The snow is snowing, the wind is blowing, just watch those icicles form. No, it’s not an Irving Berlin sing-a-long, it’s the European weather forecast.

The climate clowns at the United Nations thought they had finally got it right this year. After hosting the 26th Conference of the Parties (Cop26) in icy Glasgow (where winter temperatures drop to -9 °C overnight), many must have wondered what was the point of holding an all-expenses paid holiday about frying the planet in a refrigerator.

Hosting Cop27 in Sharm-el-Sheikh ticked the holiday box but with an average daytime December temperature of 21 degrees, it hardly set the scene for climate apocalypse now.

Mali, located partly in the Sahara Desert, is the hottest country on Earth but also one of the poorest. It doesn’t offer the luxury essential to a UN jamboree.

The United Arab Emirates, however – Switzerland with deserts – seemed perfect. The ideal setting for a Yuletide morality play about the sins of emission.

A session was scheduled on making ‘responsible yachting’ even more ‘sustainable’, the perfect vehicle for virtue-signalling.

Even though the UN is calling on the world to reduce its meat consumption to fight climate change, Cop28 restaurants put ‘juicy beef’, ‘melt-in-your-mouth BBQ’, and ‘smoked Wagyu burgers’ on the menu.

Heavy snow grounded the private jets in Munich bound for the climate confabulation but that didn’t deter US climate czar John Kerry, the living incarnation of Lurch the Butler from The Addams Family. ‘This year was the hottest year in human history that we measured,’ Kerry said and more cryptically, ‘If we can’t hear Mother Nature and can’t judge with our own eyes what the science is telling us, this is not about politics.’ What did he mean? If you stare at Fort Denison in Sydney Harbour, Mother Nature, and your own eyes, seem to be saying that the sea level is not rising, but perhaps that’s because it’s hard to spot a rise that is occurring at the rate of less than 30 cm in a century.

Climate colonialism – the exploitation of fossil fuels in developing countries – has been replaced by climate change colonialism. Vice President Kamala Harris pledged $3 billion to a climate fund for the poorest nations to prevent the development of fossil fuel-fired energy, a recipe for keeping them impoverished. Instead vast swathes of Africa will be locked up for carbon credits.

Yet despite the icy air-conditioning, the atmosphere got heated when a video surfaced of the President of Cop28, Sultan Al Jaber, saying, ‘There is no science out there, or no scenario out there, that says that the phase-out of fossil fuel is what’s going to achieve 1.5C.’

Former president of Ireland Mary Robinson had just said, ‘We’re in an absolute crisis that is hurting women and children more than anyone… because we have not yet committed to phasing out fossil fuel.’

How ‘committing’ to phasing out fossil fuels will help women and children is anyone’s guess, but Al Jaber replied that he had agreed to attend the meeting ‘to have a sober and mature conversation’ and not to participate in an ‘alarmist’ panic-fest.

Al Jaber asked Robinson to show him a ‘roadmap for a phase-out of fossil fuel that will allow for sustainable socioeconomic development’ and not ‘take the world back into caves’.

This was heresy. Bill Hare, chief executive of Climate Analytics, said ‘sending us back to caves’ was not just the oldest of fossil-fuel industry tropes, it verged on ‘climate denial’.

Kerry, ever the diplomat, was undaunted. He is, after all, a man used to presenting Ayatollah Khamenei as a campaigner for nuclear disarmament, and the head of Hamas as a peacenik. Kerry said Al Jaber’s comment simply needed ‘clarification’ or ‘maybe it just came out wrong’.

Documents were leaked showing the UAE planned to use Cop28 to do deals with 15 nations to extract fossil fuels, and work with China on natural gas opportunities in Australia. That must have been embarrassing for Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen who, a week earlier, had just committed undisclosed billions to underwrite new renewables to replace fossil fuels.

Bowen has mocked nuclear power as a ‘fantasy wrapped in a delusion accompanied by a pipe dream’ despite opinion polls showing increasing support for it in Australia. Then, in the days before Cop, billionaire Bill Gates – with whom Prime Minister Albanese is matey – signed a nuclear power deal with the UAE.

Worse was to come. In the first week of the climate fest, 22 nations including key allies, the US, UK, Canada, Japan and France, and host UAE, pledged to triple nuclear power generation by 2050, while French President Emmanuel Macron told 17-year-old Nuclear for Australia founder Will Shackel that Australia should lift its nuclear ban. Poor Bowen couldn’t bring himself to sign the pledge even though three times zero nuclear power is still zero.

Bowen can comfort himself that he wasn’t the only clown at Cop. In an otherwise soporific session, Kerry highlighted the need for personal methane reduction by audibly emitting a greenhouse gas. He’d just finished ranting that, ‘There shouldn’t be any more coal-fired power plants permitted anywhere in the world.’ That would have amused China which started construction on 50GW of coal-fired generators in 2022, approved another 50GW in the first half of 2023, and is planning to further ramp up coal production and imports. Even the Guardian has noticed China’s ‘coal addiction’ despite having more renewables than any other country on Earth.

But China didn’t have to wait long for Kerry to make himself the story. As if to emphasise that it wasn’t just coal that was the problem Kerry emitted a loud fart just after saying, ‘The message here is sounding the alarm bell. I find myself getting more and more militant because I do not understand how adults who are in positions of responsibility can be avoiding responsibility for taking away those things that are killing people on a daily basis.’

CNN’s Becky Anderson, sitting next to Kerry, turned her head away and moved her finger under her nostrils as if to mitigate the olfactory assault. Executive director of the International Energy Agency Fatih Birol surreptitiously glanced at the climate envoy perhaps wondering whether it was Kerry who was killing people daily. The crowd erupted in applause. Kerry didn’t bat an eyelid just saying, ‘And the reality is that the climate crisis and the health crisis are one and the same.’ That seems to be true in Kerry’s case. Or maybe it just came out wrong.