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But even if countries live up to their commitments on gas emissions, a stark gap remains — measured in tens of billions of tons of projected flows of carbon dioxide — between the nations’ combined pledges and what would be required to reliably avert the risks of disruptive changes in rainfall and drought, ecosystems and polar ice cover from global warming, scientists say.

The chances of success substantially hinge on whether Mr. Obama can fulfill his promises to reduce American greenhouse gas emissions and raise tens of billions of dollars to help other countries deal with global warming. That in turn depends in large part on whether Congress takes action on a bill that puts a price on carbon and devotes a substantial part of the proceeds to foreign aid. And that is no sure thing.

Before the parties gathered in Copenhagen, the United States and China had been sniping at each other over various aspects of the proposed agreement, particularly over American demands that Beijing agree to a system of international monitoring, through which its public promise to reduce the carbon intensity of its economy — the rate of emissions per unit of economic activity — could be verified. But as that friction was growing, there was also significant progress on sharing clean energy technology and even exchanges between American and Chinese environmental officials over ways to accurately measure greenhouse gas emissions.

President Obama and Premier Wen Jiabao of China conducted a productive summit meeting in Beijing last month. On Thanksgiving Day, the Chinese government announced its pollution reduction target and said it would enforce it with domestic law. American officials privately said the target was too low and raised questions about the reliability of Beijing’s reporting methods, saying that some form of international monitoring would be necessary. China protested and declared that it would not sacrifice its sovereignty to an outside verification scheme.

The friction boiled over on Friday, as Mr. Obama arrived at the Copenhagen meeting.

Twice during the day, Mr. Wen sent an underling to represent him at the meetings with Mr. Obama. To make things worse, each time it was a lower-level official.

It was bad enough, said officials, describing the atmosphere later, that Vice Foreign Minister He Yafei was sitting at the table with President Obama, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and other world leaders. But Friday afternoon, after what administration officials believed had been a constructive one-on-one meeting between Mr. Obama and Mr. Wen, the Chinese premier sent his special representative on climate change negotiations, Yu Qingtai, to a meeting of the leaders of major countries, including Mr. Obama.

An annoyed White House made a point of noting the snub in a statement to reporters. Mr. Obama, for his part, said to his staff: “I don’t want to mess around with this anymore. I want to talk to Wen,” according to an aide.

The White House set up an evening meeting between Mr. Obama and Mr. Wen. It also set up a separate meeting with Jacob Zuma, the president of South Africa, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil, and Manmohan Singh, the Indian prime minister. The approval of those was needed to seal any climate deal.

"It seems likely from our data that they entered South East Asia first - making these populations older [and therefore more diverse]," he said.

"[It continued] later and probably more slowly to the north, with diversity being lost along the way in these 'younger' populations.

"So although the Chinese population is very large, it has less variation than the smaller number of individuals living in South East Asia, because the Chinese expansion occurred very recently, following the development of rice agriculture - within only the last 10,000 years."

The quadrennial survey of foreign policy attitudes, conducted among the general public and members of the Council on Foreign Relations, finds broad recognition of China's growing power. But the public takes a less benign view of China's rise than do the members of the Council on Foreign Relations.

For CFR members, China has been transformed from a major threat to the United States to an increasingly important future ally. Just 21% of CFR members view China's emergence as a world power as a major threat to the United States. In 2001, 38% of foreign policy opinion leaders said that China's emergence was a major threat, as did 30% in 2005.

More important, there is a growing belief among CFR members that China, along with India, will be more important U.S. allies in the future. Majorities of the Council members surveyed say China (58%) and India (55%) will be more important U.S. allies; Brazil is a distant third (37%). And while more CFR members view China, India and Brazil as more important future allies than did so four years ago, substantially fewer say the same about Japan and Great Britain.

The public sees China's emerging power as more worrisome than do the foreign policy opinion leaders. There has been virtually no change since 2005 in the percentage of the public saying that China represents a major threat to the United States (53% today, 52% then). Moreover, while Iran is mentioned most often as the country that poses the greatest danger to the United States, China continues to rank among the countries frequently named by the public as dangers to the U.S.

