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that one of the impressive-sounding environmental promises that governments are signed up to - the pledge to reduce the rate of biodiversity loss significantly by 2010 - isn't going to be met.

Now, is giving us detail on some important dimensions of the problem.

It's particularly timely, as we are now on the path towards . There you can expect all of these bones to be picked over, and some new targets to be set.

If you've been following the issue, the basic pattern should be familiar.

Numbers of species, size of populations, diversity within ecosystems: all these are going down.

Habitat loss, the spread of harmful alien species, depletion of fish stocks: all these are going up.

Joining the dots and concluding that the second batch of things causes the first isn't a leap of deduction likely gain you a Nobel Prize.

The Science paper, compiled by an impressive array of scientists across disciplines led by Stuart Butchart from the and , does three things that may prove useful.

• It sorts out what we know and what we don't know, and in which regions
• It refines measurements of how the various threats are changing
• It puts all of this together in a global whole

As usual, the global picture that scientists would like to have is in reality a patchwork of local and regional pixels, with the added constraint that the time-line for measurements in many parts of the world starts only a few decades ago.

If the availability of good data on something as simple as temperature is patchy across the world, imagine how much patchier it is when it comes to issues such as the rate of nitrogen deposition or the changing abundance of birds.

Where things can be assessed from published data - for example, the size of protected areas declared by governments - you can obviously get a more precise figure than where you have to go out and do field measurements in 270 patches of forest with four day of hiking between them.

So, for example, the researchers concluded that the spread of invasive alien species can only really be assessed in Europe at this stage.

Some fisheries records are only usable from 1997. Just 16 countries submitted data on the extent of seagrass in their waters.

So you get the picture - a fragmented one, at best.

Nevertheless, some trends are clearly discernible, both downwards and upwards.

Picking out some examples, Dr Butchart tells the ´óÏó´«Ã½'s Science in Action programme:

"In my lifetime, the condition of coral reefs has declined by 40%, animal populations have declined by a third, and we've lost 20% of the extent of mangroves and seagrasses."

Arguably, the drivers of biodiversity loss are more important than the biodiversity trends themselves.

After all, society is not deliberately trying to send species extinct - it's trying to clothe itself and feed itself and get itself around faster and so on - and as long as society continues trying to do these things faster and faster using the same technologies and materials, you'd logically expect biodiversity loss to keep on going.

Of these drivers, the spread of alien species, the impacts of climatic change, loss of habitat and the over-exploitation of fish stocks are all trending inexorably upwards - the only exception is nitrogen deposition, which appeared to reach a plateau around 1990, although .

Despite the limitations of the data available, governments are undoubtedly better informed about biodiversity decline and its causes than at any time in the past.

There's no room left to claim "we don't understand the problem".

But the problem is closely tied to human development - the rising population, the rising use of resources, eating more food, building more roads, using more energy.

Halting these implies a cost: which is why there's growing interest now in - of totting up the value that intact ecosystems bring, and what it would cost to replace the services they provide.

There'll be more on this along during the year. But Dr Butchart has another, much simpler point:

"All nature has intrinsic value. What right have we got to drive hundreds of thousands of species extinct and deny our children, grandchildren or future generations the opportunity to benefit from and appreciate the species around us?"

Whether we have the right or not, it's exactly what we are doing, as this Science paper shows us in greater detail than ever before.

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When you're deciding whether to get dolled up and head off to the party, do you stop to ask who else might be going?

Few want to risk being seen somewhere where the action is not; most will do what they can to avoid arriving so early as to give the impression that they need the party more than the party needs them.

When cutting carbon emissions is the name of the game, a casual scan around the world might indicate that since Copenhagen, even the most ardent party animals are having a bad dose of cold feet.

The latest country to equivocate over whether to go to the ball is Australia. Faced with implacable opposition in the Senate, .

The was supposed to be the principal tool for reducing Australian emissions by 5-25% from 2000 levels by 2020.

As the comprehensive global deal that Mr Rudd claimed to be chasing did not emerge in Copenhagen, it's probably safe to assume the government has latterly been aiming for 5% rather than 25%. However, meeting even this modest target would require some policies - and now the main one is sheathed.

In the US, too, prospective climate legislation has taken another blow.

