Analysis shows royals crowding out coverage of global warming, as Prince Charles makes his strongest climate warning yet

Prince Charles, heir to the British throne, made one of his strongest speeches yet on the dangers of a warming planet when he warned this month that climate change is "the greatest risk we have ever faced". Action must be taken now, the Prince said, because the risk of doing nothing is "too great."

It is therefore a little ironic to look at the latest results from a study by the monitoring organisation Media Matters for America and find that the goings-on of the British royal family – but not their comments on the dire state of the planet – feature far more prominently on the major US networks than any topic related to climate change.

"Even during the warmest year on record in the US, the nightly news programmes combined devoted only 12 full segments to climate change," Media Matters reports. "By contrast, these programmes dedicated over seven times more coverage to the royals in 2012."

One programme, ABC World News, devoted 43 segments to the British royal family in 2012 and only one to climate change, says Media Matters.

Earlier this month, as scientists announced the amount of CO² in the atmosphere had gone beyond 400 parts per million, two of the major US news programmes ignored the story, preferring instead to cover the visit to the country of Prince Harry, the younger son of Prince Charles.

"In 2012, the US experienced record-breaking heat, a historic drought, massive wildfires in the West, and Hurricane Sandy," Media Matters says. "Meanwhile, Arctic sea ice extent shattered the previous record low and the Greenland ice sheet saw the greatest melt in recorded history…

"Yet despite these illustrations of climate change, the broadcast news outlets devoted very little time to climate change in 2012, following a downward trend since 2009."

Evidence suggests the paucity of reporting on climate change is not limited to the US alone. An ongoing study of various media outlets around the world by the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research at the University of Colorado-Boulder charts global climate change media coverage, noting a peak at the Copenhagen climate summit in late 2009.

A separate study found that more than 3,200 climate-related stories appeared in the world's mainstream newspapers concerning events at the ill-fated Copenhagen meeting. By the time of the climate summit in Durban two years later, the number of stories had shrunk to a quarter of that amount.

Meanwhile, the scientific consensus on the causes and impacts of climate change seems never to have been stronger.

Despite the lack of media coverage, it seems that public perceptions about climate change are also changing − perhaps influenced by a rise in extreme weather events around the world.

The subject of climate change and its causes continues to be hotly debated in the US. However, an analysis carried out late last year by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found that nearly 70% of Americans now say there is solid evidence that the world has been getting warmer over recent decades, with more than 40% saying it is caused by human activity – up from 34% in 2010.

A petition, which already has more than 70,000 signatures, has been organised by Media Matters, the Sierra Club and the League of Conservation Voters. It urges the major broadcast networks to give more attention to climate change and allow scientists the opportunity to explain the connections between humanity activity, climate change and extreme weather events.

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Previously secret note from Home Office refers to order to intercept communications at height of 1936 abdication crisis

Ministers ordered the bugging of Edward VIII's telephones in Buckingham Palace and in his Windsor retreat at the height of the 1936 abdication crisis, hitherto secret papers reveal.

The extraordinary move, reflecting a growing and deep distrust between the king and his ministers, is disclosed in a unique cache of intelligence files hidden until now in a basement at the Cabinet Office in the heart of Whitehall.

Among the files is a scribbled note, dated 5 December 1936 and marked "most secret", from the Home Office to the head of the General Post Office, Sir Thomas Gardiner, referring to an order from the home secretary, Sir John Simon.

It states: "The home secretary asks me to confirm the information conveyed to you orally … that you will arrange for the interception of telephone communications between Fort Belvedere and Buckingham Palace on the one hand and the continent of Europe on the other."

When not at the palace, Edward stayed at Fort Belvedere, his bolthole in Windsor Great Park. Edward's mistress, the American divorcee Wallis Simpson, was staying with friends in the south of France at the time.

The panic in the British establishment provoked by Edward's affair with Simpson and his apparent belief that he could get away with marrying her and remain king has been widely reported.

What has not been disclosed until now is how the lack of trust in the monarch was such that ministers went to the lengths of recording his personal conversations.

The Queen's advisers at Buckingham Palace were consulted about the decision to release the file, the Guardian understands.

Deep anxiety in Whitehall and the government's fear of losing control of the situation led to a close watch of outgoing telegrams. One that was intercepted and blocked was from Neil Forbes Grant, London editor of the Cape Times.

Summoned to see the home secretary, Grant was told there was no truth to his report that the king was about to abdicate and that if the news had reached South Africa and then been telegraphed back to Britain, the reaction might have been "of a most serious character".

Simon wrote: "I reminded him that in 1815 a false rumour that we had lost the Battle of Waterloo produced a financial crisis and ruined many people. I asked him if he did not realise that his responsibilities as a journalist and an Englishman made the sending of such a message without definite authority as to its truth very improper and reckless."

Grant insisted he had got his information from "a very highly placed source", but seemed suitably chastened. According to Simon, the journalist said "this had been a lesson to him and that he would always have this experience in mind in discharging his responsibilities in future".

Edward abdicated on 10 December 1936, four days after Grant sent his intercepted telegram.

The newly released files, all highly classified, have been gathering dust for decades in a Cabinet Office basement. Lord Wilson, a former cabinet secretary, described how he visited what he called a strongroom beneath his old office where he found "heaps of paper … my eyes swivelled".

