LONDON: It is now widely recognised that the misguided Copenhagen Conference was a complete failure. Those political leaders and policy makers who refuse to accept this reality are merely burying their heads in the sand and are forfeiting the trust of the public.

"The Copenhagen fiasco was inevitable because the basic approach of current climate policy is fundamentally wrong. The deadlock provides policy makers with an opportunity to recognise that the failure was not accidental but systemic. There must therefore be no more futile conferences with this failed agenda," said Lord Lawson, the Chairman of the GWPF.

Following the failure to agree any binding targets and deadlines at Copenhagen, the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) welcomes this opportunity to abandon the UN's inherently flawed approach to climate change. Instead, governments would be well advised to adopt a new policy approach that shifts the focus of future negotiations to adaptation to global temperature change, whatever its direction, and to an agenda aimed at helping to increase the resilience of both advanced and poorer countries to such change.

The inability of the international community to break the climate deadlock reflects the fact that, for the developing world, economic development and the relief of poverty are, rightly, more important than the curbing of carbon emissions. The focus on target-setting and carbon capping and trading is basically disastrous, as it becomes a political end in itself without any real practical outcomes, except to increase the world's debt burden and the opportunity for fraud and corruption.

Given that the true cost of decarbonisation is massive, the international sharing of the economic burden between developed and developing countries will remain an insoluble problem. The international deadlock, therefore, is likely to become an indefinite moratorium.

The GWPF welcomes the Copenhagen moratorium as an opportunity for more transparency in climate science following the many recent problems, not least those relating to the CRU data affair. We consider the moratoriumalso as an opportunity to focus on a better understanding of the dynamics and long-term impacts of climate change, including the economic analysis embodied in climate change models.

After Copenhagen, there is a need to review unilateral climate targets in light of the international deadlock. It would be extremely short-sighted for Europe or, indeed, the UK to continue with policies that are burdening national economies with huge costs and damaging their international competitiveness.

The Copenhagen fiasco demonstrates that conventional climate policies are fundamentally flawed and have no realistic future.

"What is required now is a move to plan B, the development of alternative policy approaches that are politically feasible and economically viable. For plan B to succeed, governments and government agencies need to include critics of conventional climate policies and establish more reliable and transparent approaches to climate science," said Dr Benny Peiser, the Director of the GWPF.