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Forget , reviews commissioned by universities and , and the 's (IPCC) internal deliberations.

Governments into how the IPCC conducts its work and how well its conclusions stand up to scrutiny.

The precise terms of reference are being decided even now.

But the decision - taken at - potentially offers everyone a way out of the mire currently engulfing climate science, from top-name researchers to the Joe and Joanna Public whose taxes fund them and who expect them to get things right.

The review should be finished within about six months, and the results discussed - and changes instituted - at the IPCC's meeting in October.

This would allow the organisation to re-shape itself prior to major work beginning on .

, who certainly annoyed some (not least in the Indian government) when he initially rebutted criticism of in a manner lacking much diplomacy.

In fact, though, it is envisaged as a process that will be thorough and rigorous, but constructive; what you might summarise as "tough love".

There is no point in governments either soft-soaping or lambasting the organisation to the extent that it loses all its credibility. After all, its conclusions should in principle have a major role in determining what policy options those self-same governments pursue in the arenas of disaster preparedness and energy supply.

So yes, it is possible that Dr Pachauri will not survive the process; and indeed it is possible that he will not want to, if the job description gets so heavily amended that continuing would result in him having to give up .

But there are more important questions to be addressed.

To what extent do conclusions of from 2007 stand up to scrutiny?

Should its processes for gathering and sifting information be amended - and in particular, is there a case for excluding "grey literature" (anything other than peer-reviewed science)?

Does it select its major contributors as objectively as it should? Does it communicate its conclusions effectively to policymakers and the public?

"Climate-sceptical" organisations may already be in ecstasy about a process that - they will argue - may bring down the IPCC, and by extension block political moves towards regulating greenhouse gas emissions.

And this, in turn, may prompt some people involved with the IPCC to put their heads in their hands and complain that the last thing they need is another process that will see lances levelled at the edifice of anthropogenic climate change.

That, I suggest, would be a mistake. Many commentators sympathetic to the organisation have insisted in recent months that it could do with a dose of reform; so why not have reforms recommended by a review that aims for a constructive outcome, rather than by a host of unsympathetic and unaccountable bloggers whose scientific or pseudo-scientific utterings are sometimes impelled by political theologies?

As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, reform ideas for the IPCC produced by sympathetic academics so far include producing shorter, more focused and more intelligible reports; setting itself up as a wiki-form web-based platform; and farming out parts of its function to regional organisations or national science academies.

There are some who've argued that because the actual number of mistakes in the AR4 was triflingly small, there is no need for review or reform.

But in significant parts of politics, the media and the public, that argument has already been lost, and now it has been lost in reality as well; the review will happen.

What we can expect from it depends on its precise terms of reference. But conclusions we might expect, I suggest, would include:

• unequivocal backing for the overall conclusion that anthropogenic greenhouse warming is happening and does present real dangers to some societies
• "professionalisation" of the IPCC - ie having full-time staff dominating the process rather than a disparate grouping of academics, many of whom give their services gratis
• tightening of rules for using "grey literature" - abandoning it entirely is not really feasible given that the IPCC's remit includes areas such as economics where data has to be drawn from government agencies
• streamlining the process of disseminating conclusions. A partial example of how that might be done emerged last week with , which observers with long memories will note saw academics previously opposed, Kerry Emanuel and Chris Landsea, joined in academic embrace. And a push for much greater transparency and clarity in providing data.

Tantalising questions remain. Will long-time critics be invited on board, either for the review or during the compilation of future reports?

Is there a way to involve the and the more constructively, making use of their expertise while also ensuring that the conclusions of self-appointed climate auditors are subject to audit themselves?

Do we need all major scientific papers on climate to be available to all, rather than hidden from most behind the subscription-only business plans of journals such as Nature and Science?

Another reason for getting such a review up and running now is that in June, governments are due to decide whether they will establish an organisation loosely modelled on the IPCC that will collate and sift scientific evidence on biodiversity loss.