The tripartite group of senators scheduled to unveil a new bill on Monday when one of the three, South Carolina Republican Lindsey Graham, threatened to pull out if Senate majority leader Harry Reid followed through on talk of quickly introducing a bill to reform immigration policy.

This once again raises the question of whether the US will pass climate legislation at all this year. Mr Graham was a key figure, a Republican climate legislation supporter in an arena where the vast majority of his party is opposed.

There's an oft-cited view among close observers of the US situation that if legislation is to go through, Mr Obama is going to have to throw a lot of personal weight behind it, just as he did behind the equally controversial healthcare reforms.

Will he? The analysis from this group of observers continues with the contention that the two key groups of people advising the president on this issue are pulling in opposite directions.

Those from the "smart climate" camp are saying "yes, do it, do it now". Those in the "smart politics" camp - is widely named here - are advising the opposite, not because of any opposition to the climate bill per se but because they believe Mr Obama stands to lose more personally than he gains.

Well, that's the theory. If it's correct, Mr Obama clearly has an important choice to make - not only for his reputation, not only for national climate legislation, but for the prospects of a global climate deal that can actually restrain emissions.

The BASIC group of countries - Brazil, China, India and South Africa - has just completed a short ministerial meeting in Cape Town.

One of the least diplomatically-worded segments of reads:

"Ministers noted news reports that domestic legislation in the USA had been postponed and indicated that the world could not wait indefinitely."

Some will scent a whiff of hypocrisy here, as intransigence by the BASIC group - especially China - as one of the prime causes for Copenhagen's failings.

It's worth recalling, though, that the principles of rich nations acting first, acting fastest and helping everyone else are enshrined itself.

It's been around for 18 years, so you might think Australian and US politicians would understand by now the wider context of their domestic choices.

Copenhagen left many of its attendees with the same feeling as a party where the host has dispensed nothing but flat, vinegary beer and made you drink it in a hurry: a throbbing ache of indeterminate origin, a pained bewilderment - and an aversion to going back for a very, very long time.

In the sober light of day, guest by guest, the collective reluctance to return appears to be growing.

As my colleague Nick Bryant notes in his analysis of the latest Australian move:

"An oft-heard argument levelled against the ETS was why should Australia press ahead with such a major structural reform of its resources-based economy when the rest of the world hasn't yet signed up to binding cuts in emissions?
Ìý
"The government has failed to provide a convincing rebuttal."

And so, you might conclude, has every other government.

Europe is stuck on a 2020 target that - - amounts to less than business-as-usual, Japan's intentions are mired in the government's political troubles, its emissions targets to those of its southern neighbour, and - most important of all - that southern neighbour is currently showing all the enthusiasm of a mouse invited to a cat party.

The allure of the economic arguments is fading. In some countries, the recession is cutting energy demand, blunting investment in renewables; to bump its belly like a teenage break-dancer .

Pretty much everyone is still saying they want to go to the ball.

But if action is the yardstick, you might conclude that the stars of the show are all veering towards choosing a quiet evening at home with the kids.

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As anyone who's ever dressed a salad in will testify, oil and water just don't mix.

That's especially true of crude oil and sea water that supports sea lifeforms from fish to birds to plankton to mammals.

So when we discover that , a little concern is entirely natural.

If the pessimistic "several months" timeline turns out to be correct, and if the oil continues to gush at its current rate, we could be looking at an eventual volume of 4 million or so gallons - which puts it in the same league as the of 1989 (11 million gallons) or the incident of 2007 (2.8 million).

However, past experiences may be a poor guide when it comes to projecting damage from the Deepwater Horizon rig.

Firstly, this is what you might term a slow, sustained release some 60km from the edge of land, whereas most recent spills have resulted from the sudden, catastrophic impacts of tankers close to the shore.

So whereas the oil from the Exxon Valdez, or the , was virtually certain to come on shore, there's no guarantee the coasts around the Gulf of Mexico will be impacted this time. So far, weather conditions have confined the slick offshore.

The coast of Louisiana, seen from the air, is one of the planet's most extraordinary pieces of topography. (Have a look on the satellite view).

Long tendrils of land curl out into the sea like some skeletal fern, encompassing channels that carry Mississippi water far out into the gulf.

The inaccessibility of these extremities and the fertile waters have created ideal nesting grounds for birds such as the locally endangered .

