One of the things that has increasingly reduced the credibility of scientists, and science journals, is their bald political advocacy that abuses science.

Progress on forging a strong, global treaty to fight climate change has been painfully slow. But before deciding who is to blame, consider what happened when Manfred Milinski asked teams of university students to save the planet from a climate catastrophe. Milinski, director of the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Biology in Plön, Germany, wanted to see if the students could join together to tackle such a problem, which can only be solved through cooperation. And they had to do it on a shoestring budget of just 40 euros each.

There is zero reason to think that a climate catastrophe could be solved by politics, which these confused pseudo-scientists mislabel as "cooperation". There are however reasons to believe that such problems can be solved if politicians are not allowed to control societies. Cooperation would be better applied to diverse voluntary efforts driven by shared insights and goals than to brute force political machinations.

The future of the climate wasn't actually in these students' hands — and it turns out this was a good thing. This was just an experiment, in a burgeoning field called behavioural economics. Studies such as this, and computer simulations from the related field of game theory, can be used to explore when people are likely to cooperate or stubbornly refuse to be a team player.

Declining to join a deluded group can not reasonably be considered to be refusing to be a team player. Using such language is a political effort to demonize other potential political groups and is utterly unhelpful in a problem solving scenario.

And although these games are far removed from the messy world of politics, they provide insight into which strategies are likely to succeed in climate negotiations, where the future really is at stake.

This was merely a political exercise, as all involved are well aware. To them politics is all there is.

The students in Milinski's experiment1 were told that unless they contributed to a fund to cut emissions, the world would almost certainly suffer catastrophic climate change. "It was a scenario like in The Day After Tomorrow," says Milinski, referring to the disaster movie where sudden climate change causes the collapse of ice sheets, flooding New York City and triggering mass migration.

No one in their right mind would give much credibility to such claims. When politicians tell you that the end is near we all know that this is false, a ploy to frighten people into doing things that they would never do if they weren't panicked into them by disinformation from "authorities".

Milinski's experiment was simplistic. Sparing the real world from a dangerous climate change would never be all-or-nothing. But in other ways, the students' challenge was much easier than that faced by negotiators heading to Copenhagen this December, where they are tasked with reaching an effective, and equitable, treaty.

The idea of "reaching an effective, and equitable, treaty" is just as simplistic. It can't happen under any conditions since treaties won't be effective or equitable. That's a brain dead fantasy. The sole objective of the climate opportunists is to increase political power. They know full well that their efforts will be neither effective or equitable, that's just happy talk.

The key to getting the process moving, studies on cooperation suggest, is to work on the carrots and sticks. The Kyoto Protocol — a 1992 agreement aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions, effective from 2005 to 2012 — includes, for example, an incentive in the form of the Clean Development Mechanism. Through this arrangement, countries can buy carbon credits, which are meant to pay for emissions reductions in developing countries, and allow the richer countries to delay cutting their own emissions. Also, if countries miss their targets under Kyoto, they're supposed to be penalized in the next agreement, and have to cut their emissions even more in the next phase, after 2012.

But so far the carrots have not been tasty enough, it seems, nor the sticks very menacing.

Obviously. There is no set of carrots and sticks that could be effective. What these amateurs don't seem to grasp is systems dynamics. You need to do iterative games and think in terms of evolutionary game theory since the games aren't just played once, they are played over and over again, have been played many times before the current time and will be played forever after. The initial conditions vary for all players and cannot be known in useful detail by others. After each iteration the situation changes for everyone due to that experience. There may or may not be any evolutionarily stable outcome that might be arrived at over time, and even that stability would be highly contingent. All is flux.

Now, an increasing number of economists are calling for "bottom-up" approaches, involving agreements between smaller groups of countries. "I'm pretty sure it's a mistake to try to get more than a dozen major parties to negotiate," says Schelling. It would be better to stick to "the European Union, United States, Canada, Japan, Australia, Russia and maybe China, India, Brazil, and Indonesia", he says.

Better, but still hopeless. After all, the EU can't even manage itself. It's goals are merely "aspirational", political double talk to delude the public into thinking that the hysteria that politicians whipped up will be soothed by agreements that no one can or will actually honor.

It's time for some good faith reasoning from valid premises. It's time to send the politicians home and cut their budgets so that they can't squander so many resources and create so much pollution jetting around to conferences and living the life of royalty. This wasteful and boring game should be ended. Fail.