Proper assessment of the IPCC's qualities and faults should help build a strong foundation for that organisation, if it comes into existence. Continued doubts over the IPCC could, on the other hand, make governments less likely to sanction investment in a parallel body.

Although governments have decided the IPCC needs a review, they have also decided that the world needs an IPCC. And that should come as welcome news to those who feared that a tide of "denialism" was about to swamp the world's body politic.

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While spending a few days off last week with the young primates closest to my own heart, I neglected to flag up here a new report on the threats facing various other primate species around the world.

is compiled by specialists from universities and conservation organisations (co-ordinated by the , the and ), and does pretty much what the title indicates - listing the 25 primate species and sub-species considered by that battery of experts to be at most imminent danger of extinction.

Some of the species listed by will be pretty familiar to everyone, such as .

But others are considerably less familiar and more exotically-named: the silky sifaka, the rondo dwarf galago, and Miss Waldron's red colobus - a named bestowed by its discoverer, British collector Willoughby P Lowe, in 1933 in honour of a research assistant about whom he was thinking...well, we can only guess.

If you want to see or hear Miss Waldron's red colobus in the forests of Cote d'Ivoire or Ghana, you may be out of luck. Not a single live specimen has been spotted since 1993.

Conservationists are always reluctant to declare a species extinct but the odds of this one still being around, the report concludes, are pretty long.

If you're interested in nature's variegated forms, it's worth visiting supplied by the report's authors - a few of the entries are dotted around this post.

But perhaps more interesting are the reasons why Miss Waldron's red colobus is perhaps already beyond salvation and why the other 24 may be heading in the same direction.

They're really simple: loss of habitat, and hunting.

Take the golden-headed langur of Vietnam. Now, it's only found on , on the edge of the spectacular Ha Long Bay.

Once the langur roamed over many other of the islands there, according to accounts from local people.

But by 2000, hunting had reduced the population to just 53 individuals; and even though hunting has now been stopped, its habitat is broken into such small fragments that the current population of 65 exists in seven separate groups, five of which are all female and so will not yield any young.

Cat Ba now does a lively tourist trade - to quote , the number of hotel rooms has expanded 20-fold in a decade. Apparently there is now talk of an airport.

And why not? I spent a couple of days in Ha Long Bay some years ago: the vista that nature has carved from the limestone is extraordinary, particularly just after dawn when the hills appear to float on the spectral morning mists.

But no creature that needs space and trees and a natural soundscape can survive such an onslaught.

and so far it is keeping the langurs alive. But perhaps this is an indication of their true status - they are living on the terms that humanity dictates.

Regular readers who have issues with the notion of anthropogenic climate change will probably like to know that this is not mentioned in the report at all as a cause of the primates' decline.

And that's not unexpected. As I've mentioned before on these pages, when you look through - not just for primates, but for everything - it is loss of habitat that emerges again and again as the number one issue driving plants and animals towards extinction, encapsulated most spectacularly in places such as Ha Long Bay (which is not to say that specialists don't expect climate change to become a more important issue in time).

When you look at where the 25 species are clustered and think about the progress of human societies around the world, something else that probably won't be surprising is that East Asia emerges as one of the "hotspots".

The other continent well represented is Africa. That's partly because it has a naturally high number of primate species to start with, but also because human population growth and deforestation rates are high, and in areas where the effective rule of law is suspect (Madagascar, recently) or torn by conflict (much of West Africa the last few decades) hunting, poaching and illegal logging inevitably soar.

In one sense, Primate in Peril tells us little that we don't already know about our world. But it does throw into stark relief the trends that are affecting biodiversity and nature across the planet, and is well worth a read.

This is the family, after all, to which we belong.

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The has unveiled detailed proposals on how whaling could be regulated in a way that countries still engaged in the hunt and those opposed to it could both live with.

The essential dilemma is what it has been for decades: some societies view the whale as just another wild animal to be hunted, whereas for others it is a special emblem of a troubled environment, a sentient friend that should never feel the thud of a harpoon.