The unusual topography of land and water in the , about 100km to the north of the stricken oil well, supports an unusual mix of seabirds, wading birds, rabbits and loggerhead turtles in vegetation that includes mangroves.

If the slick heads east, it will eventually encounter the equally ecological important Florida Keys - and beyond that, the Bahamas.

Whether it does end up in one of these important areas, or whether it disperses quickly and relatively innocuously in open water, is conjecture for the moment.

However, the possibility of environmental damage plus the loss of 11 lives during the rig fire about the oil industry's place around US coasts.

Just three weeks ago, to relax bans on oil exploration along huge stretches of US coast.

Areas of the Gulf of Mexico just east of the Deepwater Horizon site are among those where rigs could be permitted in future.

The measure was, in large part, a concession aimed at securing wider support for the climate and energy bill being re-framed by the cross-party Senatorial triumvirate of Joe Lieberman, Lindsay Graham and John Kerry (co-incidentally, ).

Key aims of the new bill are support for the US energy industry and a desire to reduce US dependence on oil imports.

But even as these measures promise to create employment along US shores, the risks attendant on oil exploration and production have the potential to take away livelihoods, such as those of fishermen about the leaking well.

So it's not a simplistic equation. It's about risks and uncertainties, including the vagaries of currents and tides. It's about political and economic trade-offs, and about balancing short-term and long-term risks and benefits.

The US authorities are deploying a battery of tools against the Deepwater Horizon slick - when weather permits - including booms and dispersants.

Will they prove effective? Will the submersibles now being deployed to block the well's flow be able to finish the exacting task?

The fishermen, the bird-lovers and the oilmen all have an interest in the answers.

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Remember ? The sudden impetus from all kinds of bodies including UN institutions, the EU, and governments such as the UK that began about four years ago to ramp up the growing of fuel crops and to adopt liquids made from them as the low-carbon transport panacea?

While the enthusiasm was understandable given the absence at the time of other low-carbon transport "solutions", the thinking was also full of holes.

emissions, , and of coating the surface of the planet in monocrop plantations were also potentially horrible.

You can argue that this state of affairs would never have come about if "the environment" had not been chopped up and partitioned into segments called "climate change", "forests", "biodiversity" and so on.

More holistic thinking - more integrated thinking structures at national and international level - would perhaps have ensured that the downsides were seen earlier in the day, and there would have been no over-eager policy-making and .

Something potentially analogous has been happening with the international agreements that are supposed to deal with climate change and ozone depletion - the and .

The latter has met with some success at progressively phasing out ozone-destroying chemicals such as and methyl bromide.

The job isn't done yet - not least because developing countries have needed more time to make changes than industrialised nations - but it's been going in the right direction, with CFCs themselves due to be eliminated this year apart from a few uses where there's no alternative.

However, there's been a problem. The replacement chemicals, HCFCs, are - like CFCs themselves - potent greenhouse gases; molecule for molecule they are thousands of times more potent than carbon dioxide. They also cause some ozone depletion, though far less than CFCs.

Three years ago, governments decided to accelerate the phase-out of HCFCs too, with target dates of 2020 for industrialised countries and 2030 for the developing world.

But the most likely replacements for HCFCs - - would still contribute substantially to the man-made greenhouse.

concluded that if there were to be a meaningful global agreement to tackle greenhouse gases such as CO2, then by 2050, HFCs could be contributing anywhere between 9% and 45% to the man-made greenhouse effect.

concluded that by reducing CFC emissions to the atmosphere, the Montreal Protocol had done more by accident to curb global warming than the Kyoto Protocol had achieved intentionally.

Putting all this together that the Montreal Protocol should explicitly be used as another tool to combat climate change - that curbing the "super-greenhouse" HCFCs and HFCs as soon as possible would be a relatively cheap and effective "quick hit".

Well, following a meeting last weekend of the body that funds projects in developing countries to replace ozone-destroying systems - the - the notion appears to be all set to come into reality.

Essentially that when it funds a project that replaces HCFCs with something else, it'll pay up to 25% extra if that something else is not an HFC-based system.

Low-warming replacements likely to qualify for the additional funding include, ironically, systems based on CO2, as well as ammonia and hydrocarbons - all methods that were around before the widespread adoption of CFCs, and which look set to outlive them.

