The great American writer, Mark Twain, once wryly observed that everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it. As reported a week ago today, that pithy phrase was doing the rounds at the United Nations climate change summit in The Hague, long before its dramatic collapse on Saturday afternoon. It is an apt metaphor for this depressing outcome of what Greenpeace International called the biggest environmental problem facing the world today.
It must be borne in mind that the ultimate objective of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, adopted at the Earth Summit in 1992, is the stabilisation of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic human-induced interference with the climate system. As weather-related natural disasters become much more frequent and ferocious - just as global warming experts were predicting more than a decade ago - it has become increasingly clear that the overall reduction of 5.2 per cent, agreed under the Kyoto Protocol in December 1997, will go nowhere near achieving this goal. But it would, at least, represent a small step in the right direction.
The European Union's insistence at the Hague summit on the vital need to protect Kyoto's environmental integrity - in the face of a seemingly endless search by the United States and others for loopholes to evade their own commitments to cut emissions, - is what led to the summit's collapse. Yet the EU, which was genuinely anxious to make progess, can hardly be blamed for sticking to its principles. As Klaus Toepfer, executive director of the UN Environment Programme, said afterwards: "It is better to suspend the talks and resume later to ensure that we find the right path forward rather than take a hasty step that moves us in the wrong direction."
The US was on a sticky wicket in The Hague, and not just because of the deplorable custard-pie attack on its chief negotiator, Mr Frank Loy, Under Secretary of State for Global Affairs. With Americans distracted, even transfixed, by chads - whether dimpled, pregnant or hanging - in the interminable Florida recount, the future of the planet barely got a look-in on US network television. Now that Mr George W. Bush appears more likely to succeed President Clinton, the EU and the environmental lobby which strongly supported its unyielding stance will have a tough time convincing the US to make the necessary concessions.
It is expected that the suspended summit will resume next May, probably in Bonn, where its secretariat is based. This will coincide with the publication by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, made up of some 3,000 scientists from around the world, of its third assessment of the evidence and what measures are needed to avert the worst consequences. Between this and then, it is to be fervently hoped that the latest setback will help to concentrate minds on both sides of the Atlantic and elsewhere on the need to tackle the dire threat of global warming, which one leading insurance expert warned last week could bankrupt the world economy by 2065.