deter the west against providing more direct military support to Ukraine.

The current doctrine was set out by Putin in June 2020 in a six-page decree.

In the early days of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Putin frequently invoked Moscow’s nuclear arsenal, the world’s biggest, repeatedly pledging to use all means necessary to defend Russia.

He later seemed to moderate his rhetoric, but officials close to the Russian president have recently warned Nato countries they risked provoking nuclear war if they gave the green light for Ukraine to use long-range weapons.

Earlier this month, Putin said that the west would be directly fighting with Russia if it gave such permission to Ukraine – and that Russia would be forced to make “appropriate decisions”, without spelling out what those measures could be.

Keir Starmer has defended borrowing an £18m penthouse flat from the Labour donor Waheed Alli during the election, saying he took the offer so that his son would have a place to study for his GCSEs without having to walk past journalists and protesters outside their family home.

The prime minister brought up the “human” reason for having moved his family out of his Kentish Town house in north London, saying no cash changed hands as a result of the move.

He was pressed, while attending the UN general assembly in New York, on public opposition to him taking more than £100,000 of freebies in the form of tickets, clothes and accommodation.

Asked by Sky News whether his reputation had been undermined, Starmer talked about why he moved to the flat in Covent Garden, central London, belonging to Lord Alli, a media businessman and Labour peer.

“We had a situation where the election was called. Not what we expected … My son happened to be in the middle of his GCSEs. That means there are a lot of journalists outside the front door and in the street. I’m not complaining about that. But if you’re 13, as my girl is, if you’re 16, as my boy is, that’s quite hard to navigate when you’re concentrating on GCSEs.”

He added: “So I said, we’re going to get you out of here and get you somewhere where you can just study and get to school and back without having to go through all of that. And that’s when someone said, well, in which case I can make this flat available to you. It’s safe, secure. He can get on with the job. No money exchanged hands … And I wasn’t going to let my son fail or not do well in his GCSEs because of journalists outside the front door. We also, as you know, had protesters outside the front door.”

He said he had found it “worrying” to have protesters outside and that he had promised his wife and children he would protect them. In relation to free tickets for football matches, he said it was “simply a gift from Arsenal” as it was no longer safe for him to be in the stands without very expensive security.

Pressed on whether he was in a position of privilege as a politician, when many people might want a private place to help their children revise for GCSEs away from their home environment, Starmer said: “I think that’s fair and why the rules are there to declare it … If you’re putting to me that I should have stayed in my Kentish Town home and disrupted my son’s GCSEs, that that was the right thing to do, then I think you should put that to me.”

He added that “any parent would have made the same decision” and that he could not give any better explanation. Starmer also brought up that Sky held parties costing thousands of pounds every year to which politicians were invited.

Asked whether Taylor Swift concert tickets were a “work event”, he said it was a “judgment call for each MP” and declined to answer whether he would look at changing the rules.

He stressed that in relation to clothing, he would not be accepting any more gifts, after Alli gave £16,000 for outfits and £2,400 for glasses, as well as £20,000-worth of accommodation during the election campaign.

Starmer also faced questions on Wednesday after the Guido Fawkes website reported that he appeared to have used Alli’s flat as a backdrop to a video he released during the Covid pandemic in late December 2021. At the time, employees had been advised to work from home if possible.

No 10 said Starmer was completely confident he had broken no rules when in Alli’s flat. The clip was recorded for work purposes and it is understood he was only using the flat as a one-off.

Research from YouGov published on Wednesday found that three-quarters of the public thought free tickets and gifts for politicians should be banned.

Its survey of almost 4,000 adults found 51% thought it was wrong for politicians to accept the donations even though it was within the rules, while 29% said it was OK to accept the donations but that the rules should not allow them.

France’s new rightwing interior minister has said there will be consequences after a Moroccan man suspected of murdering a 19-year-old university student and leaving her body in a forest was arrested in Switzerland.

A source close to the case said the alleged attacker was a 22-year-old man of Moroccan nationality. Prosecutors have said the suspect had been previously convicted of rape and had been the subject of an order to leave France.

The killing of the student, named only by the authorities as Philippine, is expected to further inflame political tensions in France where the new rightwing government plans to crack down on immigration.

“This is an abominable crime,” said Bruno Retailleau, the interior minister, who has promised to boost law and order, tighten immigration legislation and make it easier to deport foreigners convicted of crimes.

“It is up to us, as public leaders, to refuse to accept the inevitable and to develop our legal arsenal, to protect the French,” he added. “If we have to change the rules, let’s change them.”

On Saturday, the body of a student was discovered in the Bois de Boulogne park in western Paris, not far from the Université Paris-Dauphine, which Philippine attended.

A Moroccan national was arrested on Tuesday in the Swiss canton of Geneva and was identified as a suspect in a murder committed in Paris, a spokesperson for the Swiss justice ministry told AFP.

“The Federal Office of Justice then ordered detention for extradition purposes on the basis of an arrest request from France,” she added.

The student had last been seen at the university on Friday. Witnesses reported seeing a man with a pickaxe, said one police source.

According to the prosecutors, the man was convicted in 2021 of a rape committed in 2019, when he was a minor. He was released in June having serving his sentence, then placed in an administrative detention centre, according to the source. In early September, a judge freed him on condition he reported regularly to the authorities. But just before the murder of the student, the suspect had been placed on a wanted list because he had flouted the conditions of his release.

The killing of the student has sparked outrage in the country, with both far right and leftwing politicians urging tough measures.

“Philippine’s life was stolen from her by a Moroccan migrant who was under a removal order,” Jordan Bardella, the leader of the far right National Rally (RN), the largest single party in parliament, said on X on Tuesday. “Our justice system is lax, our state is dysfunctional and our leaders are letting the French live alongside human bombs,” he added.