The Multilateral Fund has a good track record of raising and disbursing money - without that, there would be far more ozone depletion going on than there is - so as things stand, there's no reason to believe the switch to low-warming systems won't now begin.

According to , the NGO that currently follows the ozone trail in most detail, the decision "provides an incentive for countries to choose low (GWP) and energy efficient replacements instead of high-GWP HFCs when phasing out HCFCs".

I can almost hear the exclamations of incredulity - "what, joined-up thinking across the UN?" - but there it is, it appears to be happening.

What lessons for other initiatives? The big mover at the moment is the push to agree a regime for under the climate convention.

But there are complaints that the negotiations, as they move forward, are sidelining concerns about biodiversity and the rights of indigenous peoples.

The lesson of biofuels, surely, is that you narrow the picture at your peril - and the lesson of the Multilateral Fund is that where there are easy inclusive wins, you should grab them.

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There are many ways in which climate science has moved on since the mid-1990s, the period from date which the oldest - and there are quite a few in which many both inside and outside the mainstream would argue it needs to change further.

I referred to some of them in a previous post dealing with , from .

Another of them is flagged up , from a panel chaired by .

In essence it says: tell the whole story.

"Their published work contains many cautions about the limitations of their data and their interpretation."

And a little further on:

"All of the published work was accompanied by detailed descriptions of uncertainties and accompanied by appropriate caveats. The same was true in face-to-face discussions."

And finally:

"CRU publications repeatedly emphasise the discrepancy between instrumental and tree-based proxy reconstructions of temperature during the late 20th Century, but presentations of this work by and others have sometimes neglected to highlight this issue. While this was regrettable, we could find no such fault with the peer-reviewed papers we examined."

In any branch of science, if you follow a path from raw data to scientific publication to meta-analysing review, you will inevitably see a process of simplifying and parsing.

If you then follow the non-scientific channels where that information flows - through governmental report to distillation for ministers to sound-bite, or from a journalist's research through article to headline - you will see further reduction, and sometimes not so skilfully done.

The Oxburgh review's point is that we reduce the uncertainties and caveats and cautions at our peril.

As one might have predicted, this review (like the STC's) has been broadly applauded by mainstream scientists and scientific institutions, and .

But over the last decade, many people I've spoken to across the spectrum have expressed concerns at the loss of caveats and "small print"; perhaps, at least on this aspect of the Oxburgh review, there will be some consensus.

It is not without challenges. Communicating climate science is hard enough as it is; the more uncertainties and limitations are involved, the more daunting as a communication challenge it becomes.

Yet, extrapolating from Oxburgh, it is a challenge that needs to be taken up.

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En route from in Bonn: After the brutal medicine of , no-one was quite sure how much of the UN process would survive through the harsh winter intact and emerge into the warming weather of Bonn in springtime.

Judging by the three-day meeting here, at least one UN climate convention tradition is alive and well: a total incapacity for punctuality.

The agenda for the final session on Sunday afternoon looked simple enough: decide how many meetings to have through the year and roughly when; tell the chair what inputs she should use in drawing up her draft text; recall this agreement and recognise that document - and that's about it, really.

We should have known better. The session didn't begin within four hours of its scheduled 3pm start time, as wrangles continued behind the scenes.

The Russian delegate had brought cheers and laughter on the first day by suggesting that sufficient sleep is probably part of the essential recipe for effective negotiation; two days later, his enjoinder was history, forgotten, as debate stretched until midnight and beyond.

A sardonic observer might be given to imagining some Masonic-style ritual you have to go through when you become a UN climate negotiator, wherein you vow in blood that whenever the chair entreats you to stick to the point and be brief, you see how long you can go for and how many times you can repeat statements of your basic position.

Once the gallows humour of another hopeless overrun had faded in the early morning light, the reflection came that after all, there were sound reasons for the delays and the wrangling - and that they have something to tell us about the big questions relating to this process, namely whether there will be a treaty-style agreement this year, and if so, what it might look like.

Countries perceiving themselves vulnerable to climate effects are determined it should look nothing like , the political declaration drawn up by a small group of countries and presented to the rest on the final day of December's summit.

Trust was broken by the manner of its emergence, of that there can be no doubt. Many developing-country delegates said so; .

