As thousands gather in Cancun to sip Margaritas on taxpayers' money and "work" on a new climate treaty to replace Kyoto, some of the smarter liberals who believe the anthropogenic global warming theory are throwing in the towel on the hopeless boondoggle.  Walter Russell Mead of the Council on Foreign Relations and Yale University  has fascinating essay in the liberal journal The American Interest, bemoaning the stupidity and incompetence of the green advocates, all the while believing that global warming threatens our future.

The whole UN treaty process is increasingly being seen as a colossal and humiliating blunder.  Embarrassed environmentalists are finding it harder and harder to pretend that this particular parrot is only, as the Monty Python skit put it, ‘pining for the fjords.'  Worse, some of the smarter greens out there are realizing that the UN process is not going to disappear just because it is a dead end.

The mainstream press has all along been the key point of failure.  The press consistently failed to subject SOK [Son of Kyoto - Mead's name for the proposed follow-up global warming treaty] proponents to basic common-sense questioning; arguably this dereliction of duty is to blame for whatever additional climate change results from wasted years and lost credibility.  The view that environmental reporters have been captured by their subject and have become clueless cheerleaders rather than critical observers was widely shared by their colleagues, reports a must-read piece by Margot O'Neill, an Australian journalist and climate change proponent who spent a year studying environmental journalism in Britain.  The Climategate scandal of hacked email plus the ludicrous and unvetted IPCC claims about melting Himalayan glaciers led to a newsroom backlash against climate reporters who told O'Neill that their colleagues responded with "dirty looks, a "sense of betrayal", accusations that climate reporters had "gone native," and cries that "you told me the science was settled - and it isn't!"   As one British print journalist summed it up, "Climate-gate was extremely damaging in many ways. It gave the impression that journalists had been duped. I think in the end it was mountains out of mole-hills but it looked really bad."