However, the often acrimonious and sometimes violent impasse has induced some people in both camps to explore a possible "compromise package" that both could live with in peace, if not in ecstasy.

Over the last few years aimed at finding such a compromise; and , prepared by a group of 12 countries including strongly pro Japan, strongly anti Australia and lukewarm US, constitute the latest and most detailed contribution.

If implemented, the draft would usher in a 10-year period where all hunting for the "great whales" would come "under the control of the IWC". That means the commission would set ceilings on quotas, mandate and monitor a programme of international observers on some vessels, require DNA sampling of meat from markets, and so on.

Much of the recommendations would be pretty much uncontested - there is no real disagreement, for example, over the use of observers, as there once was - and some of the overall objectives set for the IWC, such as the restoration of depleted stocks, are very much in what Americans might term the "Mom and apple pie" category.

But there are also profound difficulties - some of principle, others of politics - and early rumblings indicate they are potentially big enough to prevent IWC members from adopting this draft.

For anti-whaling countries and organisations, one of the lures of this draft deal is that they would have some say over what quotas should be set for Iceland, Japan and Norway, which currently set their own quotas and which have allowed themselves regular increases in recent years.

But as yet the report contains no numbers, not even suggestions, for what those quotas might be.

The draft's key criterion is that hunts should be sustainable. The IWC does have up its sleeve - one of them is routinely deployed to determine quotas for subsistence whaling by indigenous peoples - and despite important questions over the impacts that climate change might have on whale numbers, and although evaluations are not in a state of complete readiness for all whale species in all areas, you can see in principle that quotas based on sustainability could be issued at whatever degree of confidence within a few years.

However, quotas currently set by Iceland, Japan and Norway are determined as much by political and commercial considerations as by scientific sustainability. Some are probably lower than a precautionary definition of "sustainability" would imply, others probably higher.

And the "peace process" is also essentially political in nature, with the various governments involved only prepared to endorse it if they gain more than they lose.

So political considerations must come into the IWC's quota setting.

If the proposals were adopted, then, anti-whaling governments would find themselves partaking in the setting of quotas for hunts that according to their own beliefs ought not to exist at all, and in the knowledge that they will be probably be excoriated by environment groups on an issue where public opinion in their countries is pretty firmly on the environment groups' side.

Meanwhile, governments of hunting nations would have to be prepared to accept quotas that are below levels urged by companies operating the hunts. This could be a particularly thorny problem in Iceland where the whaling industry is urging the public to see it as a creator of wealth and employment in a time of economic hardship.

The biggest issue of principle, meanwhile, is that this plan would not remove or even phase out .

The Southern Ocean was declared a in 1994. Japan's reasoning for continuing to hunt there is that the sanctuary regulation doesn't cover scientific whaling.

The draft report, in fact, contains a huge contradiction. A new sanctuary would be set up in the South Atlantic, where whaling does not happen now and is extremely unlikely to start, but does not ban whaling from the existing sanctuary in the Southern Ocean, where it does.

There's something to be said for giving goodies even-handedly to each side in an argument; but when the goodies contradict each other to this extent, you have to wonder whether at least one will find the package unpalatable.

A related issue is that anti-whaling countries hope Japan will have ended its Antarctic hunt within 10 years anyway.

The Nisshin Maru, the factory ship, is ageing, and no decision has yet been taken on whether to build a replacement. Agreed internationally-sanctioned quotas for 10 years, environment groups will argue, might help tip the balance in favour - an investment that would ensure Antarctic whaling continued for a lot longer.

One area where the draft is likely to find favour with both pro- and anti-whaling blocs is that for the next 10 years it would limit whaling (apart from subsistence hunts) to the three countries currently doing it.

Yet that may provoke dissent elsewhere. South Korea, for example, has regularly hinted that it would like equal treatment with Japan in any new arrangement.