That was why developing countries were so adamant here that the accord should not play a major role in shaping the treaty they want this year - and why they took so much time and so many words to prevent it being acknowledged as a major source of ideas for the chair.

But exactly which are "developing countries" now? Copenhagen made manifest what had actually been clear for many a year - that the world now is very different from the one we saw in 1992 when came into being.

The single most obvious example is and its swift progress along the pathway to being the biggest economy.

But more generally, it's pretty obvious that if economies are growing at 10% or thereabouts per year, eventually their per-capita incomes and per-capita emissions are going to rise to Western levels. What constituted their self-interest has changed; and some of the internal discussions within (which now includes 130 countries with widely disparate wealth and climate-related concerns) were, apparently, rather fruity.

Still, at the end of the day (or the middle of the night, to be more accurate), this bloc is pressing for some kind of deal this year that will be as binding as possible - certainly, binding in some way on Western nations' emissions.

No-one, not even the US, is overtly opposed to that. But the US is adamant that there must be "symmetry" between itself and China - not an equivalence in the size of carbon constraints, but certainly in the "bindingness" and the monitoring and verification of those constraints.

Yvo de Boer, who's been at the nexus of this all for years, flagged this up as a potential deal-breaker, as did Artur Runge-Metzger, the European Commission's lead negotiator.

Some said before Copenhagen that if the US and China could sort out their issues, a global deal would be possible.

That was shown to be a little naive, because if you focus only on two countries only, some of the other 190 get pretty annoyed. Nevertheless it remains axiomatic that a US-China agreement is absolutely necessary, if not sufficient, for a global deal.

The next few months see a sequence of meetings at which the two governments will have a chance to sort things out between themselves, beginning with in Washington next week, and running through in Petersberg next month up to .

If they smooth their own bilateral path, there is still a mountain of obstacles to a new UN-style global treaty.

Some countries - notably - are still incandescent about Copenhagen. And there remains the suspicion among experienced observers that the traditional blockers and slowers-down - Saudi Arabia is often named in this context - have changed neither their tactics nor their end goal of avoiding any constraints on fossil-fuel use.

The role of the US is, of course, crucial.

even before assuming office; and many people interpreted that as meaning the US would steam at full power towards a new global treaty.

Copenhagen suggested that might not be an accurate deduction: and during the Bonn meeting, a document fell into journalists' hands that seems to back an alternative view.

It is titled "Strategic Communications Objectives", and appears to outline what impression the US wants to create during the year, opening with:

"Reinforce the perception that the US is constructively engaged in UN negotiations in an effort to produce a global regime to combat climate change. This includes support for a symmetrical and legally binding treaty."

It continues:

"Create a clear understanding of the CA's [Copenhagen Accord's] standing and the importance of operationalizing ALL elements... Deepen support and understanding from the developing world that advanced developing countries must be part of any meaningful solution to climate change including taking responsibilities under a legally-binding treaty."

US delegation chief Jonathan Pershing declined to comment on whether the document is genuine - it certainly appears to be - but did confirm that the US was indeed pressing to "operationalise all elements" of the Copenhagen accord, even taking the position that countries that decline to endorse it raised under its auspices.

His argument is that endorsing the accord means committing to emissions curbs - and this entitles you to some cash.

But many of are so undeveloped as to mean virtually nothing concrete, certainly nothing quantified; Benin's, for example, talks simply of increasing public transport in the capital Cotonou, preserving forests and developing plantations, and getting energy from waste, with not a number or a date in sight.

In addition, Article 4.4 of , which , makes clear that developed nations with historically high emissions have a duty to compensate all poorer countries affected -

"The developed country Parties and other developed Parties included in Annex II shall also assist the developing country Parties that are particularly vulnerable to the adverse effects of climate change in meeting costs of adaptation to those adverse effects"

- whether or not they have endorsed any particular political agreement.

What we can conclude from this is that the US sees itself as being back in the driver's seat, perhaps sharing it with China - but it may or not be driving in the direction of the binding treaty that most nations say they want.

Rather, the US appears to be leading in its own chosen direction - and if the Bolivarian republics or some of the more vocal (and vulnerable) small island states don't want to travel in that direction - well, that's tough.

It's a tangled web here. And the complexity and the spin have clearly survived the winter alive and well - just like the inability to begin a meeting on time.

