After the Kyoto debacle in Montreal - the world showed no appetite for more bureaucratic Kyoto style wanking - and Blair's change of tack, explicitly recognizing that no nation would hamstring itself to reduce emissions, the climate hysteria industry deflated for a while. More recently a lot of effort has been expended by those with the most to lose if that industry truly collapses.

When the eco-apocalypse meets the New Testament apocalypse, you know something is up. That something is a sense of political desperation among climate change alarmists, as the world slowly turns against them.

If there is any subject more certain than the federal budget process to bring on eye-glaze, it is global warming and the drearily repetitive argument about the Kyoto Protocol to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The issue combines the worst of wonky numerology (parts per million of various gases, complex computer models, opaque cost-benefit analyses), an alphabet soup of unctuous international bureaucracies (IPCC, UNFCCC, SRES, TAR, USGCRP, etc., etc.), and the incessant braying of interest groups. . .

Slowly, most governments are coming around to what has been President George W. Bush's position on the matter since taking office in 2001: The Kyoto Protocol is a nonstarter. With just a few years to go before the end of the initial target date of Kyoto, almost no nation is on course to meet its targets (except those Eastern European nations who saw emissions reductions from shuttering defunct state-owned industries after the Soviet Union dissolved, and even there the trend is again upward). . .

The final game-changer was Bush's successful initiative to launch the Asia-Pacific Partnership (APP) last summer. The APP consists of the United States, China, India, Japan, Australia, and South Korea, which together account for about half of the world's total greenhouse gas emissions. As such the APP represents an alternative to the U.N. process that gave us Kyoto, and may one day put the U.N. climate change process out of business. As the new year began, the APP held its first meeting in Sydney, Australia, and began to articulate an alternative strategy to the Kyoto approach. The APP emphasizes as its first priority economic development and the eradication of poverty. It also struck notes of realism about energy use, observing that "fossil fuels underpin our economies, and will be an enduring reality for our lifetimes and beyond." The partnership members pledged more resources for advanced energy research, but also for work on making current fossil-fuel energy cleaner. The real game afoot behind the APP is probably to accelerate the transfer of advanced technology to India and China, whose greenhouse gas emissions are expected to soar in the coming years if they use current fossil fuel energy technology.

These developments suggest that however more convincing the scientific case for serious global warming may become, most world leaders are recognizing that near-term emissions reductions aren't a sensible way to begin moving to a post-carbon energy future. Twenty or thirty years from now we are likely to look back on the Kyoto Protocol as the climate-policy equivalent of the discredited wage and price controls of the 1970s, even as the climate prediction models themselves may come to resemble the elaborate Keynesian models that were supposed to enable us to fine-tune the economy with perfect precision. The Keynesian understanding of the economy was not wholly wrong, but fell far short of the mastery of detail its backers claimed. Climate alarmists like to warn us of the danger of severe climate "surprises" that may come our way. But if we're really taken by surprise, what does it tell us about the limitations of their models?

Is this recent ratcheting up of climate change whingeing by the old guard a sign of "political desperation among climate change alarmists" as Hayward claims? Maybe, but it is temporary. They aren't going away yet. Most of them have no idea that the changes Hayward cites have even happened. They can even read his essay and still not grok it.

It begins with a survey of the rising profile of global warming, a growing list of bipartisan activists, and a description of the many increasingly confident, hair-raising climate-change stories in the mainstream media.

Out of this he somehow conjures "a sense of political desperation among climate change alarmists, as the world slowly turns against them." Hm? If this is down, then I been down so long it feels like up to me.

This is merely political spin, as Hayward pointed out, but it shows no signs of enlightenment or desperation, just confusion and some skill in kaleidoscope twirling, finding ways to ignore information that could not be rationally discounted. Reason has nothing to do with this conflict.

The issue isn't climate change, it's climate change policy. Hayward does a decent job of exploring that idea while tub-thumping a bit for his favored policy approach. I find this useful since it clarifies what energizes the conflict.

The climate alarmists aren't any more alarmed by climate change than any other informed group, but they seek broad regulatory powers to mobilize the world in a quasi-military way. That requires hysteria, a sense of immanent catastrophe since there is no other way to convince people to grant such powers. Any issue will serve their purpose, climate change is just the current star. In the past they tried to use class war for the same purpose.

The climate change realists, such as Bush has been and Blair has become - the APP group of nations - detest broad regulatory powers, especially if they have a UN/EU taint. It's a warmer war than the cold war, a cool war so to speak, a clash of civilizations in an analogous sense. The UN/EU approach is socialism lite compared to the old Soviet system, but plays a similar role in the world now that the Soviets are gone. Arguably, it's the the centuries old contest between the English and French Monarchies updated for a semi-democratic world: common law vs. civil law.

Common law works better. It makes mistakes, falls short and overshoots, bumbles here and there, but makes better net progress than the more rigid civil law approach that makes fewer but bigger blunders. Also, civil law is less agile and flexible and so less useful in fast changing times.

I hope that the alarmists are marginalized, that they continue to lose influence and that policy increasingly favors the realists because they are more likely to implement effective policies. They take a longer view and are more skillful in developing palatable methods that are more widely adopted. I'd like to see the debate shift to disputes about particular realistic approaches rather than continue as it has as a debate between hysterical alarmists and more pragmatic realists.

There are more than 2 sides to the debate since there are some who wish the realists would be even more realistic, as well as alarmists who want to abandon reason altogether and mobilize as if for climate war. . . and go down fighting. I'd rather not go down at all, and that will require a more sensible approach. The APP is almost a beginning, but some of the domestic energy stuff Bush is trying to sell now (ethanol?) smells kind of porkish and won't help the climate soon if ever. Bio-Char seems a much better approach since it addresses multiple environmental problems and actually reduces atmospheric carbon rather than merely reducing emissions. It turns the wheels backwards, which seems necessary at this point, even if world momentum is still carrying us forward, increasing GHG concentrations.

But maybe Hayward is right. Philip Stott recently said something similar:

There is something in the air, a barely perceptible change, as yet, but a new and most interesting climate-change correlation: the more apocalyptic and silly the media has become about drowning polar bears, a Gulf Stream on 'the rocks', Bacardi freezers, or olive groves ["Who she?" Ed.] in Owdham, the more the public seems to be turning off and getting on with busy and complex lives (while keeping a genuine eye out for avian 'flu - they know 'bugs' are always the real threat). I suddenly sense, through sheer inertia, that there is less of a need to blog.

Strangely, the unrelenting propagation of media-confused climate apocalypses appears to be assisting down-to-earth common sense to return.

That's his UK perspective, added to Hayward's US perspective. Maybe there is something in the air besides GHGs.