Times (UK): Gordon Brown has delivered his first big speech on the environment, and Ban Ki Moon, the UN Secretary-General, has given warning that if humanity doesn’t tackle climate change it will be “on the verge of a catastrophe”. But does such high-level agonising encourage citizens to push for collective political action? No, according to Andrew Szasz, professor of sociology at the University of California, Irvine. Instead, he suggests that repeated pronouncements have bred a “strange, new …