Significant progress made today at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change here in Copenhagen, Denmark, Earth.

Between about ten this morning and mid-afternoon it was decided that the panel should use the colour yellow to highlight certain words in order to clarify that those words actually exist. And this is only the introductory paragraph of a 30 page report.

Somehow this doesn’t quite mesh with the word ‘finalize’ in the statement released by the IPCC press office:

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) opened a meeting in Copenhagen on Monday to finalize the Synthesis Report, the last stage of its Fifth Assessment Report (AR5), which provides policymakers with a comprehensive assessment of the risks of climate change.

‘Finalize’ to me is the… well… final step to getting something done. Arguing about font size sounds suspiciously like getting nothing done.

Here’s the scene:

The room, about the size of your average theatre where you’d see a top bill comedian, is filled with politicians and scientists. The Scientists have mashed together their previous three reports into a single, mighty uber report. The previous three reports are all made up of even more scientific reports by thousands of scientists and their dire findings about how we’re all going to die from climate change.

So what we have here is a summary of summaries based on the summaries of people that measure things like “hydrogen ion concentration” with a “logarithmic scale” .

This summary of summaries is projected onto a massive screen behind the heads of about seven panellists who have the thankless job of defending their wording. They are using ‘track-changes’ in MS Word, and the operating system seems to be Windows ’93.

The ‘Imax’-style projection is to facilitate the launching of polite spitballs by the politicians who have flown from places as far away as Saudi Arabia to establish whether ‘trees’ or ‘largish plants’ should be used to describe what’s being deforested. Keep in mind, people get paid many moneys to do this.

To me, the chasm between what scientists want to say and how politicians want them to say it can best be illustrated by government-sanctioned monkeys trying to re-write a Beethoven concerto with Beethoven in the room.

A moment ago one of the scientist/panellists, exhibiting Nobel prize-winning passive aggression, was forced to define what a “statement of fact” was. Although, to be fair to the delegate who asked for the clarification, a politician who knows what a “statement of fact” is would not be a very good politician.

So, the scientific panel is faced with the impenetrable plodding nature of the process, and have to say things like, “Can we all at least agree to maybe get something done today.”

They have, in true scientific fashion, provided this helpful graph of the progress so far:

For me, I’m just trying to wrap my head around the fact that the aim of the final report is to warn politicians about the dangers of climate change. With that in mind, knowing that a couple hundred politicians are here to pick through a scientific document for other politicians to read, seems self-negating. It may be vetting in principle, but it’s more like neutering in practice. It’s a massacre of meaning, as every statement is designed to make politicians act has all of it’s gravitas sucked out of it so that their electorate don’t ask, “Why the fuck didn’t you do anything about this?” from below about 13 feet of water.

Why not cut out the middle-man? I imagine a Clock-Work Orange-style re-programming scenario with the intended audience’s eyes pinned open as they are forced to read page after page of the original document with… yes… Beethoven played in the background.