The IWC holds a special meeting in Florida in a couple of weeks' time, at which this draft will be the principal item on the menu. Signs should emerge then as to how countries feel about it, prior to what will presumably be a final decision at the commission's full annual meeting in June.

That meeting, to be held in Morocco, will almost certainly be the end of the formal two-year "peace process"; it'll either be endorsed or rejected.

Delegates will be aware that rejection will set in stone the acrimony of the recent past; but whether there is enough here for them to endorse it is a hard call to make.

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Rumours that Yvo de Boer, the UN's top climate official, would be leaving his post well before the end of this year were rife even during the Copenhagen summit.

The theory went like this. If Copenhagen turned out to be a "failure" - however you want to define that - then someone would have to take the blame.

The two candidates mentioned most often for that role were Danish climate minister Connie Hedegaard, who chaired most of the conference, and Mr de Boer.

Blaming Ms Hedegaard would divert ordure from the head of her boss, Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen, according to this thesis, while pointing the finger at Mr de Boer would divert responsibility away from the chain of senior UN officials right up to Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in moves to "seal the deal".

It would also assuage the anger said to be felt in governments of some rich countries, notably the US, at how far Mr de Boer had gone in public in saying that they had to demonstrate more ambition if there were to be a deal in Copenhagen.

The fact that he signed only a one-year contract extension last year rather than the three years that is normal in UN circles was cited by some as an indication that not all governments were happy to see him continue. In Copenhagen itself, some delegates appeared only too happy to lay blame for some of the summit's logistical fiascos - notably the repeated barring by security forces of a senior Chinese negotiator - at his door.

It's important to say at this juncture that rumours of many hues were woven into a rich tapestry during the Copenhagen fortnight, and which of them contained a germ of truth was a matter of usually-inconclusive debate.

Now that Mr de Boer from the post of executive secretary, you might expect matters to have become somewhat clearer, especially to those who follow the process closely; but there still appears to be a pretty dense cloud surrounding the issue.

Ms Hedegaard has moved on - a job for which she had been nominated before the summit - and what blame there is within Denmark has fallen principally on Mr Rasmussen.

But the questions concerning Mr de Boer are still very much live, and his official comments about his departure - that he believes "the time is ripe for me to take on new challenge" - give nothing away.

If he has decided that the prices paid in stress, abuse and time away from home for doing such an onerous job are no longer worthwhile, who could find anything surprising in that?

In public, he backs approved by most governments on the summit's final day - "the political commitment and sense of direction toward a low-emissions world are overwhelming".

But if in private he has concluded that the job is no longer worth doing, given that Copenhagen's central message is that powerful governments in what we are accustomed to call the developed and developing worlds do not want to tackle climate change through the UN process, who would blame him?

While Copenhagen remains fertile ground for those of a forensic disposition, the more important question for the wider world is: what happens now?

- whose campaigners were among the more successful in prising out what was going on behind closed doors during the summit - comments that Mr de Boer "injected much-needed dynamism and straight-talking into the role of executive secretary to the UN climate convention".

Are the most important governments prepared to tolerate a straight-talking boss any more?

It's worth recalling in this context of another senior UN climate official, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) chief Bob Watson, because his talk was seen as too straight for their interests.

Greenpeace continues:

"The job is to make sure that countries and world leaders not only turn up (to the next UN climate summit in Mexico) but do so with the intention of agreeing a fair, ambitious and legally binding deal to avert climate chaos."

In reality, is it within the gift of anyone in or outside the UN system to do that, however campaigners and governments of nations projected to be especially vulnerable to climate effects might wish it?

Mr de Boer leaves behind a string of memories that I am sure are emblazoned on his brain cells even more strongly than they are on mine: the collected calm under the tropical downpours of the 2006 UNFCCC summit in Nairobi; the extraordinary work rate during the Bali summit; the tearful breakdown as an oversight threatened to derail negotiations at the end of that meeting; the quick-fire capital-to-capital diplomacy last year as Copenhagen loomed; the measured-yet-wry replies to the sometimes inane questioning of journalists; the past-midnight revelations in Copenhagen of how Barack Obama and Wen Jiabao - arguably two of the three most powerful people on the planet - had personally sat down to write a climate non-treaty together.

