Climate Calumny

The Bush administration is doing its best to keep the United Nations on message as regards global warming. The US government is lobbying the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to forget about binding treaties, cutting emissions, legal constraints on profiteering, and all those other tedious matters with which the Bush administration has never deigned to concern itself. The Vicar of Downing Street is said to be in favour of "a new worldwide climate treaty based on binding targets to reduce emissions"; but doubtless he will prove as flexible as ever now that the Bush administration has made its wishes known. The Bush administration thinks that we should tackle global warming by "putting a giant screen into orbit, thousands of tiny, shiny balloons, or microscopic sulphate droplets pumped into the high atmosphere to mimic the cooling effects of a volcanic eruption", preferably by voluntary means, and despite the fact that, in its latest report, the IPCC "tends to overstate or focus on the negative effects of climate change." The IPCC has described the Bush administration's ideas as "speculative, uncosted and with potential unknown side-effects", even though they come from the very people who brought us Operation Iraqi Liberation.