The inneffectual UN chief Ban Ki-Moon is jockeying to become the latter-day caped crusader that saves Planet Earth. Yet even his own staff believe he's a man who rarely grasps the facts of any issue. Just the man to take over from Al Gore then.

All of this is summed up in my/our latest piece just published here this morning over at Human Events. Here's a taster:

“We have just four months. Four months to secure the future of our planet,” Ban pronounced to the Global Environment Forum -- what we in the UK call a ‘Quango’, a Quasi-automomous, non-governmental organization or ‘unelected bureaucracy’.  We are facing “Droughts, floods, and other natural disasters” as well mass social unrest, violence and “incalculable” human suffering, warned Ban.  All of which will result, Ban claimed, if the world fails to “seal a deal” on climate change in December.

With that the UN General Secretary -- Greenpeace note -- jetted off to Norway to draw attention to the melting polar ice cap where, unfortunately, severe weather conditions led to a trip to the North Pole being put on ice.  Non-plussed, Ban informed his Norwegian audience: “We may have a virtually ice-free Arctic in 30 years”. Ban did not seem to know that the Arctic sea-ice is half a million kilometres greater in extent than it was this time last year. And his hosts were clearly too polite to inform him that their ancestors were growing crops in Greenland over a millennia ago. Nor did Ban explain why he picked the Arctic rather than the world’s far larger greatly expanded ice mass of the Antarctic.