"Now that we're in the kitchen, we have to take the heat," said Rajendra Pachauri.

"And we have to recognise that the stakes are very high. So we have to prepare ourselves for criticism, and this is not something we have done in the past."

Indeed not. The worlds of climate science and politics were very different in 1988 when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the organisation that Dr Pachauri now chairs, came into being.

Concern there was about the potential of humanity's greenhouse gas emissions to produce a net warming of the planet's biosphere, which was why the organisation came into existence.

But computers on which scientists ran models were mere calculators beside today's petaflop behemoths; and many of the observation systems that now provide valued data, such as the global flotilla of Argo floats, were barely at the stage of conception, never mind in their infancy.

As a result, the risk of warming might have been perceived as real, but it also went unquantified.

And as a result of that, there was barely a prospect of painful greenhouse gas emission cuts, never mind the wholesale decarbonisation of economies within a few decades that many now advocate.

Fossil fuel lobbyists had barely begun to organise, and a webless world did not facilitate the instant fractious exchanges of angry words and equations - the game, sometimes played on astroturf, that now makes the climate blogosphere as relentless as Shinjuku station in rush hour.

And so we come, via the hockey stick and the passing of the Waxman-Markey bill and "ClimateGate" and Copenhagen and erroneous Himalayan glacier melting dates and the Tea Party movement to this, the start of the UN-commissioned review of the IPCC on a sunny canalside morning in Amsterdam.

The scene in the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences was a world away from the media scrums of the IPCC report launches in 2007, let alone the Copenhagen maelstrom.

The review panel of 12 academics - their CVs richly adorned with professorships and advisorships and awards - sat around a U-shaped table in a bare room while a handful of reporters and support staff scattered themselves around chairs at the back.

At the top of the U were the first people to present material to the review - Dr Pachauri himself and IPCC secretary Renate Christ.

Their presentations consisted mostly of background material about how the IPCC works: how it selects lead authors for its reports, how it relates to governments, how its cycles of reporting run.

Along the way, Dr Pachauri unveiled some issues that had concerned him for a while.

Communications with the public have historically been poor. Support networks are established for the duration of one assessment cycle, meaning that if something subsequently goes awry - such as discovering you've put the wrong date for the melting of Himalayan glaciers in your report - the team that should be in place to assess and deal with the issue has already disbanded.

These things are very small beer compared with the assault cannon constantly being fired in the IPCC's direction, and specifically at Dr Pachauri.

The organisation is accused of deliberately selecting report leaders "fully signed up to the global warming theology", as you might put it, and of deliberately excluding dissenting voices through a variety of mechanisms.

It is accused of routinely neglecting the influence of natural climatic cycles in its projections, and of concocting projections of the world's socio-economic future that bear little relation to reality.

Dr Pachauri himself is accused of making money out of promulgating climate concerns, despite recently being cleared of financial irregularities by auditors KPMG.

The last time I wrote about this review - when US secretary-General Ban Ki-moon announced its constitution back in March - I was already receiving emails assuring me that it was a whitewash, and I don't expect this to change.

Review panel chairman Harold Shapiro, a Princeton University economist and former advisor to both the George Bush and Bill Clinton presidencies, assured me it won't be - they are "neither friend nor foe" of the IPCC.

When I asked him whether critics who have seen the IPCC at first hand will be called - I mentioned both Richard Lindzen and John Christy in this context - he replied that this sort of

"...'thoughtful critic' - very very respectable and highly thought of scientists with criticisms of the organisation - we definitely want to hear that."

And anyone can send in comments - they're already arriving, apparently.

What's interesting me is that scientists I've spoken to, both in camps that are seriously concerned about climate change and those that find IPCC projections overblown, want this review to succeed.

By that, they mean changing the organisation as much as is necessary to help it do its assigned job as best it can: improving the quality of its scrutiny, removing inherent biases if they exist, supporting lead authors better as they wade through an every-rising tide of scientific papers, and enhancing communication of findings to the public who ultimately are paying for it.

It's a big task, let's be honest; Professor Shapiro acknowledged as much.

The 12 panellists are already very busy people, and there is a stack of material to get through and an army of people to hear from - and all before the end of August.

One presumes none will be having a relaxing summer break this time around, stuck as they'll be in Dr Pachauri's ever-warming kitchen.

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And then there were two...

Republican Senator Lindsey Graham having departed the group, it was left to Democrat John Kerry and Independent (Democrat-attached) Joe Lieberman to unveil the latest version of the US climate bill, which now sports the distinctly Stars-and-Stripes title of the American Power Act.

