If you've spent the week following every change of direction in the political winds about the likely outcome of the forthcoming UN climate summit, you'll have seen more twisting than the average Chubby Checker song.

Extending borrowing from the arts and entertainment world: "To bind or not to bind" has been the week's big question - but seeing as we've discussed this elsewhere, I'll put it to one side for the moment - while "Hey Johnny - what are you disagreeing about?" "Whaddya got?" would be a popular pick for the most apt exchange.

Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the UN climate convention, made a couple of strong and - taken together - highly indicative statements at a news conference during the week.

The first:

"There is no doubt in my mind that (Copenhagen) will yield a success; almost every day now, we see new commitments and pledges from both industrialised and developing countries."

The second: that the list of countries putting emission targets forward:

"must of course include the United States."

For environment groups, for developing countries, and now for the UN's top climate official, the US holds the key more than any other country to the chances of signing off any kind of agreement in Copenhagen.

For years, under George W Bush, the US was cited as the main obstacle to further deals on limiting climate change.

Now, under a president who emanated change and engagement and all sorts of other radically different vibes during his election campaign, the US is widely seen just one year on as still the major obstacle to a further deal on limiting climate change.

As a non-US citizen, I can't help wondering how that feels inside the country; comments much appreciated.

It's still not clear whether the US will come forward with targets or money or any firm pledges by Copenhagen. Chief negotiator Todd Stern said during the week that it was something that Barack Obama's administration wanted to do, without falling into the Kyoto trap of promising something that it would not be able to deliver.

"What we are looking at is whether we feel that we can put down a number that would be provisional in effect, contingent on getting our legislation done. Our inclination is to try to do that, but we want to be smart about it."

The US may have the will, but it won't have the bill - the Boxer-Kerry legislation, that is, seeking to impose caps on emissions economy-wide.

Senators said this week that it won't come into the Senate before spring - at the earliest.

This timeline makes things very awkward for those who - like Mr de Boer - would like to have a new deal signed and sealed halfway through next year.

If issues such as healthcare reform delay the Boxer-Kerry bill beyond the spring, the US may still not have anything approved by all arms of its governments to put before the international community by the middle of the year.

And what sort of bill might the Senate eventually consider?

A bipartisan group of senators is looking at whether something radically downscaled in ambition would stand a better chance of progress - something that would cap only emissions from power plants and maybe heavy industry.

This would of course have a smaller effect on emissions. It would also lead to the Senate passing a very different bill from the one that went through the House of Representatives in July, meaning the process of reconciling them could take longer afterwards... and so on.

There's a chicken-and-egg-style aspect to all this. The lower expectations are for Copenhagen, the less pressure any senators will feel to push forward.

That's an issue emerging in Australia during the week, where lawmakers appear to be in the final stages of debating legislation that would reduce emissions by 5-15% below 2000 levels by 2020.

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd is desperate to get the measure through the Senate. But it has been blocked once before; and now Eric Abetz, deputy leader of the Liberal/National opposition party in the upper house, observes:

"Given how Copenhagen seems to be collapsing, there doesn't seem to be any real need to rush".

Following on from the recent upping of lobbying by religious groups, an unusual new player entered the arena during the week in Australia - the United Firefighters Union, who told politicians that they were endangering lives and property if they held up the bill.

As with religious groups, I'm not sure how much influence the men with hoses will have - but if I were standing in the path of one of the forest fires that have caused so much damage in Australia in recent years, I think I'd listen to them.

Those in favour of a strong new deal received some succour during the week from pledges by Russia and South Korea on tackling emissions.

Russia's President Dmitry Medvedev indicated a new target of keeping emissions 25% lower in 2020 than they were in 1990 - strengthened from the previous figure of 10-15%.

The new target still permits a real-world rise in emissions as they're now about 37% below 1990 levels, having plunged when Communist-era industry collapsed in the early 1990s - but it's stronger than before.

