My Baltic tour continued today in Riga. This morning I saw the Latvian prime minister, Valdis Dombrovskis – who, irritatingly, is eight years younger than me – he’s 37. It was all charmingly informal. I turned up at the government offices and said “I have come to see the prime minister”, several times very slowly to the security guard on the door. Eventually he understood, pointed at the stairs and waved three fingers at me – which I accurately interpreted as meaning “third floor”. When I got up there, a woman popped out of an office and introduced herself as the PM’s secretary and went to fetch me a cup of coffee. After a while, a man in short sleeves and glasses wandered into the office. I did vaguely wonder whether he was a computer technician, since he had a faintly geeky air. But when he said, “well we might as well get started”, it struck me that that this must – in fact – be the prime minister himself.

Our talk was off-the-record, and I’m saving the serious stuff on the Baltics for my newspaper column on Tuesday. So let me just say it was really interesting, and move swiftly on.

This afternoon I gave a talk on international politics at a wonderful second-hand book-store in Riga, run by my old colleague from the FT and The Economist, Robert Cottrell. It is called appropriately enough, “Robert’s Books” and I would recommend that you drop by, if you are ever in Riga. In those rare moments when Robert is not dealing with customers (one of whom has just charmingly bought Harry Potter and a set of essays by the German Freudian psychologist, Alfred Adler), he runs the excellent web-site The Browser – which I must remember to add to my own blogroll.

PS – Fulham won 3-0.

Over the last couple of years I have been gradually transferring my loyalties from Chelsea football club to Fulham. Fulham have several advantages over Chelsea – their tickets are cheap and easy to get hold of, their ground is picturesque and closer to my house, and their supporters – unlike Chelsea’s thuggish, hyped-up followers – are amiable and philosphical.

So sharing a flight out to to Lithuania today with Fulham supporters was no hardship. Far from being the stereotypical English football hooligans, many of the Fulham fans seemed to be of pensionable age. I suppose pensioners are the only group with the time to take three days off in the middle of the week to see Fulham play an obscure Lithuanian team, in an obscure European competition. The match is on tomorrow (or possibly today, it’s late.)

I would love to be able to say that I too am here solely to watch 90 minutes of football. But, alas, I think I’m going to miss the game. One of the Fulham fans asked me why I was flying to Vilnius. I did not reply – “To interview the president” – since that sounded a bit poncey. But, actually, that is the reason. I am meant to be doing a lunch with the FT with Dalia Grybauskaite tomorrow – it should appear in the paper some time in the next few months. (Features can have rather leisurely deadlines.) We should have plenty to talk about. I read in today’s paper that the Lithuanian economy has shrunk by 22.4% since this time last year, which sounds pretty drastic.

The phrase “climate change denier” has a nasty ring to it. It links those who dispute mainstream science on global warming with “Holocaust deniers”. They are not just wrong, it implies, they are evil.

But the climate change lobby is in the grip of its own form of dangerous fantasy. It is in denial not about science – but about international politics.

At the moment, efforts to deal with global warming are focused on a huge international summit in Copenhagen in December. But the chances of Copenhagen delivering a deal that meets the goals for carbon dioxide emissions set by the United Nations Panel on Climate Change is vanishingly small. In private, many climate change activists will admit this. But Copenhagen is the only game in town – so they keep playing.

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I thought Sarah Palin’s farewell speech as governor of Alaska was an astonishing performance – and I don’t mean that in a good way. There have been times when Palin has been able to perform adequately in public; her acceptance speech at the Republican convention, and her debate with Joe Biden are examples. But this was Sarah Palin unplugged, and it was not a pretty sight.

Her early unscripted remarks were so inarticulate that they barely made sense. Some of what she had to say was comic, such as her suggestion that she would guard the interests of Alaskans with the ferocity of a grizzly bear guarding it cubs. Some of it was faintly sinister, such as her attempt to suggest that her critics in the press were betraying American troops abroad. The logic was that the troops are fighting to defend freedom, including freedom of the press. But Palin’s press critics are lying and therefore abusing that freedom. Therefore they are betraying the troops.

The second half of her speech was marginally more coherent, as she outlined her achievements as governor and her hopes for the nation. Perhaps she was using an autocue, by that stage – or perhaps she had simply got into her stride. I got the impression that she is definitely positioning herself for a run at the presidency. Certainly she hit all the key themes – guns, God, patriotism, the military, small government, voluntarism, distrust of Washington.

I also think that if the economy is really bad in 2012, she would have a genuine shot at winning the White House. Scary is an over-used word. But that really is a scary thought.