This observation, famously made by Talleyrand at the Congress of Vienna as the powers debated the fate of the turncoat King of Saxony, reminded the crowned heads of Europe that all of them had at one time or another worked with Napoleon.  Talleyrand himself had served the emperor as foreign minister and trusted ally before [...]

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 [...]

The Washington Post this morning has a strong story on the collapse of the movement to stop climate change through a binding treaty negotiated under UN auspices.  And even the normally taciturn New York Times is admitting that the resignation of the top UN climate change negotiator suggests that no global treaty will be coming [...]

An editorial in today’s New York Times acknowledges something that everybody who doesn’t read the Times has known for several weeks now: sloppy work by climate scientists and the IPCC has severely dented public confidence in climate science generally, and has undermined the political prospects for government action on the issue.
Climate skeptics won’t be happy [...]

This is the question that Blake Hounshell of Foreign Policy magazine is asking on his blog.  You can read it for yourself here;  it makes me want to paraphrase something FDR once said when an official sent him a nasty resignation.  “Tell him to go find out from Dean Acheson how a gentleman resigns,” said [...]

I know, I know, it’s a dog bites man story at this point, but today the New York Times came out with its weekly special section devoted to Science.  There was a story in there about some schoolchildren and a giant prehistoric frog, a review of some recent developments in Cretan archaelogy, a fascinating story [...]

The New York Times turned down the Watergate story, giving the Washington Post ownership of the story of the decade.  Now the Washington Post is going for a repeat, scooping the somnolent Times on the Climategate story.  The Post story by Juliet Eilperin and David A. Farenholdt is no skeptic’s dream, but Post readers now [...]

Foreign Policy, another pillar of the American journalistic establishment (and another magazine that publishes my work when it can’t find anything better to print) has come out with a substantial piece on-line that places the blame for the meltdown of public confidence in climate science where it belongs: with bad procedures at the IPCC and [...]

It had to happen and today the Associated Press has given the American public at large its first good look at a story that has been old news for weeks in countries where the media is more alert.  The story, by Seth Borenstein doesn’t cover all the angles, but it does a very good job [...]

Readers of The New York Times learned something this morning that millions of people in the UK have known for some time, not to mention of the millions of Americans following the story on the web.  But they didn’t learn much about it, or learn enough to begin to think through the consequences for American [...]

It’s not just the threat of Himalayan glaciers disappearing by 2035.
Now another headline grabbing IPCC scare story is melting away.  A report in Sunday’s London Times highlights new humiliations for the IPCC.
“The most important is a claim that global warming could cut rain-fed north African crop production by up to 50% by 2020, a remarkably [...]

Once again, there’s been an overwhelming deluge of responses to one of my posts on climate change.  I apologize if we weren’t able to review and post all the comments as quickly as I would have liked.  I was away from the GHQ yesterday giving some talks up at West Point yesterday.  This is one [...]

Over on his blog at Foreign Policy, the always interesting and engaging political scientist Daniel Drezner raises some important questions about science and politics.  Drezner looks at the interaction between populist critics of the science consensus and the guardians of that consensus — specifically at the debate between those who think that vaccinations may promote [...]

The London Times reports that John Sauven, the head of Greenpeace UK is demanding that Rajendra Pachauri resign as chairman of the IPCC.

As the director of Greenpeace UK puts it: “The IPCC needs to regain credibility. Is that going to happen with Pachauri [as chairman]? I don’t think so. We need someone held [...]

Sam Roggeveen, a terrific blogger at The Lowy Institute (Australia’s premier foreign policy think tank) thinks I’ve gone too far in critiquing the weaknesses of the international system.  Just because the international system hasn’t solved problems like slavery and piracy — to say nothing of proliferation and war — Sam argues, is no reason to [...]