He said he decided to "grasp the nettle" and set up a review to look into the possible release of the papers. It was carried out by Gill Bennett, a former Foreign Office official historian. She said the papers had been treated as "too difficult" to categorise. Officials were "not sure what to do with them", she said.

Other files among the tranche, which records events up to 1951, reveal how a male MI6 officer was arrested in Madrid wearing women's clothes, how MI6 paid huge amounts of money to agents to keep Spain out of the second world war, and how MI6 was prepared to "liquidate" selected individuals after the war.

Amid tales of bribery, smuggling, dirty tricks, and intrigue – some of which, missing files suggest, are still being carried out – the papers also include a first-hand account of how Churchill spent a night drinking with Stalin in Moscow in August 1942. Sir Alexander Cadogan, top official at the Foreign Office, wrote of being summoned to Stalin's room. "There I found Winston and Stalin … sitting with a heavily laden board between them: food of all kinds crowned by a suckling pig, and unnumberable bottles.

"What Stalin made me drink seemed pretty savage: Winston, who by that time was complaining of a slight headache, seemed wisely to be confining himself to a comparatively innocuous effervescent Caucasian red wine."

" Everything seemed to be as merry as a marriage-bell", added Cadogan, as Stalin went on about the benefits of the Soviet system. The party broke up at 3am.

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Threats to wildlife must be treated as battle, Prince of Wales tells conservationists at St James's Palace conference

Prince Charles has warned that criminal gangs are turning to animal poaching, an unprecedented slaughter of species that can only be stopped by waging war on the perpetrators, in the latest of a series of increasingly outspoken speeches about the environment.

Addressing a conference of conservationists at St James's Palace in London, the Prince of Wales announced a meeting of heads of state to take place this autumn in London under government auspices to combat what he described as an emerging, militarised crisis.

"We face one of the most serious threats to wildlife ever, and we must treat it as a battle – because it is precisely that," said Charles. "Organised bands of criminals are stealing and slaughtering elephants, rhinoceros and tigers, as well as large numbers of other species, in a way that has never been seen before. They are taking these animals, sometimes in unimaginably high numbers, using the weapons of war – assault rifles, silencers, night-vision equipment and helicopters."

It is the second outspoken speech that Charles has made this month, at a time when he is taking on an increasing number of monarchical duties, after he told a group of forest scientists also at St James's Palace that corporate lobbyists and climate change sceptics were turning the Earth into a "dying patient". The Prince of Wales warned that iconic species – which could include rhinoceros, tigers, orangutans and others – could be extinct in the wild within a decade if efforts to protect them were not stepped up. "By urgent, I mean urgent," he told the dignitaries, who included governmental and United Nations officials as well as NGOs and grassroots activists.

His son, the Duke of Cambridge, added to the plea: "My fear is that one of two things will stop the illegal trade: either we take action to stem the trade, or we will run out of the animals. There is no other outcome possible."

Charles also stressed the need to deal with the demand for exotic species. In the past, much of the market for tiger parts, rhino horns and ivory was said to be driven by beliefs in traditional Chinese medicine, in which the rare animal parts were believed to have curative or aphrodisiac properties. But the prince dismissed such ideas, saying the trade was in fact about status symbols rather than belief systems. "The bulk of the intended use is no longer for products that can be classified as traditional medicines. Instead, many more people in rapidly growing economies are seeking exotic products that reflect their economic prosperity and status."

The conference called for celebrities to publicise their outrage and opposition to the trade, and for young people in countries such as China to be educated to reject the demands of their parents for such status-fuelled goods.

Former Tory chairman Lord Tebbit also warns that legislation could allow him to marry his son to escape inheritance tax

The determination of David Cameron to press ahead with legalising gay marriage opens up the possibility of a lesbian queen giving birth to a future monarch by artificial insemination, Lord Tebbit has warned.

In one of his more outspoken interventions, the former Conservative party chairman told the Big Issue magazine that the legislation could also allow him to marry his son to escape inheritance tax.

Tebbit's remarks indicate that the marriage (same sex couples) bill will have a bumpy ride when it reaches the House of Lords.

Tebbit, who said that ministers have "fucked up" by alienating Tory grassroots, accused Downing Street of forcing through the legislation with little thought.

"The government discussed it for 20 minutes on the morning of its announcement," he told the Big Issue. "They'd done no work on it beforehand."

Tebbit also said he had challenged a minister about legalising gay marriage at the same time as ending male primogeniture in the royal succession.

"I said to a minister I know: have you thought this through? Because you're doing the law of succession, too.

"When we have a queen who is a lesbian and she marries another lady and then decides she would like to have a child and someone donates sperm and she gives birth to a child, is that child heir to the throne?"

Tebbit joked that the change could allow parents to marry their children as a way of avoiding inheritance tax. "It's like one of my colleagues said: we've got to make these same sex marriages available to all. It would lift my worries about inheritance tax because maybe I'd be allowed to marry my son. Why not? Why shouldn't a mother marry her daughter? Why shouldn't two elderly sisters living together marry each other?"

Lord Tebbit, who recently said he could understand why many people vote Ukip, said the party would attract greater financial support if they won the European parliamentary elections next year. He said: "If they make significant gains in the European elections, I know there's people rich enough to get involved and fund a significant campaign at a general election."

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