View Article & Comments

The Kyoto Protocol on greenhouse gas emissions which came into force five years ago has failed in its goals and is now largely redundant.

It took years of complicated negotiations and compromises and many hoped it would prove a major breakthrough in bringing climate change under control.

It was supposed to herald a brave new cleaner world where carbon emissions were reduced and everyone benefited from it. Even after five years problems are still unresolved. Arguably, the deal is now even further behind than it was at the opening stages.

The Copenhagen Climate Change Conference in December 2009, where a new deal on climate change was supposed to be signed, also turned out fruitless.


The main differences between the Kyoto Protocol and the deal that was supposed to be signed in Copenhagen was that Kyoto concentrated on already industrialized nations and did not make any demand on developing nations, whereas Copenhagen, as well as concentrating on industrialized nations, made significant carbon reduction demands on developing nations. It must be mentioned that the US always refused to ratify Kyoto on the grounds that it would hurt its economy while benefiting the economy of those developing nations that it did not affect at all.

As such in Copenhagen, African states and India made a fuss about signing any kind of agreement that put demands on their countries.

Astrophysicist Piers Corbyn, the head of Weather Action, told RT that “Kyoto is of no importance whatsoever for the world’s well-being and I hope the Americans never ratify it. It is now meaningless and it has been overtaken by another meaningless jamboree, and I mean the Copenhagen agreement, or lack of it.”

“What I think the world needs to do now,” added Corbyn, “is to honestly address the fact that all of this stuff is not scientifically motivated, but is politically motivated.”

Added to that in recent months the science behind climate change has been frequently called into question.

Leaked emails from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit suggested that the data that was being used to prove climate change may have been doctored by the very scientists who were working on it. It added more fuel into the fire of the skeptics’ arguments, who say there is no such thing as man-made climate change. To them, the climate changes all the time and there is nothing mankind can do to predict that.

That means essentially that a huge piece of the economy, carbon trade recommended both by the Kyoto Protocol and by any new agreement, could be based on a completely false theory. The whole economy of the world based on a greener future, like planting bio-fuels instead of crops and destruction of the developing economies, could be a result of entirely bogus science. All in all, the argument for climate change looks increasingly shaky, while the truth about how strong the effects of climate change are remains uncertain.

Research data on the effect of greenhouse gases and climate change is not always accurate, and often reflects the interests of those who produce such reports, says University of Alabama climatologist John Christy.

“Popular data sets can’t really tell us a lot about global warming from the greenhouse effect,” Christy told RT. “I think everyone agrees that the world has warmed in the past 150 years. But the question is, why? And I think some of these popular surface data sets just really don’t tell you the reason that that warming has occurred.”

Click source to see Video links with Piers Corbyn & John Christy