The U S of A, still the world’s greatest power, just, is where everything including conspiracy theories are the grandest from the JFK assassination to the rigged landing on the Moon.

Now here’s food for more conspiratorial thought. A space observatory – which would have tried to work out where earth’s carbon dioxide was being absorbed and how – would also have had the capacity to monitor how well which countries were doing in observing their international commitments to carbon emissions. It has crashed into the Southern Ocean before sending back any data.

America has been one of the biggest offenders – certainly under the appalling Bush administration – of doing little or nothing, relatively speaking, about its own gargantuan use of fossil fuels, after hard lobbying by big business.

As the one western, liberal democracy, which has every reason not to have its carbon footprint photographed as a dark smear across the blue planet, the suspicious among US citizens would have been blogging their fears about sabotage before the waves of the Southern Ocean smoothed over the splash.