The Disingenuous Environmentalist Bjorn Lomborg has once again celebrated a public epiphany on climate change, bringing him. once again, to the conclusion that the globe is warming, that humans are to blame and that we - especially we rich people - shouldn't do anything about it.

In Lomborg's latest feint, he suckered some reporter at London's Financial Times into reporting that he has broken common cause with the "climate sceptics" and called for an a global agreement on climate change in this December's Kyoto negotiations in Copenhagen.

But if you read the details, his position is the same as ever: that it would be a "mistake" to try to get rich countries to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. Lomborg's choice is to concentrate on every other thing - and especially to think about ignoring the problem in the short term, putting our energies into adaptation and "weighing up whether emission cuts are cheaper to do now or later."

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has joined UK Prime Minister Tony Blair and EU commission president Jose Manuel Barroso in urging Europe to take the lead in the fight against climate change at this week’s European Union summit. As a first step, EU leaders are expected to endorse a 20 per cent reduction in carbon emissions by 2020 from 1990 levels.

Four years of double-digit growth have heightened fears of greenhouse-gas pollution enveloping cities and degradation of scarce water supplies.