Climate change

How do you make an imaginary problem so painfully real that everyone suffers? It’s an odd question to ask, you might think, but it’s one that has been exercising some of the brightest minds in the legal firmament, led by no less a figure than Lord Justice Carnwath of the Supreme Court. Last month, at an event whose sinister significance might have passed unnoticed had it not been for the digging of Canadian investigative blogger Donna Laframboise, Carnwath contrived to nudge the world a step closer towards enacting potentially the most intrusive, economically damaging and vexatious legislation in history: an effective global ban on so-called ‘climate change’.

On Tuesday, Pope Francis set foot in the United States for the first time in his life. His plane touched down at Andrews Air Force Base, Maryland, where American presidents depart and arrive on Air Force One. But, according to a Spanish journalist on the papal plane, this was not how Francis had wanted to arrive. He would have preferred to cross over from Tijuana, the grubby Mexican city menaced by drug gangs from which countless migrants slip across the border into California. In other words, if the report is true, the Pope wished to turn his arrival into a political gesture, aligning himself with America’s 11.

Old bags The government announced details of a compulsory 5p charge for single-use plastic bags in shops. Plastic bags have only been around since 1960, when they were first produced by the Swedish firm Akerlund and Rausing, later to give the world the Tetrapak. The first store to use them was Strom, a shoe-shop chain whose owner had complained paper bags were too weak. The first plastic bags had cord handles; a design with integral handle was patented in 1965 by the Swedish company Celloplast, which went on to enjoy a decade of monopoly. Places of refuge David Cameron said that Britain would take 20,000 more Syrian refugees over the next five years. According to UN High Commissioner for Refugees, the UK had a population of 126,055 in 2013, the 25th highest in the world. Who had the most?

Climate change is the subject of a complex debate in which, increasingly, experts disagree with each other. Nearly all of them believe in man-made global warming, but they're not sure how bad the problem is or how to tackle it. Meanwhile, the 'sceptics' are no longer dominated by scientifically illiterate amateurs. Many of them believe in anthropogenic global warming, though they don't think it's happening today. So you'd expect the BBC's 'Environment and Energy Analyst', Roger Harrabin, to proceed with caution. Not so. Here are two tweets he sent out yesterday (links here and here): Quentin Letts is the Daily Mail's parliamentary sketchwriter and theatre critic, celebrated for his sometimes caustic but more often gentle wit.

'The Church has got no mandate from the Lord to pronounce on scientific matters.' In that one sentence, Cardinal Pell puts his finger on what is wrong with Laudato Si', Pope Francis's encyclical on the environment. In that document, Francis waded into an argument about climate change and took sides. Moreover, he gave the impression that he was speaking for all Catholics when he did so; and, if by any chance he wasn't, errant faithful should fall into line. In an interview in Thursday's Financial Times, the Prefect of the Secretariat for the Economy stepped out of line. See above. It was a brave thing to do: Pell's wholesale reform of the Vatican's finances is making him plenty of enemies as it is, and now he's even more vulnerable to attack. Why take the risk?