Here in Copenhagen it is 4pm on Saturday, December 19th. The U.N. Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen has just drawn to a close, having decided to “take note of the Copenhagen Accord of December 18, 2009,” reached between the U.S., China, India, Brazil and South Africa.Was an agreement reached by the COP? Well…. No, not really. It is more correct to say that the U.N. decided by resolution to pretend that their failure to agree upon anything was actually a deal.

Barack Obama swooped in on Friday, spent less than 24 hours in Copenhagen, and in that short time managed to do more damage to the U.N. climate negotiation process than George Bush did in eight years of half-hearted participation. Obama engineered the bogus deal by hammering out an agreement between five major economies: the U.S., China, India, Brazil and South Africa. That agreement was then parachuted in to the COP process which was encouraged to adopt it without time for review.

The U.N. process is a consensus process, meaning that all 193 countries are required to agree on action. That makes the bar for adoption of any agreement quite high; high enough that the agreement proposed by the group of five did not come close to clearing it.

Here’s the truth. The U.N. Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen collapsed without reaching agreement after a majority of nations agreed to refer to the lack of agreement as a “deal.”

Sorry. I don’t plan to contribute to the charade.