So what was the Kyoto Climate Treaty all about? Governments met in 1997 to agree to economically damaging restrictions to combat global warming. Twelve years la

So what was the Kyoto Climate Treaty all about? Governments met in 1997 to agree to economically damaging restrictions to combat global warming. Twelve years later it comes out that the piddling value in national metrological service data sets isn't part of the global sacrifice in the common good and attempts to check how things are coming along are stymied by problems in getting data sets that have been shared globally cleared for general publication. What we think about excuses depends on when they are offered. If the UEA was talking about needing "permission" from national meteorological service partners in 1996 the excuse would work. In 1998 it would raise eye-brows: surely governments aren't blocking co-operation on meteorology, they have just signed a treaty. Once governments have agreed to cooperate on climate change, this excuse works less and less well as the years go by. Eventually the excuse morphs into a skeptic's talking point. They can argue that Kyoto was just about politics and nothing to do with science, pointing to the fact that it didn't provide for permission for scientist to publish, and the years rolled by and the omission never got fixed. How long should we allow, after Kyoto, for meteorological data sharing agreements to be sorted out at the intergovermental level? 5 years? 10 years? 20 years?