The Age, Melbourne, Australia, on greenhouse gases:

Late this year, the people of the Carteret Islands gave up. Rising seas had turned their home, low-lying atolls off Papua New Guinea, into a salty and difficult place to live. The decision was made to move, 10 families at a time, to drier ground on nearby Bougainville.

These islanders were just one of nature's many victims in 2005. From creeping oceans to terrifying hurricanes, this was the year Mother Nature reminded us who has the upper hand. ...

While you can never categorically attribute one weather event to global warming — the system is too chaotic — the events of this year revealed the human hand on the climate levers.

In 2005, research found that levels of carbon dioxide, the main global-warming gas, were higher than at any time in the past 625,000 years. In Australia, it was the hottest year since records began. Signs of a warming world were everywhere: widespread coral bleaching in the Caribbean, Arctic sea ice shrinking to record-low levels; glaciers on Greenland and the West Antarctic Ice Sheet suddenly racing towards the sea and melting.

Against this backdrop, the world's nations met in Montreal this month to discuss the future of the Kyoto Protocol, the international agreement to cut global warming pollution. The United States' negotiators did their best to block action and stymie talks on a post-Kyoto agreement. But despite these efforts, and Australia's, Kyoto survived and will be extended into something more ambitious.

So what needs to be done? Another year has passed, and with it, 7.5 trillion kilograms of carbon dioxide has been released into the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels. The window of opportunity to turn around the slow-moving beast that is the climate system exists only for the next ten years.

The public mood is shifting, ever so slowly, on global warming, but there is a disconnect between people's concern and their behaviour.

Daily Telegraph, London, on aid to Africa:

We can see why David Cameron was keen to involve Bob Geldof in his commission on global poverty. Mr. Geldof has extraordinary appeal: a hero of the anti-capitalist movement, he is also a successful businessman, a Daily Telegraph reader, a Euro-sceptic and a knight.

The trouble is that, on the central question of how to alleviate Third World poverty, he is wrong. In 1985, through Live Aid, Mr. Geldof raised (millions) for Africa.

Not every penny was wisely spent, of course: man is fallen, and some of the relief funds doubtless ended up in Swiss bank accounts. But at least it was a private initiative, based on the generosity of individuals. As such, it worked pretty well: having handed over our donations, we wanted to know that they were being put to good use.

Twenty years later, Live Aid had turned into Live 8. Mr. Geldof was no longer demanding: "Give us yer f-----' money." Instead, he wanted us to bully our governments into handing over their taxpayers' money. Worse, he wanted us to campaign for precisely the kind of protectionism in the developing world that he rightly decries in Europe.

In short, he was less interested in individual virtue than in bigger government and more restricted trade. Yet it was precisely these socialist policies that reduced Africa to its present sorry state.

Mr. Cameron now has an opportunity to develop a distinctive centre-Right approach that might actually work. Africa needs secure property rights, limited government, action against state monopolies and cronyism and, above all, independent mechanisms for judicial arbitration through which the citizen can realistically seek redress.

Grants of aid that are not conditional on the development of these things are worse than nothing, for they stave off reform. We are not counselling inaction — on the contrary, we were among the earliest advocates of the debt cancellation initiative. But public policy ought to be aimed at ameliorating the lives of Africans, not at making Westerners feel better about themselves.