Delegates at last month’s United Nations climate conference in Warsaw decided that $1 billion dollars a day, the amount currently being spend across the world on “climate finance”, is not enough.

Far greater funding is needed to save the world from what UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon calls the “greatest threat facing humanity.”

That climate science is highly immature and global warming actually stopped 17 years ago was never mentioned.

Here’s what our representatives agreed to.

Starting in 2014, the UN’s Green Climate Fund, a plan to divert an additional $100 billion per year from developed to developing countries to help the latter “take action on climate change”, will commence operation.

A timetable was accepted to pave the way towards the establishment of a new international treaty in 2015 that will force developed countries to spend billions more to reduce carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.

The fine print in the negotiating text includes an out clause for developing nations, indicating their CO2 emission targets will not be enforced. Developed nations like ours do not have this escape clause.

But this is only the tip of the financial iceberg.

Last-minute concessions by our representatives have set us up for a potential liability of trillions of dollars.

They agreed to the establishment of a new institution under the UN’s legal framework: the “Warsaw international mechanism for the loss and damage associated with climate change impacts.”

In so doing, the door has been opened to requiring that we compensate developing countries for the impact of extreme weather that is supposedly our fault.

For the first time, the costs of extreme weather events all over the world are about to be added to our bill.

This happened because developed countries did not challenge the scientifically-flawed notion that anthropogenic climate change is known to be responsible for extreme weather events.

Extreme weather has always been an integral part of the climate system. It is not within our control and there has been no worldwide increase in such phenomena.

The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), stated in its 2012 Special Report on Extremes: “There is medium evidence and high agreement that long-term trends in normalized losses have not been attributed to natural or anthropogenic climate change.”

In its September, 2013 assessment report, the IPCC had only “low confidence” that damaging increases will occur in tropical cyclones (typhoons and hurricanes) due to global warming.

UN delegates must ask critical questions of their leaders.

For example, extreme weather events occurred with about the same frequency during the 1945 to 1977 global cooling period as they do today, yet no climate scientist pointed to human activity as being responsible in the earlier period. What is different now?

To maintain pressure for the 2015 climate treaty, there will be additional UN negotiations this coming spring, summer, and autumn. Unless our negotiators introduce real science at these meetings we will soon be responsible for trillions of dollars in compensation for natural phenomena.

The right response is to help vulnerable people adapt to extreme weather events, to the degree we can afford. The idea we cause them and can prevent them from occurring is science fiction.

— Harris is Executive Director of the International Climate Science Coalition. Dr. Madhav Khandekar, is a former research scientist with Environment Canada