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At the end of next week, governments attending the Copenhagen climate conference will say they succeeded. Bold agreements to limit greenhouse gases will be announced. Politicians will get their pictures taken. Barack Obama, having adjusted his calendar, will be there on closing day to receive his ovation: America's new president, recognizing that global warming is a problem, has committed his environmentally backward nation to doing something. Finally, some progress.

Then the politicians will come home and nothing will be any different.

The world is nearly 20 years into this process. The 1992 United Nations Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro reached the first global agreement to reduce carbon emissions. The Kyoto Protocol, signed in 1997, was the next step, with supposedly binding emissions targets for industrial countries. (Developing countries got a pass.) Both of these projects were hailed, then and since, as world-changing.

They did not change anything. If you look at the historical trend of carbon emissions, you cannot see where either the Earth Summit or the Kyoto Protocol kicked in. This is true not just for the world as a whole. One could blame the failure of the United States and the big developing-country emitters to take part for the lack of progress at the global level. The point is, it is also broadly true for the countries that were fully engaged. Even for them, for all intents and purposes, it was business as usual. For all the difference these grand global commitments made, they might as well never have happened.

Signs are, the same will be true of Copenhagen -- because governments have settled on a form of cooperation on this issue that substitutes grandiose posturing for effective action.

Of course, according to one school of thought, this does not matter. If you take the view that global warming is a hoax, it is probably a good thing that governments stage their great global conferences and then do nothing. Global-warming skepticism runs deeper in the United States than elsewhere, and it has increased in recent days because of the Climategate scandal -- the cache of leaked or hacked e-mails from the Britain's Climatic Research Unit that, in the words of The Economist, "do not show climate scientists at their best."

That is, it showed them sexing up their data in support of the story they wanted to tell; despairing over the state of their database and computer programs; acknowledging that they knew less than they were telling the public they knew; discussing how to suppress dissenting views; and advising each other to shelter their work from public scrutiny -- to the extent of considering the destruction of material that might be subject to Freedom of Information Act requests.

"A great fuss about nothing. This is how science is done," was the instant response of other climate scientists and their friends. This seems to me a slander on science. Despite the determination of many newspapers to ignore the scandal, it grew to the point where it had to be reported. (It was a story, though not a "three-alarm story," the ombudsman at The New York Times declared.) The signs are, it has had an effect.

This week, a CNN/Opinion Research poll found that just 45 percent of Americans think that human-caused global warming is a proven fact -- the first time this number has dropped to less than half. Most Americans, 58 percent down from 66 percent in a comparable 2007 poll, still believe that the U.S. should cut its greenhouse-gas emissions unilaterally. But their trust in the climate-science consensus has dropped.

My own view is that the e-mails are, at first sight, outrageous. They should be thoroughly -- and independently -- investigated. (Because they create the impression of a repressive intellectual cabal, it will not suffice to have other members of the same network probe the scandal.) I also think that other climate scientists have doubled and redoubled the damage to their reputation by questioning even the appearance of impropriety and springing without hesitation to the defense of their colleagues. The more they had expressed disappointment at what they saw and the more they had acknowledged genuine grounds for concern, the less reason the public would have had to doubt the wider body of work. Too late for that now. The damage is done.

Because I lack the expertise to question it, I do accept the climate-science orthodoxy -- though, I must say, thanks to the Climatic Research Unit, with less conviction than a few weeks ago. The preponderance of evidence and research says that the planet is warming, that human-made emissions are a significant driver, and that intelligently designed steps to curb those emissions are prudent. In view of the stakes involved -- trillions of dollars for the U.S. alone -- it seems to me that the science that is guiding policy needs to be done to a higher standard than the e-mails would indicate, and under far stricter independent oversight. But in the meantime, we should be acting to reduce the risks that global warming poses.

In other words, the Copenhagen sham is not all right. Apart from acting to restore public confidence in the science that guides policy, what should be done?

In a nutshell, the global grandstanding needs to be dialed back, and the centrality of national politics needs to be acknowledged. We need a form of cooperation that economizes on momentous international treaties and cross-border obligations -- which are difficult to frame in the first place and impossible to enforce once they exist. Instead, we need policies that can be sold to voters country by country, and that conform to a broad international effort, instead of seeming to be dictated by multinational (i.e., other people's) goals.

Curbing global warming does need to be an international effort -- because it is the stock of global gases that drives the process. There is no point in one country cutting its emissions if others do not. But this does not mean that a Kyoto-type approach -- a global treaty specifying exact binding limits on emissions, regardless of the consequences -- is the way to go. The difficulties in that method are obvious and have been amply demonstrated.

For one thing, achieving equity across countries is difficult. In setting hard targets, allowance has to be made for the fact that poor countries such as India and China emit less per capita than the United States. But how? Putting the political focus on questions like that, and trying to answer them once and for all at events like the Copenhagen conference -- then holding the entire process hostage to the answers -- is not the way to get things done.

Some environmentalists resist a price-based approach because it makes the quantitative targets soft rather than hard. But that switch has many virtues.

A big step forward would be to move the basis of international cooperation from hard country-by-country caps on emissions to targets for the price of carbon. Warwick McKibben, Adele Morris, and Peter Wilcoxen at the Brooking Institution have spelled out this idea in more detail in a paper I have mentioned before: "A Copenhagen Collar: Achieving Comparable Effort Through Carbon Price Agreements," available at brookings.edu.

This approach steps around many of the political difficulties that hobble the quantitative-target method. It allows countries more flexibility in choosing how to curb emissions. It would reassure developing countries that a commitment to curb emissions would not throttle their growth. In general, it guards against unintended consequences that might force countries to break their treaty obligations and thus jeopardize the larger enterprise. In the word of the moment, it is more robust.

How would it work? As well as stating an emissions target, countries would agree on a floor price of carbon, a ceiling price, and an annual rate of increase in both. They would be responsible for keeping their price of carbon within this so-called collar. Keeping the price above the floor would be their minimum commitment to carbon abatement. If the price rose to the ceiling, for whatever reason, the emissions target would in effect be suspended. So countries could comply even if their targets turned out to be too stringent -- a key point for many developing countries.

Hybrids would be possible: Countries such as China, uncomfortable with hard emissions caps but open to the idea of a carbon tax, could join in. Agreements on technology transfer and financial help for developing countries would still be needed -- but under this approach, these could be more easily unbundled from the main negotiations and dealt with separately.

Some environmentalists resist a price-based approach precisely because it makes the quantitative targets soft rather than hard. That switch has many virtues, however. One is economic: It is far less disruptive to address this problem with a gradually rising carbon price than with aggressive short-term caps, which might cause energy prices to spike, upsetting investment plans and causing waste.

If that does not move you, consider the politics. Hard caps are extremely difficult to negotiate in the first place, and then do not stick. They make for great signing ceremonies -- after years of tortuous negotiations. But then they don't work. It might be time to try another way.