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From in Bonn:

Good news: I've had my sins absolved.

Well, not all of my sins, obviously - that would take more Hail Marys than there are days in the year - but my carbon sins, at least.

Tucked in my back pocket is a piece of paper saying I am "hereby forgiven" for sins such as flying where I choose, using a washing machine, and eating meat.

The "Earth Goddess" who gave it to me marks the most colourful display in "NGO alley", the corridor along which every delegate to the UN climate convention (UNFCCC) meeting here must walk to and from the conference rooms.

Most of the non-governmental organisations displaying their wares are campaigning for carbon controls - the , the , - but this Gaia belongs to a group with a completely different agenda, .

Frequently accused of being in the pay of oil companies (which it broadly denies), this organisation has campaigned for 15 years on issues including climate change, on the premise that "the power of the market combined with the applications of safe technologies could offer humanity practical solutions to many of the world's pressing concerns".

One of those manning the committee's table is , the British peer who has become one of the country's most prominent "climate sceptics" - opposing carbon curbs on the grounds that science does not indicate the necessity, and opposing the UN institutions aiming to tackle climate change for what he sees as unacceptable interference in democracy.

There's no way I can sum up the scientific arguments in a single blog post, but I'll have a quick look at the democracy issue.

His concern - which he has elaborated at length during a series of public talks in the US - is that UN bureaucrats are aiming to take control of countries' elected governments through measures including a new climate treaty.

We walked to the meeting's document counter and took a copy of a document called [pdf link] - all documents here fall into this kind of numbering system - this one dates from late last year and was prepared by the climate convention secretariat, aiming to rationalise the highly disordered text that had emerged from preparatory talks in the run-up to Copenhagen.

A passage on page 18 deals with how countries' actions on reducing emissions, adapting to climate impacts and so on might be monitored and verified under a new climate treaty:

"The scheme for the new institutional arrangement under the Convention will be based on three basic pillars: government; facilitative mechanism; and financial mechanism, and the basic organization of which will include the following:

(a) The government will be ruled by the COP (Conference of the Parties, the sovereign intergovernmental body of the UNFCCC) with the support of a new subsidiary body on
adaptation, and of an Executive Board responsible for the management of the new funds and the related facilitative processes and bodies."

The use of the word "government", together with the "facilitative mechanism" to enact decisions, is what aroused the Viscount's ire. He feels it is aimed at exerting unelected centralised authority over elected governments.

Meanwhile, a preceding clause, which says the new treaty

"...should include a financial mechanism and a facilitative mechanism drawn up to facilitate the design, adoption and carrying out of public policies, as the prevailing instrument, to which the market rules and related dynamics should be subordinate..."

...he interpreted as meaning that the treaty would have the power to dictate to all the world's commodity markets.

This text had not been signed off by anyone - it was a draft.

Apart from the US, Lord Monckton told me the passages had raised concerns in some climate convention delegations from Eastern Europe, mindful of their long years without democratic freedoms.

I'd urge you to read the relevant passage, and make up your own mind as to whether it constitutes a global threat to democracy.

Earth spirits were deployed in a very different way - and only abstractly - during a news conference with Bolivia's permanent representative to the UN, Pablo Solon.

The Plurinational Republic of (so called because of its multi-ethnic population) believes that rather than aiming to keep the global temperature rise to 2C, as advocated by the EU and lukewarmly endorsed in , the target should be 1C.

As we are already about 0.7C from the pre-industrial benchmark, that would be a very tall order technically even if there were the global political will; but Mr Solon said that even now, Bolivia's glaciers are melting, causing problems with water availability (something ), and asks what will happen to people and the natural world if the existing temperature rise is tripled?

"At 2C, there is the risk that 25-30% of biodiversity can be affected," said Mr Solon, referring to projections in the .

"Are we willing to say that's a good goal? No, that's not a good goal."

Bolivia's refusal to endorse the Copenhagen Accord has led to - Mr Solon accused Denmark of doing the same - but, he said, as a nation with "dignity", that would not change its position.

Later this month, Bolivia will host . About 15,000 people are scheduled to attend, including representatives of about 100 governments - 10 at Heads of State level.

Civil society groups - non-governmental organisations - will be well represented, he told us, which is crucial to developing a good global climate policy.

