Leaving aside possible criminal charges involving attempts to avoid FOI requests, there are all sorts of legal options in the UK and US alike for people wanting to challenge the way public funds have been invested in academic work on Climate Change which (it seems) fails to meet respectable standards of integrity.

In a word, lawsuits.

Back in the world of diplomacy, here is another former British Ambassador in Moscow (Sir Rod Lyne being busy on the Chilcot Inquiry), Sir Tony Brenton, describing the way the Copenhagen process will work in practice:

Sometime towards the end of the Copenhagen climate conference, Michael Zammit Cutajar, a Maltese diplomat and conference chairman, will gather 20 or so people into a back room of the Bella Conference Centre for an all-night session (or two) to do the deal. All the noise and the posturing, the 20,000 delegates, the lobbyists, the dramatic green demonstrators, the 180-page legal negotiating text, will be shut outside.

Those 20 people — representatives of the world’s key climate-change governments — will have in front of them perhaps a ten-page text. They will agree, or not, on greenhouse gas emissions limits for developed countries, financial assistance for developing countries and emissions constraints that developing countries are willing to take on in exchange for that assistance.

If they find agreement they will sell it to the wider conference and then to the wider world. It will set our course for at least the decade to come.

Nicely put.

And of course at this level of abstraction the issues become less about Climate and more about psychology and bluff.

Each of those twenty people will be desperate to avoid being blamed for a Failure. So pressure to strike some sort of deal – any deal – is huge. This will tend to override common sense and the fact that it is not their money they are planning to give away. 

Most of them will know little about the science, or about the economic theories on how best to pay now for benefits (and costs) which might accrue many decades in the future.

Instead, a murky game of bluff.

Non-whites will be insisting that whites have basically caused the problem and that whites basically have to pay for fixing it.

Whites will be saying that even if that is the case, the non-whites can’t expect much if they too do not take on a fair share of stopping pollution as it soars in the fast-developing parts of the developing world.

Sulky accord of some sort having been reached on those points of principle, they then start haggling over the price. No doubt with a cynical thought at the back of their minds that all that zany Climategate stuff is going to reduce even further the Obama Administration’s appetite and capacity to do too much on the legislative front.

Promises and undertakings and targets will all be established, with everyone knowing that the chances of them being reached in practice are modest.

Some people will be better at convincing others of their sincerity in making the attempt to hit those targets.

Other people will be better at being obdurate to the bitter end, just to see what size bung they can be thrown to sign up.

The result? Tony Brenton again:

So outright failure is unlikely. But it is equally unlikely that Copenhagen will get us right around the climate corner. The probability has to be, at best, an interim deal with lots of work still to do.

Which rather assumes that there is agreement on what has to be done and why it well help. Will the current Consensus start to unravel in the months and years to come in those courtrooms?

If you have got this far and want More, read this excellent post over at Devil’s Kitchen by Pedant-General which talks through the logic of the whole business at some length.

In particular P-G looks at the central question: even if we are sure that Climate Chnage is Bad and we think that human action can make it better, should we act boldly now (mitigate) or merely adapt as we go, keeping our options open?

Thus

  • the worse the climate situation is, the greater the cost of mitigation and the more attractive it is to go for adaptation. This is the oddity with the Stern Report. If his numbers are correct, we’re either doing enough for mitigation already or we shouldn’t be doing it at all. As the shrieking gets louder, the costs of mitigation inevitably rise and the argument gets stronger AGAINST mitigation.

    Something for those twenty lucky souls to chat about during the coffee break.

  • Finally we get to the politics and the Bjorn Lomborg position. Even if it is all ghastly, there are many more important things to do with our resources. Millions really actually will die from preventable water-borne diseases, malnutrition and malaria and we really actually can do something about those. Buggering about with the climate, although it definitely will be expensive, is desperately uncertain both in terms of its effectiveness and the lives it will save. That’s not a good trade off.