“It’s time for this government to act: our compatriots are angry and will not mince words.”

The former socialist president François Hollande also chimed in, saying deportation orders had to be enforced “quickly”.

Ellen DeGeneres begins as she means to go on in her new – and supposedly final – standup special. Her journey from dressing room to stage is cast as a memory lane, past clips of her first appearance on the Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, snapshots of the furore when she came out as gay in 1997, and then a recap of her more recent brush with controversy – when, four years ago, accusations of a toxic workplace culture torpedoed her daytime talkshow. For Your Approval is DeGeneres’s reckoning with that cancellation, and her being deemed “the most hated woman in America”. And, like its opening sequence, it frames that reckoning solely in terms of our host’s journey, and her victimhood. Anyone looking for apologies, or humility, must look elsewhere.

As a study in evasion, self-mythologising – and world-beating servility on the part of her audience – For Your Approval takes some beating. If, like me, you can’t bear standup that courts affirming cheers rather than laughter – well, getting to the end of this will require considerable forbearance. Clearly, the scandal that saw off her TV vehicle has not sullied the ardour of DeGeneres’s many fans, who whoop and applaud her every utterance here; not just the ones that address healing after being “kicked out of showbusiness”, but the middling jokes about butterflies and parallel parking too. It slows the gig down terribly. Quit clapping, I shouted at the screen, and let the comedy crack on.

And there is comedy here, amid all the slippery self-justification: standup of the type with which Ellen first secured her place in America’s affections. She talks about rearing chickens, a hobby with which she has filled her newly spare time. She talks about her OCD and her ADHD, and how they cancel each other out. She addresses the oncoming decrepitude of her body, and her mother’s dementia.

Most of this is fine, little of it remarkable, and all of it overshadowed by the address For Your Approval makes to DeGeneres’s fall from grace in 2020. The problem then was that a host who had made “be kind” her trademark was said to have presided over a workplace culture of bullying, discrimination and harassment. Four years on, that doesn’t seem to be DeGeneres’s version of events. “We had so much fun together on that show,” she trills here, playing tag and practical jokes on-set. Perhaps some construed this bonhomie as bullying? Or perhaps it’s a gender thing? Women aren’t used to being bosses, she says at one point – and comedians even less so. How that tallies with her later claim, that her only crime was to be “a strong woman”, is not clear.

As a feat of self-exculpation, For Your Approval is a wonder to behold. You can’t help but admire the chutzpah when the 66-year-old brackets her recent excommunication with the one she suffered when she came out as gay, 23 years earlier – as if these were analogous experiences of heroic persecution. For anyone who had a miserable time working on her TV show, no thought is spared. “I’m proud of who I’ve become,” intones DeGeneres solemnly at the show’s conclusion, to more roars of approval. But there’s not much here for her to be proud of – nor much for fans of comedy (as opposed to fans of Ellen) to savour.

Leading climate scientists are urging the government to pause plans for a billion pound investment in “green technologies” they say are unproven and would make it harder for the UK to reach its net zero targets.

Labour has promised to invest £1bn in carbon capture, usage and storage (CCUS) to produce blue hydrogen and to capture carbon dioxide from new gas-fired power stations – with a decision on the first tranche of the funding expected imminently.

However, in the letter to the energy security and net zero secretary, Ed Miliband, the scientists argue that the process relies on unproven technology and would result in huge emissions of planet-heating CO₂ and methane – gases that are driving the climate crisis.

“We strongly urge you to pause your government’s policy for CCUS-based blue hydrogen and gas power, and delay any investment decision … until all the relevant evidence concerning the whole-life emissions and safety of these technologies has been properly evaluated,” they write.

The letter, which is signed by leading climate scientists from the UK and US as well as campaigners, argues the plans would:

A recent study found a proposed multibillion-pound CCS project in Teesside would be responsible for more than 20m tonnes of planet-heating CO₂ over its lifetime.

Dr Andrew Boswell, an energy analyst who carried out the research on the Teesside project, said: “Investing now into CCUS and blue hydrogen would dangerously lock the UK into increasing imports of liquified natural gas, which carry a very-high footprint of methane emissions in its production and transport, to well past 2050.”

He said that following David Lammy’s Kew speech last week, in which the foreign secretary, said tackling the climate emergency had to be central to everything the Labour government did, it must now “walk the talk”.

A spokesperson for the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero said CCUS would “play a vital role in a decarbonised power system” that would “make us less, not more, reliant on natural gas”.

“This technology will boost our energy independence, and the Climate Change Committee describe it as a necessity, not an option for reaching our climate goals.”

The spokesperson added: “Through our national wealth fund, we will support carbon capture and hydrogen to make the UK a world leader in these technologies of the future.”

However, Claire James, from the Campaign against Climate Change, a pressure group that also signed the letter, said Labour had “a great opportunity” to tackle the climate crisis and create jobs by investing in “basic things we know work” such as insulating homes, renewable energy and public transport.

She added: “When it comes to carbon capture and storage, which has a track record of repeated failure, or considering the risks of methane emissions from importing gas to make hydrogen, we can’t see this as a good use of big public subsidies.”

Another signatory, David Cebon, a professor of mechanical engineering at Cambridge University, said the government should be 100% focused on reducing carbon emissions through proven technologies.

He added: “The CCUS projects (inherited from the previous government’s cosy relationship with the fossil fuel industry) will do precisely the opposite. They will lock the UK into significantly higher gas consumption for the next 30-50 years and will increase energy costs, at taxpayers’ expense.”

Cebon said CCUS technology had “a very poor track record for reducing emissions” and came “with significant health, safety and cost risks”.

“The secretary of state should think very carefully before embarking on these projects,” he added.