"If people of the Earth don't engage in this process we have now, the results are going to be terrible."

As well as themes that reflect the UN process - cutting emissions, spreading clean technologies - the conference will debate issues such as "climate justice", and whether there should be a worldwide referendum of people to give governments some kind of global mandate on the issue.

A declaration on the "Rights of Mother Earth" - paralleling - is likely.

Bolivia's comes from , and in Copenhagen spoke eloquently of the link between people and "Mother Earth".

He wants us to use a wider sense of Mother Earth and our guardianship of Earth, and derive policies on issues such as climate change from a deep ecological understanding rather than from Powerpoint presentations in hotel conference rooms in places such as Bonn.

The Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow's Gaia forgives us our sins; Evo Morales's will punish us for lack of care.

Which will you follow?

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From the in Bonn

"When you think back to Rio," the delegate asked rhetorically, "would you ever have imagined it would end up like this?"

This is a delegate with much greater experience than me in this arena - someone who saw the UN climate convention come into being in 1992, and has been at all the important gatherings since. I am a gadfly compared to his elephant.

But no: thinking back to the - no, I wouldn't have imagined it would end up like this.

The idea of the UN climate convention is very simple.

Governments agree to keep effects of man-made climate change within safe boundaries, so rich nations promise first to cut their greenhouse-gas emissions and second to finance poorer ones to help them green their economies and protect themselves against climate effects caused principally by emissions from rich countries.

Really, that's about it.

The notion that greenhouse-gas emissions might affect the Earth's climate , and became a matter of politics only in the early 1990s. Now, much of the negotiating is done by lawyers.

While there are good reasons for that, it also explains how we got to where we are. Lawyers working on international treaties are good with language. In fact, they're really good.

The best example I've come across is about how work should progress this year.

(I single out this submission not to have a go at any particular country; rather because it's very cleverly written.)

Here's the preambular paean to , the document forged by a small group of leaders (and presented to the rest) on the meeting's final day:

"Heads of State representing Parties with the overwhelming majority of global greenhouse gas emissions, together with leaders and heads of delegation representing a significant portion of the world's vulnerable countries, personally engaged in intensive negotiations over two days, forging a consensus package among them that addresses the most fundamental issues on the table in the run-up to Copenhagen."

Read casually, you might take that to mean that the accord:
Ìý (a) represents a consensus and
Ìý (b) that it takes care of emissions, money, technology and all the other issues
- neither of which is the case.

Read it again carefully, and you see that all it claims is that the accord represents a consensus among the small group that worked on the accord and that it refers to the issues - both of which are the case.

Exhibit B: targets. The Copenhagen Accord doesn't set a firm target of keeping the global average temperature rise since pre-industrial times below 2C; instead it "recognises" the figure as one supported by science.

But the US drafters have come up with something that sounds a bit grander, namely that the accord:

"...establishes the first globally-agreed quantitative parameter for the ultimate objective of the Framework Convention, namely that the increase in global average temperature should stay below 2C compared to pre-industrial levels..."

"Globally-agreed" is stretching things a bit, as many governments haven't endorsed the accord - all the Copenhagen summit did was - but what's really impressive is the phrase "quantitative parameter", which rings like a bell without having any real meaning.

Many developing countries are harshly critical of the way the accord was agreed, citing the back-room deal as an example of bad faith from the most powerful nations.

The US take on this is that:

"Those involved in the development of the Accord negotiated in good faith with the intention that it result in an agreed outcome in Copenhagen..."

Again, it sounds impressive - until you realise that the "good faith" extends only across fewer than 30 countries.

There is more, but you've got the picture by now.

And therein, expanded across all political blocs and all issues and flowering gradually over the last 18 years, lies one of the explanations as to how we got from the fairly simple aims of Rio to where we are now, where the choice between a comma and a semi-colon can take discussions into the early hours.

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The battered old charabanc of splutters back into life this week for a quick three-day outing to Bonn.

But how it runs during the course of the year, and where its final destination lies, are issues that the drivers and passengers have yet to decide.

It appears that they're not all trying to get to the same place; also, that where some perceive a mud-splattered Rolls-Royce that can still be restored to its proper glories, others see only a broken down rustbucket that they'll pull on one last journey to the knackers yard.