A Hotline for China and India

"Hotlines" between world leaders, like the legendary
Moscow-Washington "red telephone" devised after the Cuban missile crisis, are
designed to prevent misunderstandings or miscommunications between nuclear
powers from escalating into a nuclear conflict. China and the United States
have one. So do India and Pakistan. This year, the leaders of India and China
agreed to set one up between New Delhi and Beijing, highlighting concerns that
a worsening border dispute could quickly become the first major conflict of the
multipolar era.

Asia's two emerging superpowers are
at odds over the Himalayan region of Tawang, a district of India's Arunachal
Pradesh state that China claims is historically part of Tibet and therefore
within China's borders. The countries fought a war over the territory in 1962
that killed more than 2,000 soldiers. The India-based Dalai Lama has a great
deal of influence over the region's largely ethnic Tibetan population, further
irritating Beijing. The area has been increasingly militarized, and the Indian
military documented 270 border violations and almost 2,300 cases of "aggressive
border patrolling" by the Chinese in 2008. Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh
visited the area in October, drawing official protests and retaliatory measures
from Beijing.

In June, the Times of India reported that Chinese President Hu Jintao suggested
to Singh that the hotline be set up so that the border dispute didn't lead to
military -- or even nuclear -- confrontation between the countries. Although
likely a prudent precaution, the hotline is an indication that Tawang has
joined Kashmir as one of Asia's most dangerous flashpoints.

 JEWEL SAMAD/AFP/Getty Images

The Beijing-Brazil Naval Axis

Ever since China not so secretly bought several aging Soviet
aircraft carriers during the 1990s, China's ambitious naval plans have been the
subject of fevered speculation by military analysts. In March, Chinese Defense
Minister Liang Guanglie offered the strongest confirmation yet that China plans
to embark on a major aircraft-carrier building program, telling his Japanese
counterpart, "We need to develop an aircraft carrier." The Pentagon thinks that
the People's Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) could have multiple carriers up and
running within the decade, with construction costs likely to run into the
billions. With little in the way of naval aviation experience, China would need
to get its sailors and pilots up to speed in a hurry to meet that timetable -- and
that means finding an already operational carrier to train on.

This is how it begins: Proponents of a fringe or non-mainstream scientific viewpoint seek added credibility. They're sick of being taunted for having few (if any) peer reviewed publications in their favor. Fed up, they decide to do something about it.

These “skeptics” find what they consider to be a weak point in the mainstream theory and critique it. Not by conducting original research; they simply review previous work. Then they find a little-known, not particularly influential journal where an editor sympathetic to their viewpoint hangs his hat.

They get their paper through the peer review process and into print. They publicize the hell out of it. Activists get excited by the study, which has considerable political implications.

Before long, mainstream scientists catch on to what’s happening. They shake their heads. Some slam the article and the journal that published it, questioning the review process and the editor’s ideological leanings. In published critiques, they tear the paper to scientific shreds.

Embarrassed, the journal’s publisher backs away from the work. But it’s too late for that. The press has gotten involved, and though the work in question has been discredited in the world of science, partisans who favor its conclusions for ideological reasons will champion it for years to come.

The scientific waters are muddied. The damage is done.

Take the climate science storyline first. The most definitive account of what happened appeared in a Chronicle of Higher Education article by Richard Monastersky; the New York Times and Wall Street Journal also covered the story.

In early 2003, the small journal Climate Research published a paper by climate change “skeptics” Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, which challenged the established view that the late twentieth century saw anomalously high temperatures. The paper didn’t present original research; instead, it was a literature review. Soon and Baliunas examined a wide range of “proxy records” for past temperatures, based on studies of ice cores, corals, tree rings, and other sources. They concluded that few of the records showed anything particularly unusual about twentieth century temperatures, especially when compared with the so-called “Medieval Warm Period” a thousand years ago.

Soon and Baliunas had specifically sent their paper to one Chris de Freitas at Climate Research, an editor known for opposing curbs on carbon dioxide emissions. He in turn sent the paper out for review and then accepted it for publication. That’s when the controversy began.

Conservative politicians in the U.S., who oppose forced restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions, lionized the study. Oklahoma Republican Senator James Inhofe called it literally paradigm shifting. The Bush administration attempted to edit an Environmental Protection Agency report’s discussion of climate change in order to include reference to the Soon and Baliunas work. None of this should come as a surprise: The paper seemed to undermine a key piece of evidence suggesting that we can actually see and measure the consequences of human-induced climate change.

