No deal: Japanese Environment Minister Nobuteru Ishihara refuses to agree to the emissions reductions required by the Kyoto Protocol

The United Nations' annual climate change conference held in Warsaw from November 11-23, was a sedate affair that attracted little public attention. It's been a hard four years for international climate negotiations since the debacle in Copenhagen in December 2009. At least 40,000 people from around the world flew into Copenhagen to encourage world leaders to save the planet from the carbon dioxide emissions produced by, among other things, aeroplanes. 

It didn't work out that way. In the first place, the tens of thousands of NGO delegates from environmental groups were excluded when the 130 or so prime ministers and presidents arrived with their entourages because the convention centre could hold fewer than 20,000 people; and so the activists, who after all provide the political push behind the global warming agenda, had to be content with a massive protest rally in the streets (as snow fell gently on their stocking caps). Not even the magic provided by America's then new president, Barack Obama, could save the negotiations from imploding. And as Rupert Darwall recounts in his outstanding book, The Age of Global Warming: a History (Quartet, £25), it was not only a major setback for the negotiating process. It was also a humiliation for the West and particularly for the European Union, administered by China and India.

Although many expert observers concluded that the Copenhagen meltdown has doomed efforts to negotiate a new agreement to replace the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which was set to expire at the end of 2012 (but has since been extended to 2020), the fact is that the international global warming establishment is too powerful and the economic interests supporting it are too large to go away quietly. Thus the Warsaw conference, known officially as COP-19 (for the 19th Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change — or UNFCCC), made modest steps towards concluding a new agreement to limit global greenhouse gas emissions at COP-21 in Paris in December 2015. 

Whether a new agreement will be signed in Paris or soon thereafter is an open question. However, those who are confident that not only has the global warming bandwagon slowed down but that the wheels have actually come off would do well to consider the damage that a losing army can still inflict in the latter stages of a war. 

The most notable aspect of COP-19 was the role that climate science played in the conference sessions and the many side events. It was negligible. The conference began a few days after Typhoon Yolanda (or Haiyan) hit the Philippines. Naderev Sano, head of the Philippines delegation, announced on the first day that he would not eat during the conference "until a meaningful outcome is in sight". Sano made an impassioned plea for action: "What my country is going through as a result of this extreme climate event is madness, the climate crisis is madness. We can stop this madness right here in Warsaw." 

The head of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and many of the scientists who contributed to the IPCC's Fifth Assessment Report, a draft of which was released in September, did nothing to contradict this obvious nonsense, even though the report could find no trend in extreme weather events and specifically no trend in hurricanes and typhoons. On the contrary, the head of the World Meteorological Organisation stated that it is now an indisputable fact that natural disasters are increasing as a result of climate change. Nor did the scientists who spoke at a high-level IPCC briefing I attended mention the fact that as atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide have continued increasing and have now reached a level of 400 parts per million (or one in 2,500), global mean temperatures have not increased in the past 16 years. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon even claimed that the IPCC's Fifth Assessment Report completely dispels all the rumours spread several years ago by climate sceptics, one of which of course was that warming had stopped a decade ago.