OK, enough of the motoring analogies else I shall go off the road completely.

In plain English - ahem - what we have, in the form of the 11th session of the Ad-Hoc Working Group on Further Commitments for Annex I Parties under the Kyoto Protocol and the ninth session of the Ad Hoc Working Group on Long-term Cooperative Action under the Convention, is a short sharp meeting that will largely focus on where the two parallel tracks of climate negotiations that made little headway at are going this year.

(If you're unsure why there are two parallel tracks, I tried to make sense of it in the third segment of this post.)

The main thing that's happened since the summit is that governments have been telling the UN climate convention secretariat what they intend to do about the , the document that emerged on the conference's fraught final day.

Most nations have sent something to the UNFCCC - 123 when I counted on Wednesday afternoon, although more were being added, so the total might be a bit higher by the time you read this.

What's more, I've read through (don't ever say I don't go the extra mile for you.)

The vast majority endorse the accord - they "associate themselves" with it - but not all.

Ecuador, Nauru, Kuwait and the Cook Islands are among those that do not; meanwhile, countries that voiced the most opposition on that final Copenhagen morning - Bolivia, Cuba, Venezuela - have not sent in anything, so it's fair to assume they don't want to associate either.

Neither has Saudi Arabia, the most influential of the oil-rich Gulf States.

The most eloquent and detailed critique [pdf link]. I suggest you read the whole thing if you have time, but the essential points are that the accord doesn't do enough to prevent "dangerous" climate change, it's not an official UN agreement, and things coming out of it (for example a new fund for developing countries) cannot therefore have UN status.

It's very clear, therefore, that there is no consensus across nations on whether this accord is useful tool or a worse-than-useless distraction.

Among the majority that have endorsed it, there are some interesting lines to be pulled out.

A number of developing countries are explicit that it's just a political agreement, a helping hand on the road to a legally-binding international treaty. Some endorse the accord only on the condition that it leads to such an outcome this year.

China - widely regarded as the single most important driving force behind the accord - is the most explicit [pdf link] that industrialised nations still have to fulfil pledges made in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 and in Bali 15 years later to take the lead by making deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions and in providing financial aid to help developing countries do the same.

There are splits within some long-established groups.

Within the Gulf states, for example, Kuwait is against it whereas the UAE endorses it.

Small island states - among the first to be materially affected if projections of sea-level rise come to pass - are also divided, with - for example - the Cook Islands opposing and the Marshall Islands associating.

The US submission is also worth a look.

During the Copenhagen summit, President Obama said:

"I'm confident that America will fulfil the commitments that we have made: cutting our emissions in the range of 17% by 2020...in line with final legislation."

But the [pdf link] reads:

"In the range of 17%, in conformity with anticipated US energy and climate legislation, recognizing that the final target will be reported to the Secretariat in light of enacted legislation."

You can argue that there is no difference between the two. You can also argue that there is a crucial change of nuance - the introduction of the term "anticipated" legislation, with the final target explicitly dependant on how that legislation might finally look.

What, then, if legislation doesn't happen at all - a distinct possibility?

You can bet that China and India and the other major developing powers will be watching the space between "anticipated" and "commitment" very, very closely.

So what will come out of the three days of talks in Bonn?

No major news, in all probability. But perhaps, an indication of whether the process can make any meaningful progress this year.

Last week, the UK [pdf link] to developing countries, saying it...

"...would be prepared, as part of the EU, to commit to an appropriately designed second Commitment Period under the Kyoto Protocol, provided that countries which currently do not have commitments under the Protocol agree on a satisfactory legally-binding agreement which could operate in parallel".

(You'll recall that reluctance of the EU and other developed world blocs to agree further emissions reductions under the Kyoto Protocol was a major issue leading up to and during Copenhagen.)

If this indicates a more general willingness on the part of developed nations to live up to the letter of their historical commitments, it could be an important move, breaking down one of the barriers that kept rich and poor apart during the course of last year.

But it wasn't the only roadblock that prevented negotiations reaching an international climate treaty last year, and it isn't the only one that exists now.

We'll see how the beaten-up old bus looks after its three-day outing, and whether there's enough juice in its tanks to jump over, or drive round, a few of these other obstacles on the long journey to Cancun, Mexico, at the end of the year.

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