Kyoto is dead. Pass the Ferrero Rocher would you?

Friday December 11th

9am

Even getting on the plane this morning was exciting. As I walked down the aisle to take my seat at the back, I saw people either side of me reading reading scientific or UN papers, carrying laptops with climate science mission badges or reading through the agenda for their climate justice NGO. I recognised an ill-kept junior civil servant from DECC (not that I'm in a position to throw stones - I've hardly slept this week between a stinking cold and working late and look like my grandfather's dead whippet). But there's that kind sense that you get sometimes when you get on a plane full of people going on holiday - nobody knows each other, but is a little demob happy, aware that there's a sort of common purpose.

3pm

OK I've just arrived at the Bella Centre, where the Conference of Parties is taking place. It's a hideous warehouse in the middle of a deserted wasteland, surrounded by cold looking police in parkas and hippies waving placards. Queuing for registration as an observer, I find myself beside the BP representative on one side (who appears not to have been properly accredited so she wasn't let in. Karma 1 : BP nil), and a bunch of sandal wearing beardies on the other. Then someone introduces the lead sandal wearing beardy as the chief economist of the Stockholm Environment Institute who did the lead critique of the Stern Report.

I move on.

3.15pm

I've got my photo badge and appear to be in what looks a bit like a university Freshers week. Stalls from Stanford University to the International Chamber of Commerce to Greenpeace block the way of the entrants going to the main halls and negotiations. Each stall is about the size of a school boys desk so its a bit comical. I wander past the Heinrich Boll Stiftung stand and stop to ask what that great German writer had to do with the environment. (Boll is renowned on my father's island off the West Coast of Ireland, though mainly because of the Summer house he had there). The man on the stand doesn't actually appear to know who Heinrich Boll was.

Again, I move on.

4pm

Everything here seems so cramped. You're here at the most momentous and historic attempt by human kind to organise itself so as not to wipe itself out, and all that seems to be going on is a circus of new age hippies is waving placards in a half-arsed sort of way at the guys in suits with the pink badges of government representatives, all of whom look very tired.

430pm

The Tuvaly delegation is explaining on TV why they've held up the formal negotiations for two days on a procedural point. It doesn't appear to make a lot of sense.

5pm

By now I've negotiated lunch and a beer and am starting to understand what's going on, largely by virtue of having caught up with a few pals. It seems that the UN has decided that the FCCC has to be very democratic, so they've let every fruitcake who can afford a ticket to Copenhagen come and set up their demos INSIDE the conference centre. These are all shoved together, about 200m away from where the government delegations are. But they get to make their demos at people sitting in cafes inside a nice warm hideous warehouse, while the government reps get on with the hard work of hammering something out in their much nicer cafes in the state delegations section.

My friends tell me that it's all a bit mad. And it really is. It's a circus with 35000 participants.

650pm

Go to collect my coat. Find I have lost my ticket due to a holey pocket. Nice lady tells me that there are 15,000 coats here, and do I really expect to find it? By staggering luck, someone has handed the ticket in and I have my coat in 60 seconds flat.

7pm

Dash to Northwest Copenhagen for dinner at the UK Ambassador's residence. Clearly, I've finally made the A-list!! Yeah right ...

Midnight at my hotel bar

Most interesting conversation. The ambassador gave me the official UK line "UN FCCC just doesn't work, it's going nowhere. Kyoto is finished, we need something new with a new set of institutions." I'd been warned by a mate who works for Sterns office that it might end up like this, with a tug of war between rich and poor and no more UN involved.

So it looks as if the rumours I'd heard in London two weeks ago are true. The rich countries have drafted a new treaty, and so have the poor - sorry - developing countries. And both texts shove Kyoto / UN FCCC / poor old Yvo de Boer out the window, and start all over again. The developing countries are arguing for a 1.5 C limit, but that's fairly unrealistic. In truth because of the 40 year time lag in the ocean-cryophere-atmosphere system, we're probably committed to 1.5 C rise already by 2050 and there's nothing we can do about it.

The other side of the coin is that everything I've heard from various sources today suggests that they WILL reach an agreement, and there will be a $100bn pot of cash for developing countries technology improvement by 2020.

So it's not all a tale of woe, there's hope yet.

By the way, the Ambassador served us Ferrero Rocher. Really. I told him he was spoiling us.