These are among the memories that Yvo de Boer leaves with as he trades the UN climate convention for life as a climate advisor to business and as an academic.

In public, it's entirely his decision to leave a process that in public he says has many more miles to run.

In private? We can only guess.

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In the past few weeks, has received a vast amount of advice on how it should be reformed, ranging from minor structural tinkering to immediate self-immolation.

So it must inevitably be when powerful political interests come to blows over what is supposed to be a body dealing with science independently and impartially.

This week's edition of publishes five short and varied recipes for a new and better IPCC - or some other set of organisations set up to do the same basic jobs, but better.

The writers are all working scientists, and have all contributed - some heavily - to IPCC reports down the years.

None of them concludes that the job does not need doing at all, even though Nature's chosen title - The IPCC: cherish, tweak it or scrap it - appears to allow for that option.

The most conservative analysis comes from Thomas Stocker of the in Switzerland, a co-ordinating lead author on the third and fourth assessment reports and co-chair of the climate science working group for the fifth (AR5), due out in 2013.

Dr Stocker falls firmly into the "cherish it" camp. An "honest broker" is needed, he argues, in such a turbulent field as climate change; and "From my perspective, the IPCC has fulfilled this role with remarkable rigour and integrity."

His prescription is, basically, more of the same: "Only with strict adherence to procedures and to scientific rigour at all stages will the IPCC continue to provide the best and most robust information that is needed so much."

But, argues , more frequent and more pointed reports are what the world needs now. Reports could even be annual, he says; and the principals should always be the best available people, forgetting the current proviso that authors are also selected so the panel encompasses "a range of views, expertise, gender and geographical representation".

Eduardo Zorita, from the in Geesthacht, Germany, advocates a little more reform by turning the IPCC into an international agency somewhat akin to the .

Its reports should emerge every couple of years, and should only concern peer-reviewed studies - not the "grey" literature such as .

The 's Mike Hulme - a prolific commentator on the troubles of climate science recently, - advocates disbanding the IPCC after the fifth report.

Instead, he proposes establishing a global panel to evaluate and produce frequent reports on tightly-defined scientific issues of interest.

A series of regional "evaluation panels" would then sift the basic scientific messages and sort out what they imply for various parts of the world. A further body - something akin to a global science academy, if I interpret correctly - would examine policy options.

And John Christy from the - has consistently chosen to contribute his expertise to the organisation - suggests removing the panel from UN oversight altogether.

A "Wikipedia-IPCC" could be set up, he suggests, with leaders being selected by learned societies, serving on a rolling basis as the organisation grapples with a series of specific science and policy questions.

All food for thought; and though it appears likely that the IPCC will remain working roughly in the way it has done until the fifth assessment report (AR5) is complete, with minor tweaks to take account of Himalayan and other issues, it is entirely within the gift of governments to make whatever changes they see fit once that process is over.

But there are several other factors to throw into the mix, as politicians and scientists and concerned observers debate the organisation's future.

Firstly, the IPCC speaks directly to governments. They endorse its reports - and all members, including the climate-sceptical US under George W Bush, have endorsed them - basically because they own the process.

One lead author observed to me in 2007, as the fourth assessment report (AR4) came out, that without such direct involvement, the reports would carry much less weight in the corridors of power; and that caveat is surely as correct now as it was then.

Secondly, there is the question of resources.

Virtually all of those contributing to the assessment reports do so voluntarily. They may be "volunteered" by their home government, they may receive some logistical support, but essentially they give their time and expertise for free; and the process is so gruelling that many of the leading lights will do it once and once only.

Are the financial and logistical resources sufficient?

According to one academic with a long knowledge of the organisation, sometimes they're not; with adequate backing, he said, issues such as a debatable date for Himalayan glacier melt or the correct figures for the costs of sea level rise in the Netherlands would have been checked and double-checked, and would not have made it to the final report, with the embarrassment that has now followed their publicisation.

