How about that Kyoto Protocol, huh? First the Americans and the Australians refuse to sign it, then Russia wants out. Canada's new Prime Minister, who's about as green as Canadians get (and that makes it a pretty deep green), says he doesn't like it, either.

Then there are the failures to reach emissions cutback targets. The greener-than-thou countries of the EU failed miserably. Only two countries in the world seem to have been able to live up to their promises - Sweden and Britain. Yet individual environmentalists and environmental groups the world over are as committed as ever to Kyoto. Their opinion of American President George Bush's environmental policies dipped deeply when he said he wouldn't sign it, and, far from recovering with time, has been on a steady run downhill ever since.

So what is it with this treaty? Why won't it work? Why is it so controversial? You have to understand right from the beginning that Kyoto is about global warming - and that's what one American Senator, James Inhofe of Oklahoma, calls “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people”. I don't think he's right - I think the Y2K bug was the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people, the European people and any other person on the face of the earth who happened to own a computer. But that's another story.

If Senator Inhofe sounds like a nut to you, you'd be wrong. Actually, he's one of the best-informed Senators on the science and economics of global warming. And what he says about global warming is correct, in the sense that the certainty of many environmentalists that global warming is being caused by carbon dioxide emissions, and that we face disaster if they are not reduced, is misplaced. There is no such scientific certainty.

The globe is warming - there isn't a lot of wiggle room in that discussion - and carbon dioxide emissions do cause the temperature on the planet to rise. But carbon dioxide is not, therefore, a pollutant … some Satanic gas that the people of the earth should search out and destroy wherever it is hiding. In fact, the comfortable atmosphere of the earth depends on its warming properties, and those of water vapour. If they weren't present in the atmosphere, it would be so cold that all water on the earth would be frozen. Human life would almost certainly not have developed. And those who took chemistry in school will remember that carbon dioxide is essential to plant life in this important respect: without it, there wouldn't be any.

What can be accurately be said about carbon dioxide and global warming is this: since carbon dioxide causes warming, there is a possibility - and no more than a possibility - that too much of it in the atmosphere might lead to a too-warm planet.

The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is increasing. There is about a third more now than there was before the Industrial Age, and there is no doubt that the increase is down to human activity. But you cannot jump from there to blaming carbon dioxide for our current global warming without some scientifically-certain link between the two, and so far, there isn't one.

There are a couple of difficulties standing in the way of concluding that the link exists and is dangerous to the Earth. First, the Earth's climate is constantly changing, going through successive warming and cooling cycles over long periods of time. We don't understand why very well, but we do understand that there are a number of contributing factors, perhaps including changes in solar output and variations in Earth's tilt and orbit. Increasing carbon dioxide is one possible explanation, but it has also credibly been suggested (for example, in a Geological Society of America paper entitled Celestial driver of Phanerozoic climate? published in July of this year) that changes in solar output have caused the period of warming we are going through now.

Second, it is becoming clear to scientists that carbon emissions are increasing more slowly than first thought. Instead of increasing by one percent a year, as was the accepted figure about ten years ago, the increase seems to be more like 0.4 percent a year. Temperature's response to atmospheric carbon is not linear, it is logarithmic - so that if a doubling in atmospheric carbon dioxide were to increase global temperatures by, say, 2.5 degrees, a further doubling would not increase them by five degrees, but by another 2.5 degrees. Global temperatures are likely to increase gradually, therefore, not by spiralling out of control as was postulated by the Club of Rome in the 1970s.

So, one major flaw in the Kyoto treaty is that it rests on a foundation of science that is still pretty murky. Another flaw is that it is one heck of an expensive way of making what amounts to a tiny improvement.

The targets that were agreed could have had an effect on world temperature in the order of hundredths of a degree of temperature. The cost of that improvement would have been about $100 billion, most of it to be paid by the United States. The Protocol also failed to include developing countries, such as China and India, in its emission-reduction targets.

How could anyone be surprised that the US, in particular, would consider this a lousy idea? And why would anyone be surprised that Kyoto, as it was designed, would die a death, as it did in Milan this month? But that's as it was designed. The problem that Kyoto attempted to tackle is still there. The danger to human survival of global warming may not be as was advertised, but the possibility that carbon dioxide emissions do pose some kind of danger still exists as a worst-case scenario, and should be addressed.

The Washington-based Cato Institute held a day-long conference on December 12, the day the Milan Kyoto conference ended, entitled Global Warming: The State of the Debate, (http://www.cato.org/events/gw031212.html) that featured discussion on the current state of the science, economics, and politics of global climate change. Their four experts reached the conclusion that “while it would be possible to spend the next generation simply studying the potential for global warming, it was preferable to adopt such low-cost measures as could be devised to mitigate it, while continuing the attempts to determine its magnitude and potential timing”.

In particular, they thought that a simple carbon tax, set initially at a low level by international agreement, would provide incentives to discover the “low-hanging fruit” methods of mitigating carbon emissions, while at the same time providing a mechanism that could be made more Draconian should further research prove the worst case-scenario to be a serious threat.

Professor William Nordhaus, the Yale University lecturer who specialises in environmental economics, has calculated that that optimum carbon tax would be $10 per ton of carbon emitted, rising to $60 per ton in stages. The tax would be paid primarily by those nations already emitting large amounts of carbon already, primarily the US, Japan and Europe. Rapidly-growing economies such as China and India would become payers of significant amounts of tax only if they did not adjust their growth patterns to reduce carbon emissions.

These days, though, it's rare that such simple and straightforward solutions find favour. The Non-Governmental Organisation extremists who dominate conferences like Kyoto these days now want to move “beyond Kyoto”. It's almost certain that they and their UN colleagues will regroup and come out swinging again - if only to keep this lucrative moveable feast moving.

Michael Crichton, the novelist, trained in university as an anthropologist. He was asked to speak to the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco in September about what he considered to be the greatest threat to mankind.

“I have a fundamental answer,” he said, “the greatest challenge facing mankind is the challenge of distinguishing reality from fantasy, truth from propaganda.

“… so it is, sadly, with environmentalism. Increasingly it seems facts aren't necessary, because the tenets of environmentalism are all about belief. It's about whether you are going to be a sinner, or saved. Whether you are going to be one of the people on the side of salvation, or on the side of doom. Whether you are going to be one of us, or one of them.

“Most of us have had some experience interacting with religious fundamentalists, and we understand that one of the problems with fundamentalists is that they have no perspective on themselves. They never recognise that their way of thinking is just one of many other possible ways of thinking, which may be equally useful or good.

“On the contrary, they believe their way is the right way, everyone else is wrong; they are in the business of salvation, and they want to help you to see things the right way. They want to help you be saved. They are totally rigid and totally uninterested in opposing points of view. In our modern complex world, fundamentalism is dangerous because of its rigidity and its imperviousness to other ideas.

“I want to argue that it is now time for us to make a major shift in our thinking about the environment, similar to the shift that occurred around the first Earth Day in 1970, when this awareness was first heightened. But this time around, we need to get environmentalism out of the sphere of religion. We need to stop the mythic fantasies, and we need to stop the doomsday predictions. “We need to start doing hard science instead.”

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