Most of those concerned with climate have had their eyes on Barcelona this week, where delegates from 192 countries plus hundreds of observers, campaigners, lobbyists - and journalists - convened for the final session of preparatory talks before the UN climate summit in Copenhagen.

As I've reported, there's been a deal of tension between rich and poor - with the developing world accusing the developed world of forgetting about its needs, as rich nations refuse to cut greenhouse gas emissions enough to stave off "dangerous" climate change (their view).

How much of the rancour turns out to be real and how much synthesized as a political bargaining tool we will find out in Copenhagen - although perhaps not until the last few days of that meeting.

What's certain is that unless the US comes forward with a pledge on reducing its greenhouse gas emissions, there will be no deal of any kind, legally binding or politically binding (whatever those phrases may mean precisely).

If the US does produce a figure, it can realistically be in no other ballpark than a 17-20% reduction from 2005 levels by 2020 - that's roughly what President Obama pledged before the election, and roughly what the Boxer-Kerry bill now going through the Senate would produce.

In a news conference here, US negotiator Jonathan Pershing reckoned this would put the US way ahead of the EU on ambition - the US would cut emissions faster that Europe over the next 11 years.

The reason is that the EU has already cut emissions markedly between 1990 - the baseline that everyone else uses - and today.

And against that baseline, the US pledge will only be about 4% - paltry beside the EU's 20-30% and Japan's 25%.

Mr Pershing may not want the administration to which he belongs to shoulder the burden of making cuts that the Bush government did not... but from the perspective of a developing country many miles away, the US is the US is the US, whoever is in charge at various times.

Is there a formula that everyone could live with? Will the EU consider 4% "comparable" to its own efforts?

Would developing countries accept a US pledge as binding in the absence of Senate legislation - given that on the Kyoto Protocol, the US first signed, then declined to ratify, then withdrew?

Could money and technology bridge the gap?

Is it, indeed, bridgeable?

Mr Pershing said it's not yet been decided whether the US will put forward a target in Copenhagen and one reason for the non-decision - if non-decision it is, rather than a decision that's been taken and is being kept under wraps - is presumably the sticky passage envisaged for the Boxer-Kerry bill.

Republican senators on the influential Environment and Public Works Committee decided to boycott discussions on the bill this week, saying that a full analysis of its financial costs and benefits was needed first.

So committee chair - and bill sponsor - Barbara Boxer pushed it through the committee without debate - a procedure that's apparently rarely used.

However, in a sign that not everything is going swimmingly well, senators John Kerry, Joe Lieberman and Lindsey Graham started working on a "parallel track" towards a bill that can get the 60 votes necessary to pass legislation in the full Senate.

It's likely to include more support for nuclear power and perhaps for the oil and gas industry, while maintaining the cap-and-trade programme that is the current bill's centerpiece.

What this means for prospects of passing climate legislation isn't clear - perhaps not to anyone. But it doesn't exactly sound like a fast track - particularly as the further legislation evolves from the text that the House of Representatives passed in June, the harder it will be to reconcile the two.

A high-level European delegation was in Washington this week and although German Chancellor Angela Merkel's address to Congress asking for more action on climate change was received with applause on the Democrat side, there was reportedly silence on the other side of the house - another indication that not all US lawmakers are convinced that their president is on the right track on climate change.

Other potentially significant moves this week include the meeting of G20 finance ministers - a meeting expressly charged at the last G20 summit in Pittsburgh with putting a new offer of climate finance on the table.

Campaigners are urging them to phase out fossil fuel subsidies as soon as possible. To do so was a pledge made by governments at the G20 summit - it's also an agreed aim under the UN climate convention, which dates all the way back to 1992.

At the time of writing, the finance ministers' meeting is under way but nothing has yet emerged - you can follow my colleague Andrew Walker's reports on the BBC News website and we'll look at it again next week.

A conference will open in the Maldives next week of countries considered especially vulnerable to climate change. Governments invited include Bangladesh, Costa Rica, and a number of Caribbean and Pacific island states.

What they'll come up with is likely to include demands for reducing greenhouse gas emissions further and faster than is currently envisaged under the UN process.

The UN texts, the advice from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and some of the developed country targets are loosely aimed at keeping the rise in global average temperatures within 2C since pre-industrial times.

The equations are inexact but that may roughly translate to keeping greenhouse gas concentrations below the equivalent of 450 parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide.