Soon mainstream climate scientists fought back. Thirteen authored a devastating critique of the work in the American Geophysical Union publication Eos. After seeing the critique, Climate Research editor-in-chief Hans von Storch decided he had to make changes in the journal’s editorial process. But when journal colleagues refused to go along, von Storch announced his resignation.

Several other Climate Research editors subsequently resigned over the Soon and Baliunas paper. Even journal publisher Otto Kinne eventually admitted that the paper suffered from serious flaws, basically agreeing with its critics. But by that point in time, Inhofe had already devoted a Senate hearing to trumpeting the new study. However dubious, it made a massive splash.

BILL MOYERS: THAT MEANT ASKING QUESTIONS ABOUT THE SOURCES OF INFORMATION THE PRESS AND GOVERNMENT WERE RELYING ON, INCLUDING, NOTABLY, THIS MAN, AHMED CHALABI.
AFTER THE FIRST GULF WAR AMERICANS HAD INSTALLED CCHALABI AS THE LEADER OF IRAQI EXILES SEEKING REGIME CHANGE IN BAGHDAD. NOW HE WAS ALL OVER WASHINGTON, AS THE ADMINISTRATION'S AND THE NEO-CONSERVATIVES' STAR WITNESS AGAINST SADDAM.

AHMED CHALABI: Hello... Yes, very well.

JOHN WALCOTT: Chalabi's motives were always perfectly clear in this and understandable. He was an Iraqi. He didn't want his country run by a thug and a murderer, a mass murderer, and a crook. And everything he said had to be looked at in that light, and scrutinized in that light.
And why anyone would give him a free pass, or anyone else a free pass for that matter, on a matter as important as going to war, is beyond me.

JAMES BAMFORD: Chalabi was a creature of American propaganda to a large degree. It was an American company, the Rendon Group, that - working secretly with the CIA - basically created his organization, the Iraqi National Congress. And put Chalabi in charge basically.

BILL MOYERS: JAMES BAMFORD IS AN INDEPENDENT JOURNALIST WHOSE SPECIALTY IS THE INTELLIGENCE WORLD.

JAMES BAMFORD: From the very beginning Chalabi was paid a lot of money from the US taxpayers. The CIA paid him originally about 350,000 dollars a month, to Chalabi and his organization. The CIA finally caught on in the mid-90s that Chalabi was a conman basically. And, they dropped him.

BILL MOYERS: CHALABI'S HANDLERS IN WASHINGTON WERE NOT DETERRED BY THAT STAIN ON HIS CREDIBILITY. HE CHARMED CONGRESS OUT OF MILLIONS MORE DOLLARS FOR HIS CAUSE, AND HAD THE PRESS EATING OUT OF HIS HAND.

JAMES BAMFORD: He made a lot of friends in the media. And, he convinced a lot of people that he was legitimate even though the CIA had dropped him.

BILL MOYERS: WHEN CHALABI MADE SELECTED IRAQI DEFECTORS AVAILABLE TO THE PRESS IT WAS A WIN-WIN GAME: THE DEFECTORS GOT A PLATFORM. JOURNALISTS GOT BIG SCOOPS.

MICHAEL MASSING: There was a big effort, in fact, to find people who seemed to have credible evidence about what was going on inside Iraq. Because, in fact, if you could find somebody who was credible talking about a nuclear program in Iraq or chemical weapons, that would be a big story.

BILL MOYERS: AND IT WORKED. THE NEW YORKER. USA TODAY. THE WASHINGTON POST. THE NEW YORK DAILY NEWS. THE NEW YORK TIMES. AND ON PBS JUST TWO MONTHS AFTER 9/11, FRONTLINE AND THE NEW YORK TIMES TEAMED UP FOR A DOCUMENTARY ON THE DEFECTORS.

FRONTLINE NARRATOR (FRONTLINE, PBS, 11/8/01): Captain Sabah Khodada is a former army officer who defected from Iraq. He made a crude drawing of what he says is a terrorist training camp on the outskirts of Baghdad.

BILL MOYERS: THERE WERE CAVEATS...

FRONTLINE NARRATOR: And a further caution: these defectors have been brought to FRONTLINE's attention by one group of Iraqi dissidents, the INC, The Iraqi National Congress.

