Will the U.N. Conference on Climate Change (UNFCCC) [COP 13/MOP 3, Bali, Indonesia, December 3-14] follow the now well-established pattern of manic-depression that has characterised nearly all such previous mass meetings, including those in The Hague (2000), in Marrakesh, Morocco (2001), in Edinburgh around the G8 Summit (2005), in Montreal (2005), and in Nairobi, Kenya (2006)?

First, key figures will work hard, through the media, to try to lower public expectations - e.g., “This is only about producing a ‘road map’, or timetable, for future negotiations”; “It is just about putting a process in motion rather than taking any substantive decisions.”

Then, for the first few days of the Conference nothing much obvious will happen, and there is little for the hordes of environmental reporters to report. Things only start to get ‘hot’ when governments finally let loose their senior figures to ‘finalise’ the key issues during the last three days [for example, the UK will be sending three gunboats to Bali, namely HMS Hilary Benn, the Environment Secretary, his junior minister, HMS Phil Woolas, and jolly old HMS Sir Nicholas Stern (“For it is he!”)].

Then, if things go to plan, the ‘meeting’ will be reported as “slow and difficult”, or even “failing” (as, classically, at Montreal in 2005), with participants walking out, or raising “impossible” issues. “Why do the developing countries keep on insisting that we should carry all the burden and pay for everything?” Ultimately, the ‘meeting’ then extends into the early hours of the morning after the day on which it is meant to have closed, the chair and host nation using every trick in the moral-blackmail book to achieve something for the record and for home consumption.

Finally, a relatively bland agreement is cobbled together at the very last minute. Thousands of participants and journalists emerge from their fierce-small-world euphoric, tears are shed, and the “success” of the meeting is over-hyped and over-spun - “The world can breathe again!”; “We are saved!”; “Real progress has been made!”

Eventually, in the cold light of day, euphoria turns quite quickly to angst and to bitterness as it becomes increasingly obvious that little-to-nothing has really been achieved and that nobody will act on what has been agreed in any case.

The euphoric high is inexorably followed by a long depression - until, that is, the next migration and Conference of 15,000 souls [COP 14, by the way, will be in Pozna?, Poland, from 1-12 December, 2008. Just thought you would like to know].

If you examine carefully the symptoms exhibited during and after these repeated ‘meeting patterns’, while analysing in detail the changing media language involved, it becomes obvious that ‘global warming’ hype is leading to clinically-identifiable symptoms closely associated with those presented in ‘mass psychogenic illness’, or ‘mass sociogenic illness’.
http://web.mac.com/sinfonia1/iWeb/Global%20Warming%20Politics/A%20Hot%20Topic%20Blog/39D0049E-FC93-47F7-87DD-C219E8D55FB8.html