Settled

According to the BBC:

The Earth's surface really is getting warmer, a new analysis by a US scientific group set up in the wake of the "Climategate" affair has concluded.
[...] Funding came from a number of sources, including charitable foundations maintained by the Koch brothers, the billionaire US industrialists, who have also donated large sums to organisations lobbying against acceptance of man-made global warming.
[...]Since the 1950s, the average temperature over land has increased by 1C, the group found.

Although there are caveats -- the work hasn't been peer reviewed, for example -- because its claims are not extraordinary, and corroborate previous studies, this suggests to me that this is copper bottomed science. Now, the scepticism about AGW -- whether this change is driven by humans or by sun spots -- will remain, but it has fewer boltholes to run into.
Whatever one's politics, one will have to take climate change into account, and responding to it will become the governing imperative of the century. Hopefully now no-one (especially a front rank politician) will be able to dispute climate change science with any credibility.

One world

This is a fascinating little story - the Micronesian federation - lots of tiny pacific islands which will fall beneath the sea as global tides rise - have raised the issue of the Czech Republic boosting a coal power plant. I'll let someone else tell the story:

Micronesia noted CEZ's coal-fired plant at Prunerov in the north of the republic was the 18th biggest source of greenhouse gases in the European Union, emitting about 40 times more carbon dioxide than the entire Pacific island federation.

OK, to politics - the first is that the idea of countries a hemisphere apart being environmental neighbours is important - the air is global, the climate is global. We are all locked into one spaceship Earth, and we need the common means to control it.

Whilst the Tragedy of the Commons is seriously disputed nowadays, the atmosphere is an excellent example of a commons, and externality that can be ruined by untrammeled free action.

Sadly, in a world of nation states, the narrow interest of the Czech Republic in the short term will trump any longer term concern they may have about climate change - those Bohemian mountains aren't going to fall under the sea any time soon. Commonise costs, privatise profits. Common ownership, and democratic control of the worlds air is needed, and I think this story illustrates way.