BILL MOYERS: BUT THE CAVEATS COULDN'T COMPETE WITH THE SPECTACULAR TALES TOLD BY DEFECTORS.
BEFORE THE INVASION THE NEW YORK TIME'S JUDITH MILLER WOULD WRITE SIX PROMINENT STORIES BASED ON THEIR TESTIMONY.
JUDITH MILLER: Ahmed Chalabi is a controversial leader of the Iraqi opposition...

BILL MOYERS: AND STILL ON THE WEB, A REPORT ABOUT THE DEFECTORS, NARRATED BY JUDITH MILLER AND PRODUCED BY NEW YORK TIMES TELEVISION FOR THE NEWSHOUR ON PBS...

JAMES BAMFORD: Well, Judy Miller had been an old friend of Chalabi. Did a lot of the stories on Chalabi. Was very favorable to Chalabi.

BILL MOYERS: JAMES BAMFORD FOUND OUT THAT IN 2001 CHALABI HAD ARRANGED FOR MILLER TO MEET IN THAILAND WITH A DEFECTOR FROM IRAQ NAMED AL-HAIDERI.

JAMES BAMFORD: So, Al-Haideri was in Bangkok. Judy Miller flew there to interview him.

JAMES BAMFORD: The NEW YORK TIMES ran a front page story basically confirming everything the administration had been saying about Iraq.

MICHAEL MASSING: THE NEW YORK TIMES remains immensely influential. People in the TV world read it every morning, and it's amazing how often you'll see a story go from the front page of the day's paper in the morning to the evening news cast at night. People in government, of course, read it, think tanks, and so on.

JONATHAN LANDAY: There were some red flags that the NEW YORK TIMES story threw out immediately, which caught our eye, immediately. The first was the idea that a Kurd - the enemy of Saddam - had been allowed into his most top secret military facilities. I don't think so. That was, for me, the biggest red flag. And there were others, like the idea that Saddam Hussein would put a biological weapons facility under his residence. I mean, would you put a biological weapons lab under your living room? I don't think so.

WARREN STROBEL: The first rule of being an intelligence agent, or a journalist, and they're really not that different, is you're skeptical of defectors, because they have a reason to exaggerate. They want to increase their value to you. They probably want something from you. Doesn't mean they're lying, but you should be -- journalists are supposed to be skeptical, right? And I'm afraid the NEW YORK TIMES reporter in that case and a lot of other reporters were just not skeptical of what these defectors were saying. Nor was the Administration...

FOX NEWS ANCHOR (8/1/02): A former top Iraqi nuclear scientists tells congress Iraq could build three nuclear bombs by 2005.

CNN NEWS ANCHOR (12/21/01): Well, now another defector. A senior Iraqi intelligence official tells VANITY FAIR in an exclusive interview that Saddam Hussein has trained an elite fighting force in sabotage, urban warfare, hijacking and murder. David Rose wrote the story; he joins us now from London.

BILL MOYERS: IN VANITY FAIR'S DAVID ROSE, DEFECTORS FOUND ANOTHER EAGER BEAVER FOR THEIR CLAIMS. THE GLOSSY MAGAZINE, A FAVORITE OF MEDIA ELITES, GAVE HIM FOUR BIG SPREADS TO TELL DEFECTOR STORIES.
THE TALK SHOWS LAPPED IT UP.

DAVID ROSE: (MSNBC 12/21/01) What the defector Al-Qurairy, a former brigadier general in the Iraqi intelligence service, told me is that these guys, there are twelve hundred in all and they've been trained to hijack trains, buses, ships and so forth...

JONATHAN LANDAY: As you track their stories, they become ever more fantastic, and they're the same people who are telling these stories, until you get to the most fantastic tales of all, which appeared in VANITY FAIR Magazine.

DAVID ROSE: The last training exercise was to blow up a full size mock up of a US destroyer in a lake in central Iraq.

JONATHAN LANDAY: Or, jumping into pits of fouled water and having to kill a dog with your bare teeth. I mean, and this was coming from people, who are appearing in all of these stories, and sometimes their rank would change.

LESLIE STAHL (60 MINUTES, CBS 3/3/02): Musawi told us that he has verified that this man was an officer in Iraq's ruthless intelligence service the Mukhabarat .

JONATHAN LANDAY: And, you're saying, "Wait a minute. There's something wrong here, because in this story he was a major, but in this story the guy's a colonel. And, in this story this was his function, but now he says in this story he was doing something else.