Can world leaders reach climate change deal?

Upcoming Paris conference will have a major impact how we live our lives and those of future generations.

About 40,000 negotiators from nearly 200 countries are descending on the French capital for the UN conference on climate change or COP 21.

The decisions they make will have a major impact on how we live our lives and those of future generations.

Scientists have warned that if greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise, we will pass the threshold after which climate change will become catastrophic and irreversible.

That threshold is two degrees Celcius above pre-industrial levels, and scientists say a rise in global temperatures must not exceed that figure by the year 2100.

But delegates face a number of problems. Although many countries have already made pledges to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions in the run up to COP 21, it is likely they will not be enough to slow global warming to two degrees.

The second problem relates to the differences between developed and developing countries. Developing nations want financial aid to help them implement the policies that will be a part of any Paris deal.

The biggest obstacle to any climate change agreement will come from Republicans who control the House and the Senate which allows them to block any legislation on this issue.

Specifically Republican U.S. Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma who is chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee and Texas Republican U.S. Representative Lamar Smith who is Chairman of the Committee on Science, Space and Technology both of whom are ardent climate change deniers.

The thing is: The Benghazi committee is not even the worst committee in the House. I'd argue that the House science committee, under the chairmanship of Lamar Smith (R-TX), deserves that superlative for its open-ended, Orwellian attempts to intimidate some of the nation's leading scientists and scientific institutions.

The science committee's modus operandi is similar to the Benghazi committee's — sweeping, catchall investigations, with no specific allegations of wrongdoing or clear rationale, searching through private documents for out-of-context bits and pieces to leak to the press, hoping to gain short-term political advantage — but it stands to do more lasting long-term damage.

In both cases, the investigations have continued long after all questions have been answered. (There were half a dozen probes into Benghazi before this one.) In both cases, the chair has drifted from inquiry to inquisition. But with Benghazi, the only threat is to the reputation of Hillary Clinton, who has the resources to defend herself. With the science committee, it is working scientists being intimidated, who often do not have the resources to defend themselves, and the threat is to the integrity of the scientific process in the US. It won't take much for scientists to get the message that research into politically contested topics is more hassle than it's worth.

SEN. JIM Inhofe (R-Okla.) chairs the Environment and Public Works Committee — and he seems determined to make that fact a national embarrassment.

Mr. Inhofe delivered a Senate floor speech about the “hysteria on global warming” last week with two conspicuous props. One was a blown-up photo of his family standing in front of an igloo labeled “AL GORE’S NEW HOME.” The Inhofe clan constructed it following a 2010 “snowstorm that had been unprecedented, it set a record that year,” Mr. Inhofe explained.

“In case we had forgotten, because we keep hearing that 2014 has been the warmest year on record,” Mr. Inhofe continued, reaching for a plastic bag next to his lectern, “I ask the chair, do you know what this is? It’s a snowball, just from outside here. It’s very, very cold out.”