More strikingly, South Korea - one of the most developed of the nations that are not quite developed enough to be asked to take on an actual cut in emissions - pledged to make one anyway.

President Lee Myung-bak announced emissions will fall by about 4% between now and 2020 - a 30% reduction in the extent to which national emissions would grow without any restraining action.

There had been suggestions (including on this blog) that President Hu Jintao of China might reveal an analogous target during Barack Obama's visit - but nothing materialised, for reasons about which we can only speculate, but (speculating here) are presumably connected to the Obama administration's non-offering of targets on money and mitigation.

Still more heart will be taken from India's just-announced plan for a thousand-fold expansion in solar power over the next 12 years - a plan that will presumably mean building fewer coal-fired power stations.

Meanwhile, lots of the discourse around legally-binding agreements and politically binding deals and so on has gone on without much reference to the fact that some countries might simply not sign anything in Copenhagen that falls below their minimum expectations.

"We should not allow any country to turn a political failure into a media success," the Marshall Islands' UN Ambassador Phillip Muller said mid-week.

Would small-island developing states and the least developed nations of Africa withhold their signatures if they felt that only a fig leaf were being proffered in Copenhagen?

We don't really know the final negotiations positions of any countries and blocs, but it has to be a possibility, I suggest, that might concentrate minds in the west.

Also concentrating minds, perhaps, will be a new analysis of emissions trends released during the week in the scientific journal Nature Geoscience.

Remember that G8 pledge to hold warming to 2C? According to the Global Carbon Project, current emissions trends are taking the world in the direction of 5-6C: a world of rising sea levels, drought across much of the tropics and drastically declining agricultural yields.

Perhaps someone somewhere will think of having a global treaty to sort all that out. Oh - hang on a minute...

As always, if you think I've missed something important in this weekly round-up, please post a comment.

Update 2309: Because comments were posted quoting excerpts apparently from the hacked Climate Research Unit e-mails, and because there are potential legal issues connected with publishing this material, we have temporarily removed all comments until we can ensure that watertight oversight is in place.

• Bookmark with:
• del.icio.us |
• Digg |
• Newsvine |
• NowPublic |
• Reddit
• - What's this?

A couple of weeks ago, the cat came well and truly out of the bag: there would not be a legally binding treaty at the UN climate summit in Copenhagen next month.

Or will there?

During his meeting on Tuesday with China's President Hu Jintao, President Obama appeared to indicate that some sort of comprehensive agreement was still possible.

Then, Danish Prime Minister Lars Loekke Rasmussen, speaking to a pre-summit meeting of environment ministers, called for developed nations to bring firm targets to Copenhagen - targets that should be binding.

All of this is very much at odds with statements from a number of European officials and ministers during and directly after the recent UN negotiating session in Barcelona, which were variations on the theme that a legally-binding deal was "unlikely", "extremely unlikely" or "impossible".

It certainly poses more questions. What does "legally binding" mean in this context? What does the alternative being bandied around - "politically binding" - mean?

And where does the formulation that President Obama used in his Beijing speech - "not a partial accord or a political declaration, but rather an accord that covers all of the issues in the negotiations and one that has immediate operational effect" - fit in to the overall picture?

We are into a miasma of nuance here; but for different parties, all of the nuances are important, so it's worth having a look at what's being suggested, what might actually transpire, and who's likely to be happy or unhappy.

So let's go back to the Bali meeting nearly two years ago and the pledge, in the Bali Action Plan (BAP), to produce something new by Copenhagen.

The BAP doesn't actually prescribe a legally-binding treaty, although that's an interpretation and an outcome that's been accepted by most governments as desirable and necessary.

You could argue that something legally-binding is implied by the agreement that all developed countries must adopt "measurable, reportable and verifiable nationally appropriate mitigation commitments or actions, including quantified emission limitation and reduction objectives".

What is explicit is that a Copenhagen agreement must "achieve the ultimate objective of the [UN climate] convention" - in other words, must stabilise "greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system".