Since its last incarnation, the bill has clearly gained a few clauses and lost a bit more than Mr Graham's name on its title-page.

The entire bill [pdf link] weighs in at 987 pages; and no, I haven't yet read them all, so what follows is of necessity a quick and incomplete skim.

I'd be delighted if any of you want to pull out any details and dissect them.

So we have the continuation of the cap-and-trade principle, but a more gradual phase-in than was previously the case. Industry would not have to come on board until 2016.

That's one of the industry sops; another is the extension of support for new nuclear power stations.

Consumers - voters - heck, ordinary people - gain assurances that revenues raised through the proposed new law will largely go on reducing fuel bills.

Although this features very prominently on Senator Kerry's crib-sheet [pdf link], I must admit to being somewhat in the dark about how it's supposed to work, so if anyone has the full picture, perhaps you could post.

One ingredient that should please authors of the Hartwell Paper, the alternative climate policy vision that we featured earlier in the week, is a section aiming to curb short-lived warming agents such as black carbon, HFCs and methane.

And if there is no global climate deal, countries that would be able to out-compete the US as a result of extra costs imposed by the bill would eventually have tariffs imposed on exports to the US.

Some of you may find more than one irony in this clause - I'll leave it to you to point out what they might be.

But what's making headlines are the proposals - trailed well before the Deepwater Horizon rig disaster - to encourage oil and gas drilling off US coasts, including the sharing of revenues with coastal states.

Since those proposals were trailed, senior political figures in several states including California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger have said they don't want it - they'd rather raise revenue by some other means than risk the ecological and economic damage now being visited upon the Gulf coast.

So the new bill contains even newer measures that would allow states to block drilling within 75 miles of their shores.

You may be asking a question at this point: does the bill see US oil production as a boon or a millstone?

The answer must be a bit of both, depending on whose support it is chasing.

The drilling-or-not-drilling aspect is really a microcosm of the subtle shape-shifting the bill has had to go through to reach this stage, squeezed as it has been by resurgent climate scepticism, the loss of the Democrat super-majority, and now by BP's misadventure.

Andy Revkin in the New York Times describes what emerges as "a classic piece of American legislative compromise, with multi-billion-dollar incentives and investments and favours".

All the give and take creates three potential problems.

Firstly, the sops you give to one faction may antagonise another. Secondly, the package may become simply too unwieldy to suit anyone; and thirdly, it may lose sight of its core intent, which - at least according to the pre-election rhetoric from Mr Obama and Mr Kerry - was curbing US greenhouse gas emissions.

So is passing it politically feasible? And if it does pass, would it affect emissions as much as President Obama promised it would during his election campaign, or as much as mainstream climate science concludes is necessary?

Senator Graham has indicated support. But other Republicans who might have given their support are coming under increasing pressure from their party's right, and there are those on the left who now protest that the bill doesn't go far enough.

Clearly, the bill has been too much of a behemoth for many analysts to get their heads around immediately.

Frances Beinecke of the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) gives it a cautious welcome, though emphasising that there's a lot of detailed reading to be done.

But she's already read enough to conclude:

"The bill's core carbon pollution limits are solid. These emission limits get tighter every year and will drive investments in clean energy that create jobs, cut pollution, and end our addiction to oil from dangerous locations, both offshore and overseas."

However, the Center for Biological Diversity begs to differ. The bill, they conclude...

"...will not solve the problems of global warming and continues pandering to the fossil fuel industry - including expanded offshore oil drilling - that created the problems in the first place."

However the political numbers game plays out, and whatever the bill might or might not do for emissions, one thing appears certain - we are now in the endgame of this issue.

Its outcome will be of vital importance not only for the US, but for the world in general.

US legislation - however battered about by pork-barrel winds - would breathe new life into global climate negotiations. Abandonment would take most of the air that remains out of its lungs.

Either way, it's that important.

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No-one I know who survived the two-week incarceration in Copenhagen's Bella Center in December believes everything is tight and rosy with the UN climate process.

The yawning chasm between the rhetoric of "the most serious problem facing humanity" and the reality that governments are nowhere near agreeing effective remedies is as wide as that between BP's need to stem the Gulf of Mexico oil spill quickly and their confidence in being able to do so.

So even those most committed to the ideal of a new UN climate treaty are keen to hear new ideas - thoughts outside the box of the Bella Center, or indeed outside any other box, that could make a real dent in humanity's greenhouse gas emissions.

Into that scene comes The Hartwell Paper, a free-standing (and, according to its authors, free-thinking) alternative analysis not only of the prescription, but also of the malaise.

