News reports from Copenhagen have Barack Obama saying that a “meaningful and unprecedented breakthrough” has been reached. Details are not yet available, but I’ll bet anyone a beer that no serious person will say that the deal is in fact meaningful.  It will be the thinnest fig leaf to cover yet another Obama failure.

Beyond this announcement, there are still “details to work out” to get to a binding treaty. I predict the US will not sign a binding treaty on this issue during Obama’s presidency.

Initially, the agreement will have a meaningless statement that those nations agreeing to this solution-in-search-of-a-problem will work to keep global temperatures from rising more than 2 degrees centigrade.  Let’s stop continental drift while we’re at it.

Of course, there is almost no leading climate research organization which we can now trust now that we know that the British CRU and Hadley Center are both lying about the data, and NASA is corrupted with people of similar mindset, most famously James Hansen.  (Even without the lying, we need to pay much more attention to the satellite data which is less likely to be corrupted by measurement error.)

Yesterday, Obama’s spokesman said that an “empty deal” is worse than no deal.  Again, I’d bet we’ll see something that objective viewers will call an empty deal.  It’s fine with me.  Congress probably won’t send the money that Obama’s promising down the rat hole of developing nations’ corrupt governments.  No nation will sacrifice their economic development or recovery by actually cutting carbon emissions, which correlate nearly perfectly with GDP and almost as well with life expectancy.

The left will see this empty deal as another Obama disappointment.  The right will play that up, as they should for both substantive and political reasons. Obama will try to say they’re all wrong, but as we say in my business “the trend is your friend” (if you’re against Obama right now).