George W. Bush is justly famous for his tendency cheerily to dismiss uncomfortable realities, but even by his standards, his comments on Thursday on climate change showed astonishing chutzpah. The Bush administration has consistently obstructed progress in fighting climate change: first withdrawing from the Kyoto Protocol; then attempting to argue that the science was too dubious a basis for action; finally arguing for a voluntary approach that was bound to prove inadequate. Yet listening to Mr Bush now, one would have thought that the US had long led the charge against climate change. It is hard to know whether to laugh or cry.

Mr Bush’s only firm proposal was to get the key players to sit around the table within the next 18 months, with the aim of agreeing a global emissions target. By US standards this is radical. The rest of the industrialised world already has such a target, of course, and has had it for over a decade. It is set out in the 1996 Kyoto agreement, which Mr Bush himself has done everything in his power to destroy.