In the broadest sense, then, there is acknowledgement by all governments that everything enacted before - the UN climate convention of 1992, the Kyoto Protocol of 1997 - could not achieve that goal, and something new was needed.

That "something else", according to BAP, would have to be bigger and bolder, encompassing emissions cuts by rich countries, curbs on the rate of growth of emissions by major developing countries, and finance and technology transfer to help poorer countries constrain their emissions and adapt to climate impacts.

It was described by UK Foreign Secretary David Miliband as the most complex set of international negotiations ever, on any issue.

Two principal factors now line up to prevent a full binding treaty emerging in Copenhagen. One is the sheer amount of negotiating needed in a tight period of time; the other is that the US has yet to put any commitments on the table and may not do so before the summit.

What a number of developing countries are still demanding - joined, apparently, by Mr Rasmussen - is something that is firmly binding even though it might not carry any formally legal weight, let alone the paraphernalia of a full treaty.

But how can that be?

Recall first that these treaties don't become binding on anyone until they've been ratified by enough countries to gain the status of international law. In the case of Kyoto, that took eight years - and in the case of Copenhagen, we don't yet have an agreement on the legal form of any treaty, let alone what would trigger its adoption as law.

Secondly, one of the bases for the Copenhagen process has been that "nothing is agreed until everything is agreed".

(A better phrase might be "nothing is binding until everything is binding, because certain things such as an agreement on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD) could conceivably emerge as a self-standing entity whatever the carnage around it.")

Are governments really going to grant binding status to something that includes main numbers on emissions targets and finance, but omits details that for some nations might turn out to be crucial? This has to be a consensus of 192 countries, not a majority vote.

Thirdly, what is there except international law that can bind countries to anything?

When it comes to the form and status of something that is not international law but is more than just a promise, I for one am out of ideas; if anyone has a clearer notion, I'd be very happy if you can spell it out for us in a comment.

A fourth issue is that some countries are very unhappy about signing up to anything that is not legally binding. A number of developing nations including Sudan (chair of the G77/China bloc), Grenada and Barbados have been making noises about not agreeing to anything that is not legally binding.

Their position is that we had the politically-binding agreement in Bali. In a sense, we had it in Rio; this is supposed to be the time for delivery on those fine words.

And it not just small developing countries; a number of European delegates have said that no deal is better than a bad deal, and presumably if they do not see the requisite amount of "binding" in the text, they will not sign, whatever embarrassment that might cause the Danish hosts.

The runes on this story appear to shift their shape daily. Experienced negotiators and observers suggest the fog is unlikely to clear before the final Copenhagen dawn on December 18th.

To the outside observer, it might seem a strange old way to try and solve a problem that most governments acknowledge as a serious and urgent threat to humanity's prospects.

But if there's one thing that governments appear to consider truly binding in this process, it's the requirement to obfuscate and procrastinate right down to the wire.

• Bookmark with:
• del.icio.us |
• Digg |
• Newsvine |
• NowPublic |
• Reddit
• - What's this?

Here in London, we've reached that time of year when the Sun rises after you do and sets comfortably before you leave the office. And the hours in between are filled with grey, malevolent drizzle.

Have the week's diplomatic moves shed more light than the Sun is currently doing here on the likelihood of reaching a climate deal at the UN talks next month?

It's been a relatively quiet week; but if the latest moves mean anything, a deal is further away than ever.

While European delegates to the preparatory conference in Barcelona that ended a week ago were saying variations on the "deal is unlikely but possible" theme, now the "unlikely" bit of it has hardened.

Now it's emerged that the UN is looking again at a "COP 15.5" - a follow-up summit in the middle of next year.

As this had previously been raised as a possibility and then discarded, the logical conclusion from its resurrection is that the chances of a substantial agreement next month have slipped from slim to infinitesimally tiny.

