Around $27bn (£18bn) was paid out by insurers for natural disaster claims last year, with weather causing 94% of incidents, according to data from reinsurer Munich Re.

While the climate phenomenon known as El Niño reduced the development of hurricanes in the north Atlantic, storms and floods still caused billions of dollars worth of damage in Europe and North America, the world’s largest reinsurer said in an annual review.

Sen. Ted Cruz, who has questioned the existence of global warming, said Tuesday that if he were elected president, he would withdraw the United States from the landmark climate agreement reached in Paris earlier this month.

"Barack Obama seems to think the SUV parked in your driveway is a bigger threat to national security than radical Islamic terrorists who want to kill us. That’s just nutty," Cruz told reporters in a high school classroom here. "These are ideologues, they don’t focus on the facts, they won’t address the facts, and what they’re interested [in] instead is more and more government power."

Dramatic cost declines in solar power tenders in India have shaken up expectations on pricing for the renewable fuel and have triggered warnings that the country's need for thermal coal imports will be much lower than some are banking on.

Huge solar power contracts awarded by Indian states to global players in November and December have been priced at levels more than 20 per cent below 12 months ago and point to solar power rapidly overtaking thermal coal imports in competitiveness for power generation.

The current El Nino is the strongest on record and is likely to continue until around May, but with its fallout - especially in South-east Asia - expected to be felt until the end of the year.

Dozens have died and millions of dollars have been lost due to El Nino-related weather, from storms and floods in the Americas to drought in South-east Asia. El Nino causes warm waters that normally pile up in the Western Pacific to flow east, triggering heavier rain along the west coast of the Americas and drier conditions in Australasia and South-east Asia.

Zero emission cars accounted for 17.1 percent of new car registrations last year in Norway, the industry said on Wednesday, the highest market share for clean vehicles anywhere in the world.

"Never has the market share of electric cars been as high as in 2015," Christina Bu of the Norwegian Association for Electric Cars said.

Weekend rain washed away the dangerous pollution that has afflicted Rome in recent weeks but left city authorities with a new headache: roads and pavements made treacherous by bird droppings.

The downpours that cleaned up the air and brought levels of fine particles back down below a World Health Organization-recommended threshold also cleansed the city's trees of several weeks worth of guano deposited by millions of migratory starlings.

More than a million private cars were banned from New Delhi's roads on Friday, as authorities began trialing drastic new measures to cut smog in the world's most polluted capital.

From January 1 only cars with odd-numbered license plates will be allowed on the roads on odd-numbered dates and those with even-numbered plates on the other days to try to reduce pollutant levels which regularly hit 10 times the World Health Organization safe limits.

Temperatures at the North Pole rose above freezing point Wednesday, 20 degrees Celsius above the mid-winter norm and the latest abnormality in a season of extreme weather events.

Canadian weather authorities blamed the temperature spike on the freak depression which has already brought record Christmas temperatures to North America and lashed Britain with winds and floods. 

A revolutionary floating dam that traps plastic bags, bottles and other waste choking the world's oceans will be tested at sea for the first time in 2016, the Ocean Cleanup foundation said.

"It will be the first time our barrier design will be put to the test in open waters," the foundation said of the 100 meter-long (62 miles)  barrier segment that will be deployed 23 kilometers off the coast of The Netherlands in the second quarter of the year.

More than two weeks of heavy pollution led Iranian officials to ban all outdoor sport and impose new traffic restrictions Wednesday as persistent cold weather exacerbated Tehran's air quality problems.

In the worst concerted period of pollution for three years, primary schools and nurseries were closed and new car exclusion zones imposed in the capital.