The apparent victory of Viktor Yanukovych in yesterday’s Ukrainian presidential election is yet another setback to the idea that the world is rapidly becoming a more democratic place.  The candidate whose fraudulent claims of victory in 2005 led to the much hailed “Orange Revolution” of 2004.  Losing candidate Yulia Tymoshenko has vowed to challenge the […]

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 […]

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 […]

According to a recent Gallup poll, 55 percent of Americans want Congress to put health care reform aside for a while.  Only 39 percent want the Democrats to struggle on.The majority is right.  The problem isn’t that the bills in the House and Senate are too sweeping.  The problem is that they are so timid […]

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 in […]

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 […]

The collapse of the climate change movement is entering a new stage: the liberal media is waking up to the story.  Slowly.This, in a nutshell, is what’s happened.  A whole series of missteps and misjudgments at two of the leading institutions of the climate change universe (the UN’s International Panel on Climate Change and the […]

It was a quiet Tuesday today in Queens until I stumbled upon this very sleek video and the walls of Mead Manor shook with the pounding beats of what my young staffer told me was ‘electronic’ music. As my readers may know, I have been writing about the 10 global trends that will shape the […]

Judging by the comments, my post yesterday on the death of global warming did not make everybody happy.  Some readers thought I went too far, cavalierly dismissing the work of thousands of scientists over many decades — a typical example, one reader noted, of Ivy League arrogance since without anything more than a BA in […]