Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales told Reuters TV that anyone who claims to be an expert will have their identities checked in the wake of the Essjay scandal. (h/t to the NYT's The Lede).

Essjay claimed to be a religion professor, but was actually a 24-year-old college drop-out.

The Beeb's M. Ilyas Khan on the back story over the controversy over a proposal to ban tainted shades on vehicle windows in North Waziristan.

From the BBC:

European Union leaders at a climate change summit in Brussels have agreed to slash carbon dioxide emissions by 20% from 1990 levels by the year 2020.

But a consensus on a binding target for the use of renewable fuels, like wind and solar power, has yet to be reached.

Al Gore has received a spanking lately over his prodigious power use at home. Gregg Easterbrook uses that to launch an argument over how to get the most bang from our climate-changing buck.

Climate change evangelist and Oscar-winner Al Gore has a mansion in Tennesse that positively gobbles electricity. The right has cried hypocrisy!, even though Gore buys clean power and carbon offsets. A climate change author tries to defend him.

From the NYT:

The director of the Fish and Wildlife Service defended the agency requirement that two employees going to international meetings on the Arctic not discuss climate change, saying diplomatic protocol limited employees to an agreed-on agenda.

Two memorandums written about a week ago and reported by The New York Times and the Web site of The Seattle Post-Intelligencer on Thursday set strict parameters for what the two employees could and could not discuss at meetings in Norway and Russia.

The stipulations that the employees “will not be speaking on or responding to” questions about climate change, polar bears and sea ice are “consistent with staying with our commitment to the other countries to talk about only what’s on the agenda,” said the director of the agency, H. Dale Hall.

One of the two employees, Janet E. Hohn, is scheduled to accompany a delegation to Norway led by Julia Gourley of the State Department at a meeting on conserving Arctic animals and plants.

Tina Kreisher, a spokeswoman for the Interior Department, parent of the wildlife service, said the memorandum did not prohibit Ms. Hahn from talking about climate change “over a beer” but indicated that climate was “not the subject of the agenda.”