Of course, praying to jaguar goddesses addicted to human sacrifice may not really be so inappropriate, if you happen to be a member of the international bureaucratic clerisy using alleged Anthropogenic climate change as a tool for gaining economic advantage.

The latest Wikileaks document dump, reports the Guardian, reveals that US diplomats used threats and bribery and spied on developing countries in an underhanded effort to force them to conform to a regulatory regime dictated by the leading Western governments.

Hidden behind the save-the-world rhetoric of the global climate change negotiations lies the mucky realpolitik: money and threats buy political support; spying and cyberwarfare are used to seek out leverage.

The US diplomatic cables reveal how the US seeks dirt on nations opposed to its approach to tackling global warming; how financial and other aid is used by countries to gain political backing; how distrust, broken promises and creative accounting dog negotiations; and how the US mounted a secret global diplomatic offensive to overwhelm opposition to the controversial “Copenhagen accord”, the unofficial document that emerged from the ruins of the Copenhagen climate change summit in 2009.

Negotiating a climate treaty is a high-stakes game, not just because of the danger warming poses to civilisation but also because re-engineering the global economy to a low-carbon model will see the flow of billions of dollars redirected.