A Moment Of Clarity: The case for climate action must be remade from the ground upwards by Ian Katz, The Guardian

What a difference three months makes. Back in November, the world broadly agreed that emissions of carbon dioxide were heating up the planet and that we needed to do something about it, even if we couldn’t agree exactly what. And though we’d had the usual pre-summit rollercoaster ride of dire predictions and naive exhortations (yes, I plead guilty to some of those), even hardheaded types dared to hope that Copenhagen might produce the basis of a global climate treaty.

As late as 7 December, 56 newspapers around the world could declare in a common, Guardian-led editorial: “The politicians in Copenhagen have the power to shape history’s judgment on this generation: one that saw a ­challenge and rose to it, or one so stupid that we saw calamity coming but did nothing to avert it.”

Now, with climate science under siege and climate politics in disarray, that sounds like the rhetoric of another age. The American commentator Walter Russell Mead recently captured the mood: “The global warming movement as we have known it is dead … basically, Sarah Palin 1, Al Gore zip.” A senior British diplomat compares those trying to secure global action on climate change post-Copenhagen to “small groups wandering in different directions around the battlefield like a beaten army”. A leading scientist offers an equally pithy assessment: “Everybody is completely clueless.”