Would the resource issue improve if the IPCC's tasks were split between different bodies, perhaps some working on a wiki-basis, or perhaps under the aegis of science academies? It is hard to envisage.

Would funding have to come from a few governments, providing even more opportunity for the perception that findings were being tweaked to suit certain agendas?

A third issue is the relationship between developed and developing worlds. Clearly, most expert scientists work in rich countries, and that's also where climate-relevant data (such as temperature records) is most abundant.

Yet if scientists from developing countries are marginalised, if Western scientific academies (or other organisations) take control, if the evidence there is of climatic changes from poor countries is neglected because it comes in a form other than peer-reviewed literature, how can this process achieve a global balance, and why should developing countries buy into it?

It's perhaps unfortunate, in retrospect, that none of Nature's chosen five contributors dealt with these very real developing world concerns.

On the one hand, apologies for devoting a whole post to this somewhat technical issue; I know how much the whole IPCC-gates thing and all the vitriol that goes with it bores and frustrates some regular readers.

On the other hand, no apologies - there's a strong case, I feel, for arguing that IPCC occupies an absolutely pivotal role, and it's well worth taking time to get the form and structure right so that it, or some other arrangement, can play the role as effectively as humanity needs it to.

If its projected ranges of temperature rise, sea level rise, rainfall change and so on do map out our planet's immediate future, then we need the best interpretations of impacts, costs and benefits - that's what the IPCC is for, and however it's constituted or whatever replaces it, it's vital that the organisation(s) performing that role must inspire trust among not only governments but the wider public.

What's your prescription?

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Over the last few months, a number of British commentators have been trumpeting an increase in scepticism about climate change.

The cold weather (often claimed - incorrectly - to be a hemisphere-wide phenomenon), the , the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's , the : all these and more have been proclaimed as factors that are said to be deflecting the public away from climate concern.

Now comes - commissioned by the Ö÷²¥´óÐã, carried out by Populus - indicating that in Britain at least, tales of increasing scepticism may be true.

The headline stats are that between November last year and the beginning of February this year, there has been a net 9% downwards swing in the proportion of Britons believing that "the Earth's climate is changing and global warming is taking place".

Having said that, three-quarters of the population still believes global warming is a real phenomenon.

However, only one quarter believes it is a fact and that it is largely man-made - down from two-fifths last November.

Determining the cause of this change, however, is less easy.

More than half of respondents said they were aware of news stories about "flaws or weaknesses in climate science".

But in this group, 16% said they were now more convinced of the risks of climate change, against only 11% who were less convinced; so if exposure to "ClimateGate" or "GlacierGate" or other such issues has done anything, it has increased confidence in the scientific picture of greenhouse warming.

Which perhaps leaves the weather as a key factor. Having to dig your car out of a snowbank and sending the kids out to make a snowman would, you might think, tend to mitigate against belief in warnings of a dangerously warming world ahead.

Backing this argument, 83% of respondents said they were aware of news stories about the (substantially more than were aware of reporting on the Copenhagen summit, incidentally).

So if this poll gives an accurate reflection of a change in public opinion, who does it vindicate, who does it encourage, and who does it depress?

It hardly vindicates those who see all the various "gate" stories as "exposing the climate science fraud", because if anything - as discussed above - exposure to these stories co-incided with rising confidence in the science, although the numbers are small.

It will encourage those hoping for a crack to emerge in the cross-party consensus on climate change pervading UK politics at the moment.

With a general election looming and political advisers looking for anything that could give them an edge, the poll comes at an apposite time for anyone arguing that their particular party should break the mould and downscale plans for wind turbines, energy-efficient lightbulbs and "walking buses".

It might well depress anyone who sees climate change as a real and looming danger, whether for UK citizens or people in less affluent parts of the world. Bob Watson, chief science adviser for the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), said it was "very disappointing".

