Climate change advocates are stuck on stupid.

The "global" problem of climate change is endlessly discussed, but rarely looked at in a cold light. The crux of the matter is that all of us, everywhere, share this same monumental problem. To prosper we need energy security; but if we persist in using fossil-fuels with current technologies, our prosperity will founder.

Cold light? Well, I suppose you could call it that if by cold you mean mental inactivity, as in dead. It isn't certain that by continuing to use fossil fuels that our prosperity will founder. It could even be the opposite. It isn't clear that the air can't be processed to remove some carbon, and it isn't clear that some of the other mechanisms lumped together as geo-engineering won't relieve pressures. It isn't even clear that the net result of warming will not be positive, though there would be huge change as climate zones shifted.

The roadmap drawn up at the Bali climate-change convention on 3-14 December 2007 will show what we need to do to establish the post-Kyoto regime.

It might, but it will have nothing to do with climate change. Kyoto had nothing to do with climate change, and its weans won't either.

The departing United Nations secretary-general Kofi Annan warned in November 2006 of the growing gap between what scientists say is necessary to avoid dangerous climate change and what politicians are willing to do.

Politicians are willing to do anything at all so long as they remain in power. The problem is that there isn't anything they can do that would actually achieve worthwhile climate related objectives. They can sometimes fool the public with rhetoric, but they can't deliver on their promises. This is obvious to those with any grasp of reality, and some of them advise politicians about the risks of making promises that they can't keep. Worse, there are huge costs associated with these ineffective policies. The rhetorical game can only last for a short while until the dire consequences become clear to all.

The window of opportunity to keep the eventual temperature rise below 2 degrees Centigrade - increasingly recognised as the threshold of dangerous climate change - is closing rapidly. It is no exaggeration to say that the fate of the earth and its 6.5 billion citizens largely depends on the success of the United Nations climate-negotiating process being launched in Bali.

This is simply idiotic. The only way that the fate of the world depends on any United Nations effort is if it is not opposed by saner voices and so is allowed to run amok with its half baked schemes. The world would suffer less from completely ignoring climate change than it would from following any UN initiative.

The Bali conference is the ultimate in "talks about talks". Its purpose is not to agree what more should be done to tackle climate change. The political conditions simply do not yet exist for such an agreement. Instead, it will try to agree to launch a negotiating process aimed at reaching such an agreement at the conference of the parties in Copenhagen (COP15) in November-December 2009.

Sure, just like the trade talks. They go on and on, year after year, decade after decade, while accomplishing nothing. In the meantime things progress anyway without UN involvement. The UN and its talks are just a jobs program.

Without agreement on a second commitment period, or an agreement that replaces the protocol and all its mechanisms completely, the world's burgeoning carbon markets would collapse. Agreement is needed by 2009 because of the time it will take for it to be ratified by enough governments to come into force before 2012.

This is the real concern, the only concern. Those who so foolishly got suckered into Kyoto are out on a limb. They haven't reduced their emissions though they have suffered economic loss. The collapse of carbon markets would be yet another loss and a career ending disaster for many politicians and do-gooder groups.

Climate change isn't a political issue. Sure, it's politicized and there are opportunists and grifters in politics cashing in on the threat, but they can't actually do anything about it. In future when we look back on this time we will clearly see the failure of scientists to speak out about the foolishness of the politicians seeking to exploit the issue, just as we now see the foolishness of economists and others who failed to speak out against socialism. There were some who were sincerely deluded, simply mistaken in their ideas. Many others knew full well that it was nonsense but didn't want to make a fuss and so risk their own well being. Isn't there some old saying about evil and good people doing nothing?

Climbing the energy ladder is an ongoing task for humanity. It doesn't take a particularly fertile imagination to see that the current problems are not the end of this task, that humanity will face this repeatedly in future as it has done in the past. The task is always the same: to get to the next screen, which will present a new problem set. The doomers and end-timers most fear that humanity will acquire a functional grasp of this pattern, and so become much more difficult to stampede into supporting foolish short term policies that do not advance civilization but merely enrich a few grifters.

The political effort required for these negotiations to really succeed is on a par with that the west required to win the cold war. That victory involved creating Nato to counter the military threat and the OECD and address the economic and intellectual challenge. It also involved the willingness of western states to spend untold billions on weapons they hoped never to use.

The cold war isn't over. The climate hysterics are the same people fighting on a different front with the same end objective of totalitarian rule of the whole world. What would be the proper analog of NATO to counter this threat? What group will address the economic and intellectual challenges they pose? Who will have the intellectual clarity and courage to call them out and denounce them for their crimes? Their ideas are just as nonsensical, their policy proposals just as harmful to humanity as the old socialists. There are real threats, but their ideas on what to do about them, if implmented, will make those threats worse rather than better, though much blood and treasure would have been spilled.

Few foresaw and fewer still reported the immanent collapse of the eastern European bloc. I wonder if we might not be nearing another inflection point where there is a general awakening and resultant collapse of totalitarian forces. It took most of a century for the failures of socialism to become too dire to deny any longer, but things happen ever faster. We can already see that the Kyoto block has failed to cut emissions while some of those outside the block, such as the USA, are reported to have done better while also making progress in other areas. I think that we have the information needed to refute the Kyoto bloc but it may still be some time before that information penetrates public consciousness.

Not that this would be the end of the old totalitarians. The monsters never really die.

Update:

Debriefed. [via Prometheus]

This week in Bali, Indonesia, delegates are considering climate policy after the Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012. We will witness a well-known human response to failure. Delegates will insist on doing more of what is not working: in this case more stringent emissions-reduction targets, and timetables involving more countries. A bigger and "better" Kyoto will be a bigger and worse failure.

This isn't novel behavior. History is littered with the defunct carcasses of others who have done the same.

Escalation of commitment occurs when people or organizations who have committed resources to a project are inclined to “throw good money after bad” and maintain or increase their commitment to the project, even when its marginal costs exceed marginal benefits (Teger 1980, Camerer and Weber 1999). Escalation of commitment is very similar to the sunk-cost effect. Most research is focused on individual decision making. The main explanation for observed escalation is self-justification (Brockner 1992). The idea of self-justification is that people do not like to admit that their past decisions were incorrect and, therefore, are trying to reaffirm the correctness of those earlier decisions.

Self-justification is part of the problem but not all of it. Many count the imposition of controls as victory even though no climate related good comes of it. Climate was just the excuse to get control.