For the small island developing states (SIDS), that's too much. They want a maximum of 350ppm adopted as the benchmark.

Although on the surface politicians - especially from Europe - are trimming expectations for Copenhagen, behind the scenes they are also encouraging campaigners to step up the pressure in the intervening weeks.

This week, we've had aliens wandering round asking "Where are the leaders?" and barrages of alarm clocks indicating the shortness of time before the summit... and we also have what are probably the first climate hunger strikers.

Anna Keenan and Sara Svensson have vowed to go without food until the Copenhagen summit at least - perhaps beyond, if there is no agreement that meets their satisfaction.

"We're undertaking the hunger strike because we're not seeing much action from governments and we really need it," she told me.

Can their action affect governments and persuade them to amend their positions in the four weeks between now and the start of the Copenhagen talks? Should it?

As always, if you think I've missed any significant developments this week or interesting ones coming up, please post a comment.

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At the UN climate negotiations in Barcelona.

It's a story that's been coming for the last few months; now that it's being written, the first cards of the blame game are being played.

Remember the UN climate conference in Bali two years ago, and the road that stretched from there to Copenhagen?

The last-night exhaustion and the tears, the drama of the US being asked to step aside if it wouldn't lead? The glittering promise held out by ministers of a new deal this December - a treaty that would legally bind most countries to do something about curbing their carbon emissions, and fund those about to be beset by effects of climate change?

As October's preparatory conference in Bangkok ended, a complete treaty by the end of the year was already being dismissed in some quarters - even by insiders - as a step too far, given the fundamental divisions that had endured even as governments sought to agree their common vision for the treaty.

There might now only be a framework of an agreement, it was said - but it would have some firm numbers in it, and it would be legally binding.

In the last two weeks, this has unravelled a step further, with politicians and negotiators and officials - and now the UK's Climate Secretary Ed Miliband - acknowledging that achieving anything legally binding is probably too big an ask.

For the developing countries, it's obvious who to blame: the US and the EU.

The US should commit to steep carbon cuts, as envisaged in the Bali Action Plan, they say; the EU should press harder and lean more heavily on its allies in Washington DC.

For those beleaguered Western governments, one answer is to point the finger back at developing countries.

China should pledge more impressive curbs than it has so far, US lead negotiator Todd Stern told a Congressional committee on Wednesday - a notion echoed by Mr Miliband on Thursday.

Developing countries are demanding levels of financial compensation - such as 1% of the industrialised world's GDP - that they know to be unrealistic, said officials here.

Campaign groups, too, are pointing the finger at the US, which they accuse of caving in to corporate lobbying.

Russia and Canada are accused in some circles of less than full commitment to the process - partly from a desire to expand exploitation of oil and gas reserves in places that are now made inaccessible by ice or made unaffordable by the harsh economics of their extraction.

There have been harsh words for Saudi Arabia. The Tcktcktck activist coalition accused the Gulf state of putting its oil interests before the needs of the poor countries with which it's allied in the G77/China bloc, obstructing parts of the negotiations that it found inconvenient.

Wednesday saw a series of events mounted in various developing country capitals to raise the issue, and on Thursday the Saudi delegation was handed a letter outside the talks here saying that "the position of the Saudi Arabian government in the negotiations risks preventing the necessary deal from being made".

For some of the youth caucus, the issue is simple, with the "school report card" they prepared giving pass marks to every bloc from the developing world and failing every industrialised country.

The African countries that staged a walkout on Tuesday would probably concur.

Simplistic? Certainly, according to other developing country delegates who - off the record, of course - found the African action unconstructive - an episode of what Australians term "spitting the dummy".

To some extent, all the blaming and shaming is a political game - another part of the diplomatic manoeuvring which governments use to secure not just a deal they say they need, but the variant of the deal that works best for them.

Does anybody in the Obama administration really expect China to pledge cuts in greenhouse gas emissions when the US has put no numbers on the table at all for 2020?

Does the G77/China bloc really expect the Obama administration to put firm numbers on the table when it only has as much power compared to the Senate as the US political system allows?

There is also a degree of back-covering - getting a bit of retaliation in first, as critics sharpen their knives in the bloody abattoir of national parliamentary politics.

Who is really to blame? Everybody will have their own list; so can guidance be sought in this affair's guiding treatise, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change?

Perhaps it's worth noting one paragraph...