But should he be so gloomy? If the mood really has been changed by a localised spell of cold weather - and that is a theory rather than a conclusion, I know - it shouldn't depress them too much.

Because who knows? An unusually hot summer - and globally, January was the warmest on record, in case you missed it, and El Nino conditions pertain in the Pacific - and fickle opinion might turn again.

One set of people who perhaps ought to be concerned are those working in the British media.

It would be interesting to see whether all 83% of those who had heard it was the "coldest winter on record" were also aware that the cold snap did not apply to the whole globe or even half the globe, but was much more limited in its extent.

Were all editors as rigorous as they might have been in making sure this context was put across - or was the footage of British snowploughs and closed British schools so compelling as to banish thoughts of including balance from further afield?

In terms of the global politics of climate change, it's hard to see the poll results making any difference at all.

One of the lessons of Copenhagen is that the question of whether and how the international community will get to grips with rising emissions is currently in the gift of a small, select group of nations - and the UK isn't one of them.

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Much has been written - not least on this website - and much more surely will be written over the coming months about supposed inconsistencies, errors, misjudgements and poor practice among climate scientists.

How many "scandals" do we now have with the suffix "-gate" attached to them? At least five, by my count, with the most embarrassing surely being .

The latest -gate - detailed in by environment journalist Fred Pearce - concerns a set of temperature data from China that was used in to estimate the likely impact of progressive urbanisation on temperatures recorded at weather stations.

The paper is one of several cited by the (IPCC) in reaching its conclusion that:

"Urban heat island effects are real but local, and have not biased the large-scale trends."

The implication of The Guardian's article is that Chinese scientists contributing data for that paper had not taken as much care as they should have done to document and allow for the fact that some of the weather stations had been relocated over the course of the study period, possibly affecting their readings; and that at some stage the paper's lead author, Professor Phil Jones, had been made aware of the issue by an independent UK researcher, Douglas Keenan, but did not seek to publicise or remedy it.

As anyone following the -gate trail will know, Professor Jones is the scientist at the centre of the original "Climategate" - from the University of East Anglia.Ìý

The point of this post isn't to go once more over well-trodden ground, but to raise a simple but crucial point.

Like all the other noisy -gates, this latest one throws up two questions: was scientific best practice followed, and is there anything here that affects the basic picture of climate science?

Whatever the answers to those may be - and Professor Jones' University of East Anglia covering key points of The Guardian's article - the important point to make is that they are separate questions.

In some circles, every single -gate "relevation" has been followed by a ritualised fanfare claiming that the picture of climate warming through rising greenhouse gases concentrations has now been "fatally undermined", or some similar phrase.

Journalists with an eye for old-fashioned concepts such as balance, like Fred Pearce, are careful to avoid making that conclusion.

He writes that this latest episode...

"...does not change the global picture of temperature trends. There is plenty of evidence of global warming, not least from oceans far from urban influences. A review of recent studies published online in December by David Parker of the Met Office concludes that, even allowing for Jones's new data, 'global near-surface temperature trends have not been greatly affected by urban warming trends'."

He could also have cited the body of evidence from the satellite record, which also shows a clear warming trend.

In [pdf link] in which he detailed his concerns about the 1990 conclusions, Doug Keenan made the same point:

"None of this means that the conclusion of the IPCC is incorrect."

In an interview with the Press Association (PA) about The Guardian's article, Phil Jones says he stands by the conclusion of the 1990 paper, not least because it was backed up by other studies, including papers in 2007 and 2008 that used a more detailed Chinese dataset.

Below is a graph comparing the 1990 (Jones et al) and 2007 (Li et al) graphs.

He goes on to say:

"It makes me quite worried people are beginning to doubt the climate has warmed up."

And clearly some people do doubt that - many of you tell me so, in great detail, on every post I write, whatever it deals with - and judging by your comments, that's partly because some of you believe that all climate scientists are as bent as a... well, a hockey stick might be a good simile here.