Finance ministers from G20 countries met last weekend in the Scottish town of St Andrews. On their to-do list was an item marked "decide what we're going to do about financing a climate deal".

The meeting's communique makes it clear that this item is still on the to-do list. They "recognised the need to increase significantly and urgently the scale and predictability of finance" and "that finance will play an important role in the delivery of the outcome at Copenhagen".

But on new ideas on how to raise money and manage it - and of new commitments - there was nothing.

Eleven of the countries likely to be recipients of adaptation funding if and when any materialises met in the Maldives on Monday and Tuesday for a mini-summit.

It marked the first meeting of a new grouping - the V11, V standing for "vulnerable".

Their declaration broke little new ground in calling for tough targets on emissions (aiming for 350ppm CO2e rather than the 450ppm that other blocs find acceptable) and for a substantial increase in funds on the table (1.5% of developed countries' GDP).

They did, though, vow to move towards carbon-neutrality - partly, it seems, as a way of shaming richer nations who have not made such pledges.

Brazil confirmed during the week that it will take to Copenhagen a target of curbing the rate of emissions growth by about 40% by 2020 - the majority to be achieved through cutting Amazonian deforestation by 80%.

And as if by magic, President Lula was able to report that the deforestation rate has indeed slowed by about 45% in the last year.

This is exactly the sort of commitment that industrialised nations say they want to see from the major developing countries - it's explicitly asked for in the action plan produced at the UN Bali summit two years ago - and the more developing countries produce such figures, the more pressure there will be on richer nations to step up their own commitments.

Denmark, host of next month's UN summit, has invited heads of state and government from every UN country, in what it sees as an "upgrading" of the talks' importance.

About 40 have indicated they will come - Australia's Kevin Rudd became the latest to declare publicly during the week.

Whether President Obama is among them will depend on how talks are progressing, he said in an interview with Reuters. If his presence can secure a deal, he'll go - if not, he won't.

What is still missing is any sign of whether the US will put any numbers on the table for cutting emissions or providing finance.

In one sense, this is a surprise.

Progress of the Boxer-Kerry bill appears to have slowed even further this week, with leading Democrat senators saying debate is likely to be delayed until January.

That confirms that if the President goes to Copenhagen, he will do so without an express mandate from the Senate.

From that perspective, Mr Obama's situation is not going to change between now and mid-December; so why can't the decision be made now, and made public - which would surely induce more leaders to get their plane tickets to the Danish capital?

Here's a thesis - a suspicion, a possibility. Could it be that the decision is tied much more to the president's current visit to Japan and China, and the forthcoming visit by Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to Washington.

Mr Obama has already pledged with Japan to work for more progress on a new treaty; but that appears to signify little but more words.

What could signify something more substantial is his meeting with China's President Hu Jintao.

In September, at the UN special session on climate change in New York, Mr Hu pledged to curb the growth of China's greenhouse gas emissions by a significant - but as yet unspecified - amount.

Could he unveil some numbers during Mr Obama's visit, either publicly or privately? Will Mr Singh be specific about India's plans when he meets the US president?

Politically, big pledges from China and India could influence the Senate's decision on the Boxer-Kerry bill... and if Mr Obama thinks the pledges (whether made privately or publicly) are big enough to ensure the bill's passage, perhaps he will then feel able to make a commitment on behalf of the US at or before Copenhagen in the absence of an explicit Senate backing.

All conjecture, of course... we'll see by the time this countdown clock reaches zero how accurate my crystal ball has been.

As well as Mr Obama's Asian tour, something to look out for next week is the "pre-COP" - the gathering of environment ministers in Copenhagen to discuss the summit.

These meetings don't have anything like formal negotiating status but they do provide a chance to put a finger in the air and see if it smells of progress.

I'll do my best to bring some soundings during the week. In the meantime, if I've missed out anything significant, please post a comment.

• Bookmark with:
• del.icio.us |
• Digg |
• Newsvine |
• NowPublic |
• Reddit
• - What's this?