"The global nature of climate change calls for the widest possible co-operation by all countries and their participation in an effective and appropriate international response, in accordance with their common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities and their social and economic conditions."

...which surely implies that it's up to all parties to achieve the treaty they say they want.

Looks like it's not going to be this year, though... perhaps next?

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At the UN climate negotiations in Barcelona.

It looks like the UN climate summit in Copenhagen is shaping up to be another final-night, early-hours, last few seconds kind of affair.

On the surface, what we're witnessing here at the final preparatory session in Barcelona is a stand-off between a pair of adversaries whose positions are both rock solid and un-reconcilable.

Lumumba Stanislaus Di-Aping, the Sudanese diplomat who leads the negotiating team from the G77/China bloc, is adamant that developed nations have to pledge to cut their greenhouse gas emissions by at least 40% (from 1990 levels) by 2020; otherwise there can be no deal.

"Anything less than 40% means Africa's land mass is offered destruction as the only alternative," he said.

And "destruction" included people's livelihoods as well as forests and other ecosystems, he said.

The "at least 40%" demand has raised some eyebrows because it's a deeper cut than the 25-40% figure recommended by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in order to keep the rise in the average global temperature since pre-industrial times below 2C.

But later, Sweden's chief negotiator Anders Turesson expressed some sympathy for the G77 position.

"It's not unreasonable. We say 30% (the EU target in case of a global deal) is within the span of the IPCC in order to meet a 2C target, but we do also recognise that 2C will provide serious consequences for some countries."

But developed nations - the EU, Australia, Japan, New Zealand, Norway, Canada - have already set out their targets; with or without a big US pledge, it amounts to a lot less than 40%.

So on the surface, no deal is possible in Copenhagen in December, nor in the mooted "child of Copenhagen" conference some time next year that is looking increasingly necessary - nor in any other session thereafter until one side or other drops down from exhaustion.

The same divide appears to be evident when it comes to finance - richer countries paying poorer ones either to help them develop along low-carbon lines, or to help them adapt to impacts of climate change.

Last week, the EU set out its vision for finance. A global pot of 100bn euros per year would be needed by 2020; between a quarter and a half of that would come from the public finances of developed nations, and the EU would pay its fair share.

The EU stopped short of declaring explicitly what that would be; but here, the European Commission's chief negotiator Artur Runge-Metzger clarified that it would be between 5bn and 15bn euros per year - dependent on other developed countries paying their "fair shares" too.

Again, on the surface this is not enough to secure a deal, with various developing country blocs demanding that richer nations contribute 0.5-1% of their GDP, and from public funds too.

Asked how these apparently unbridgeable divides could be bridged, Mr Turesson said it would be wrong to think that final negotiating positions would emerge here in Barcelona, nor in the first week of Copenhagen.

Only when ministers - and possibly heads of government - arrived towards the end of the Copenhagen talks would we really know, he said - and very likely not until the last day, or probably the last night, or the unscheduled early morning beyond the last night.

Later, in a news conference with lead negotiators from the EU, the subject of Canada's emissions reduction target came up - a 20% cut from 2006 levels (or 3% from 1990 levels) by 2020, which the government has declared to be "non-negotiable".

"Negotiators often say things are 'non-negotiable'," said Mr Runge-Metzger. "But if it is really that, why are they here negotiating?"

I asked Mr Di-Aping whether he was sure that no deal was better for the nations he represents than a deal under which developed countries cut their emissions by, say, 30%. He replied by emphasising the arguments lying behind the G77's 40% demand.

I'm sure he wasn't giving away his final negotiating position either, and why would he?

He's probably waiting until the final night in Copenhagen too.

So there are two questions running round my mind.

One is whether it's worth holding the first nine days of that conference. Maybe the thousands of delegates, ministers, aides, campaigners, journalists, caterers and everyone else should spend their time listening to music or watching football with a beer or two before piling in solely for the final night when they'd all be happy and relaxed and thinking of nothing but the good of the planet and its inhabitants.

(Scurrilous I know - and also flawed, because in reality negotiators do have a lot of groundwork to do, including formatting a new draft text that can be used as a basis for the final discussions - but tempting nevertheless.)

The other question is whether this is really the best way to reach a deal that is supposed to have such far-reaching consequences.

After nearly two years of talking, you might think it wouldn't need to come down to another final-night, early-hours, last few seconds kind of affair.

If so, it's looking increasingly likely that you'd be wrong.

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