World Climate Report » Will the U.N. Chill Out on Climate Change?

10,000 people from 86 countries have descended upon Poznan, Poland for yet-another United Nations meeting on climate change. This time, it’s the annual confab of the nations that signed the original U.N. climate treaty in Rio in 1992. That instrument gave rise to the infamous 1996 Kyoto Protocol on global warming, easily the greatest failure in the history of environmental diplomacy.

Kyoto was supposed to reduce global emissions of carbon dioxide below 1990 levels during the period 2008-2012. But since it was signed, the atmospheric concentration of this putative pollutant continued to rise, pretty much at the same rate it did before Kyoto. (Even if the world had lived up to the letter of the Kyoto law, it would have exerted an influence on global temperature that would have been too small to measure.)

The purpose of the Poznan meeting is to work out some type of framework that goes “Beyond Kyoto.” After completely failing in its first attempt to internationally limit carbon dioxide emissions, the U.N. will propose reductions far greater than those called for by Kyoto. Kyoto failed because it was too expensive, so anything “beyond” will cost much more.
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The bottom line is that the U.N.’s own climate models have failed, barely a year after they were made public. They have demonstrated a remarkable inability to even “predict” the present! Can 10,000 people in Poznan somehow ignore this?

They shouldn’t. Instead they should be thankful. The lack of recent and future warming almost certainly means that the ultimate warming of this century is going to be quite modest. Instead, they should keep in mind that expensive policies to fight a modest climate change will only worsen the unprecedented cold snap affecting the global economy.