It's been somewhat amusing to observe the dueling narratives of global warming hysterics and their antagonists. The meaningless dispute has been going on for a long time with long periods of relative quiet interrupted by episodes of high dudgeon conflict, and periodic deflations as some ill conceived and poorly executed program collapses.

Recent events in this tawdry story include the deflation of the Kyoto protocol at the last meeting in Montreal, the collapse of European carbon markets and efforts by the British government to revive nuclear power as the only feasible replacement for base load power generation facilities that use natural gas. It's becoming scarce, expensive and subject to political brinkmanship, and the obvious alternative, coal, is unlikely to be clean enough.

Canada, which has missed its Kyoto commitments cynically made by a previous administration though there was never any hope of meeting them, has mooted the idea of withdrawing from Kyoto. Australia has increasingly made light of the older European efforts to constrain society using emissions as the excuse, and like Canada, the US and most of the rest of the large nations looks more to technological solutions than governance solutions as being more sensible and effective than bureaucratic antics.

Media and activist groups - the most hysterical of all - have a lot of loose money and time to produce a steady stream of infotainment and advocacy pieces. Besides, they make money with movies, paraphernalia and contributions. It's big business as well as low religion. A recent movie featuring defeated Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore - a packaging of his lucrative marketing pitch for himself which exploits environmental concerns including climate change - has gotten a lot of support from other media.

But it has also gotten some pointed criticism for the way it plays fast and loose with science - using a carefully selected subset of available data to exaggerate and skew reality - in order to support an otherwise tenuous view. A pair of commercials produced by opponents at the Competitive Enterprise Institute fights fire with fire, presenting an alternative view by using the same methods of data selection and misrepresentation in a sophisticated package that uses imagery as well as text to bolster the alternative message.

Politics is stupid. Narratives are false. Huge amounts of time and energy are being squandered - and producing lots of GHG emissions - but it's big business so it won't stop. It's the ugly side of the attention economy where people make fortunes and gain power without producing any value except perhaps for a kind of entertainment.

I think it's important to grasp that these disputes are not about anything important. The policies advocated by the hysterics are trivial, would do almost nothing to affect climate even if they had everything they wanted. Their ideas are childish, their methods antiquated, their prescriptions puny. But it would be expensive and would increasingly hamstring their opponents. Lots of money would be sloshing around in the slops trough and they would count coup on their enemies.

If you think that climate change is no big deal then it's probably OK for the issue to be just another battle ground for empty headed poseurs on the make for power and wealth. They're always going to be somewhere making a mess of things, there's no getting rid of them. They're like terrorists in that sense: you can't eliminate them so you try to distract them by giving them apparently juicy targets that have no intrinsic worth that they can dissipate their energies attacking. It's fools bait or rope-a-dope so to speak.

However, if you are truly concerned about the climate then this is all an unfortunate waste of time and energy that would be better spent in rational development of effective methods to reduce impacts. All of the resources squandered on infomercials, media extravaganzas and political campaigns could be used in far more effective ways.