It is a free world; and if you really do hold that view, then presumably it makes sense to jump the divide between the two questions I raised earlier, and conclude that as all climate scientists are dodgy, so is all climate data.

But I would argue that keeping the questions separate is of absolute and vital importance.

How scientists and the institutions of science behave is an important issue, no doubt about it - for evidence, look no further than , which sees The Lancet retracting the decade-old paper that sparked all the fuss - and Phil Jones tells PA in his interview:

"We do need to make more of the data available, I fully accept that."

But what matters far, far more than the nuances of climate scientists' behaviour is whether the climate is warming, and if it is, what is driving that warming.

Those are questions crucial for humanity's future, because if the IPCC's projections become reality, .

If the scientific case for greenhouse warming crumbles, so be it; but I'd suggest we should beware of assuming it is crumbling simply because a few scientists or a few scientific papers or a few IPCC reviewers have been seen to fall short of the highest standards.

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Arguably, it's a deadline that isn't a deadline for an accord that isn't an accord.

"It" is - or was - by which governments were supposed to tell the UN climate convention (UNFCCC) secretariat what pledges they are prepared to make on curbing greenhouse gas emissions.

The date stems from - the agreement cobbled together at the end of December's UN climate summit in the Danish capital.

It received less than universal support at the summit, and since then UNFCCC executive secretary Yvo de Boer .

So does who sends in what really matter?

UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown believes it does; and in , he's just set out some of the reasons why.

If countries that indicated support for the accord at the summit send their submissions in, he writes:

"For the first time, the world will see, collected together, strong mitigation commitments by countries representing more than 80% of global emissions.
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"If those commitments are then implemented to their maximum potential, they could lead to emissions peaking by around 2020 or before, representing the crucial first step towards the level of reductions required to hold global temperature increases to under 2C."

The UNFCCC hasn't released details of who has sent in what - they're expected to do so during Monday or Tuesday - but a number of key players have said they would make submissions, including the US, the EU and the Basic group of Brazil, China, India and South Africa. (NB: SEE UPDATE BELOW)

An argument made in some quarters as to why it matters is that the number of countries sending in submissions will indicate the extent of support for the Copenhagen Accord.

Implicit in this argument is a belief that the accord might be instrumental in holding countries to their pledges. It also ties in with a belief that the accord can be the basis for the bigger, more legally framed treaty that the EU and a number of developing countries say they want to secure at this year's UN conference in Mexico.

Do these views hold water, though? One reason why they might not is that the accord didn't bring any commitments from any countries above and beyond what they had pledged in the run-up to Copenhagen.

Compare countries' statements of intent as of November, say, with what they have sent to the UNFCCC and my guess is that you will not see a jot of difference. Some were going to do what they pledged anyway, unilaterally, accord or no accord.

And some, such as the EU, have indicated they'll now adopt targets at the weak end of the ranges they'd proposed - an action confirming that the accord is regarded as lacking in ambition.

And as I've asked before on this blog: given the way Copenhagen turned out, what basis does anyone have for believing that there is appetite among all significant parties for a stronger agreement with at least a whiff of legal obligation?

The agenda in those final hours of the summit was set and driven by the Basic bloc, who are most insistent that their own pledges must be regarded as voluntary. This view has been given additional emphasis by that the Basic countries had agreed how far they would go a week before the Copenhagen summit convened, during a meeting on 28 November in Beijing.

The bloc now plans to hold quarterly ministerial meetings on climate change.

So here's a provocative question: given the outcome of Copenhagen, and given the strength of the sinews that these powerfully developing nations are beginning to flex on a more regular basis in all sorts of arenas - see last week - are these regular four-nation meetings now the most important events for deciding where the world is going on climate change?

UPDATE: The UNFCCC has now released so far received. Top stats are: 55 countries, accounting for 78% of global emissions from energy use.

According to Yvo de Boer:

"The commitment to confront climate change at the highest level is beyond doubt."

See our news story .

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