The meltdown of the climate change movement is entering a new phase as the European left turns on the UN climate change office and the IPCC.
The German left wing press, one of the world’s strongest supporters of the ‘climate change movement’ is turning against the scientists and UN bureaucrats responsible for leading the movement. A round-up of German press coverage over the unexpected resignation of UN climate chief Yvo de Boer offers a perspective on the failures of the climate change movement that is both more scathing and more frank than anything the mainstream US press has yet brought itself to utter.
“De Boer’s Resignation is Catastrophic,” runs the headline on Der Spiegel’s English language website. Die Tageszeitung, a leftish daily, says that De Boer’s resignation may signal the collapse of the effort to stop climate change by treaty: “a signal that world diplomacy is not the way to win the struggle against climate change.”
The German press is also wondering why de Boer has resigned while Pachauri, widely seen as bearing more individual responsibility for the IPCC’s failings than de Boer, still clings to his job. The Sueddeutsche Zeitung, considered another left leaning newspaper has a much harsher assessment:
At last even the UN is drawing consequences from the disgrace of its climate politics over the last few months. Scientific documents were suppressed; the summit was prepared with such unbelievable dilettantism that it had no chance to succeed; then there was the bitter argument over false predictions about the melting of Himalayan glaciers. The resignation of Yvo de Boer — chief of the UN’s climate secretariat and one of the responsible figures — is overdue.
In France, the left wing Le Monde — the New York Times of France — wrote about a “total confusion” in the global climate change movement following De Boer’s resignation. According to Le Monde, the diplomatic process has broken down completely; De Boer’s resignation at least brings this out in the open. Le Figaro, a more conservative newspaper, offers an article on the proposal to reform the IPCC made by 5 leading scientists in Nature. Figaro quotes a leading French scientist who attacks the current process as biased and unfair, given IPCC’s status as a quasi-official body. In another piece, Figaro describes the climate skeptic movement’s attacks on the mainstream consensus (Sorry, the links are to articles in French).
When the British press attacked the IPCC, the US media insofar as they noted the British attacks at all, dismissed newspapers like the Telegraph and the Times as right wing outlets — Fox News in print. What do they say about this latest inconvenient truth: that left wing papers on the Continent increasingly believe that the movement to get a global climate treaty is dead and that the follies, dilettantism and errors of the climate change advocates rather than the churlishness of their critics is to blame?
Nothing.
The blogosphere has shamed some leading US newspapers into paying perfunctory attention to one of the biggest stories in several years. But there’s still no sign that the US press is ready to pursue this still unfolding story with anything like the determination it deserves. Until then, Americans will have to rely on the internet to watch this story unfold — and every day that goes on, the mainstream US media lose readers and respect.