When rational people give up, all that is left are zealots - that means the conduct of some nations at the 17th Conference of the Parties (COP-17) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) could be a sign reasonable discussion of controlling emissions are out the window.

It has been hoped for years that a meaningful successor to the Kyoto agreement could be in reach soon but it's a little silly to have the world's top CO2 emitter exempt from CO2 emissions cutbacks - not to mention India, Brazil and Mexico, who are also exempt and don't want that to change, since they are much poorer than China and China remains exempt.

When the Copenhagen talks collapsed in 2009 it instead began to look like what I said early in the last decade; the Kyoto agreement was an economic action and a not a science one.  The target date was not arbitrary at all, France and Germany insisted on it because it was post-unification for Germany, so they simply had to cut some East German Soviet-era factories and France had more nuclear plants come online after that date.   With other large emitters being exempt, the only country hurt would have been America, where anti-science hippies drove out nuclear power and directly caused the boost in coal and CO2 emissions in the first place.

Now, no one is buying it.  The world has seen what a modern world with 1990 CO2 emissions looks like - and it isn't pretty.   America is at 1995 emission levels and if you are part of the 20% unemployed, you wish we had manufacturing here again. 

The plain truth is that if the only thing this UN committee will do is ask for a fund to redistribute 'climate aid'.  In 2009, earnest activist/journalists were rationalizing why they had to fly to Copenhagen ("relationships', they determined earnestly, made them need to go even if it pained them so because they were causing pollution) but now few people bothered to go.   

That isn't a good sign.  The problem has not gone away, but activists and journalism/blogging science cheerleaders shouting 'Holocause denier' and 'Flat Earther' at anyone who suggested CO2 was not some magical knob in climate have turned off the public.

In response, some journalists and the activists at the UN think the solution is to get even more shrill and partisan in their rhetoric, and make even more outrageous demands of member nations regarding lower emissions.  It isn't the way positive policy changes get done but it just may be that the Blogging Generation of young scientists and journalists who are attending this conference simply haven't discovered the real world yet.

Ad Hoc Working Group on Long-term Cooperative Action under the Convention - UNFCCC