According to Protocol - To hear USA Today tell it, the Kyoto Protocol has had a negligible effect on CO2 emissions. According to a study conducted by Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO), the world's growth rate of CO2 emissions into the atmosphere has more than doubled, from less than 1 percent for most of the 1990s to more than 2.5 percent from 2000 to 2005. The CSIRO research also showed that 2005 was the fourth consecutive year of above average emissions.

That all of this occurred even as Kyoto was in effect should not surprise. As it is, many of the countries that implemented Kyoto are hard pressed to meet their current targets for emissions reductions, which for most developed countries mandated a 5.2 percent reduction in their production of greenhouse gases. According to data presented by the European Environment Agency in their report, The European Environment – State and outlook 2005, “After more than half the time period between 1990 [the baseline year for most of the 15 European Union signatories to Kyoto] and the first commitment period (2008–2012) under the Kyoto Protocol, the reduction by 2003 was less than a quarter of that needed to reach the EU-15 target.”

According to the report, in 2002, emissions were above the 1990 baseline by more than 10 percent in Italy and Greece, more than 20 percent in Ireland and Portugal, and more than 30 percent in Spain. Even for countries that have met their Kyoto targets, this is often the result of one-time events, as in the case of Germany, which met its goal through “a replacement of ‘old technologies’ following German reunification in the early 1990s.”

Yet again, even as leftist elites throw the world “under the bus” through the use of unworkable treaties such as Kyoto, they simultaneously attempt to punish the developed world for its successes and regulate the developing world’s access to the means of societal uplift through growth in industrial capacity. (Ironically, by waving the banner of global warming, the overindulged and under-occupied drain the scarce milk of human kindness away from activities that would have a more tangible benefit for the world's benighted.) As discussed elsewhere, it appears that most experts agree that reducing CO2 emissions is not the best way to address the problems of the developing world.

The Left’s insistence on implementing global compacts in order to reduce the production of greenhouse gases is all the more puzzling when you take the words of their proponents at face value. In December of 2005, British Prime Minister Tony Blair was quoted as saying, “The blunt truth about the politics of climate change is that no country will want to sacrifice its economy in order to meet this challenge.” (Perhaps this is why the treaty does not include two of the biggest producers of greenhouse emissions besides the United States, China and India, with China being the world second largest emitter of greenhouse gases.)

But perhaps the greatest outrage as it pertains to Kyoto is its lack of efficacy in impacting predicted climate change, even if it were perfectly implemented. Dr. Bjorn Lomborg, a Danish statistician and adjunct professor at Copenhagen Business School, as well as the author of 2001’s The Skeptical Environmentalist (and global warming evangelist), went on to state his opinion on the Kyoto Treaty.

As a matter of fact we can see that the effect of the Kyoto Protocol will be marginal – even if we assume that the Kyoto emission ceilings will be kept in place indefinitely, an issue which has not been addressed by the protocol. Several models have calculated that the consequence of Kyoto will be a temperature increase by 2100 of around 0.15°C less than if nothing had been done...Equivalently, the permanent Kyoto curbs on carbon emissions would result in a sea level rise in 2100 which will be just 2.5 centimeters (1 inch) less.

To Dr. Lomborg’s point, according to Dr. Tom Wigley, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, if the Kyoto Protocol were fully implemented by the current signatories, it would reduce temperatures by a mere 0.07 degrees Celsius by 2050, and 0.13 degrees Celsius by 2100.