Out goes the framing of climate change as an "environmental problem" that requires a global wrapping of sack-cloth and ashes to "solve".

Out goes an initial focus on carbon dioxide; out go carbon trading, the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), REDD and all the other measures that give the Kyoto Protocol and its putative successor the appearance of having been designed by Escher on acid.

In come "politically attractive and relentlessly pragmatic" policies that take aim at issues relating to energy and "human dignity", but make a dent in emissions at the same time.

Meanwhile, the finance that the west is due to pay to the rest for climate damages would flow through the simple (and, some might say, long overdue) step of having industrialised countries live up to their word of providing overseas aid amounting to 0.7% of GDP.

(You can read more details in our news story, and in the article that one of the academics behind the report, Mike Hulme, has authored for our Green Room series).

Whether it's the answer that Copenhagen's lost souls are seeking is another matter.

It certainly cuts through some of the tangled bureaucracy of the UN process that has, at times, seen Kafka-esque wrangling over details such as how tall a bush must be to be considered a tree, and how closely spaced they must be to constitute a forest.

It's refreshing to hear adaptation money being called what it really is - aid. The change of nomenclature could actually lead to more money flowing, as well, because currently there is a real lack of clarity over where funds mooted at Copenhagen will come from, how they will be transferred, and even whether they have to be additional to existing aid.

But there are some holes evident in the paper too; I'll just deal with three.

Firstly, its advocacy of first chasing warming agents that may be more tractable than carbon dioxide assumes that isn't happening already; but it is.

UK methane emissions are less than half their level in 1990, because the government and industry found cutting them was cheaper and easier than tackling CO2 - and that's under domestic targets stemming from the Kyoto Protocol.

Efficient wood stoves that minimise output of black carbon, and solar cookers that produce none of the stuff, are chasing CDM funding.

As one of the architects of Kyoto, Gracelia Chichilnisky, suggested recently, there's no reason why such facilities can't be installed in their millions across Africa and the poor portions of South Asia once the players involved become as skilled at tapping CDM funds as the Chinese factories that have thus far absorbed most of the money.

Short-lived, intense warming agents could certainly be tackled faster than is happening at the moment - but so could CO2 itself.

Secondly, there's no notion here that developing nations would buy into the kind of voluntary mechanisms espoused here.

The UN climate convention sets the principle that poor countries likely to be hardest hit by climate change are able to negotiate deeper carbon cuts in the wealthy world.

In brutal terms, if Tuvalu is going to disappear under the sea, it can tell the US, Japan and so on that they must cut emissions faster than they've pledged to, and have some expectation that it will be listened to.

Any analysis of Copenhagen would show this hasn't really happened.

But the ideal is there; and giving it up would finish the demolition job begun by the Copenhagen Accord, by acknowledging the end of the 20-year principle that climate change ought to be sorted out on an inclusive, equitable basis. It's not something that the Tuvalus of this world are likely to be wildly happy about

That not one of the 14 academics behind the Hartwell Paper hails from the developing world perhaps tells its own story.

However, perhaps the biggest hole in the Hartwell principles concerns the notion that western governments are going voluntarily to increase their spend on the issue - by coughing up the 0.7% of GDP in aid, and by imposing a hypothecated carbon tax that would kick-start renewable energy research and development.

For one thing, there's no guarantee this tax money would be a more effective spur to clean energy development than the combination of Kyoto-rooted incentives (including the EU's Emission Trading Scheme) and self-interest (in countries without secure access to fossil fuels) that we have at the moment.

More importantly, there's nothing to suggest governments want to introduce such a tax.

Lest we forget, a carbon tax, to be applied across the rich nations, was most definitely in the air in the run-up to the Kyoto summit of 1997.

It didn't happen - mainly because those rich nations didn't want it. Largely as a sop to the US, bureaucracy-heavy market mechanisms were introduced instead, although politics in Washington DC, Tokyo and Canberra - along with the toxic Copenhagen fallout - are currently conspiring to curtail their reach.

But, the simple question remains: if rich countries didn't want a widespread carbon tax then, what evidence is there that they want one now?

One long-time observer I spoke to took Occam's famous razor to the confused and festering corpse of global climate politics.

Failure to agree a meaningful way forward on climate change was nothing to do with the complexities of the Copenhagen architecture or any mis-framing of the issue, he said.

It was simply that big countries, especially the US, didn't have the will to make it happen.

And that, one suspects, might be enough to derail prospective global approaches rooted in the leafy, free-thinking environs of Hartwell House as well as those forged in the fetid cauldron of Copenhagen's Bella Center.

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