Richard Black's Earth Watch

As several readers have pointed out in comments on my previous post, and several more by e-mail, I made a schoolboy howler in this week's article about how rice yields are responding to temperature rise in Asia.

There are 101 reasons I could bore you with as to why it happened, but essentially it's my error for mis-reading a scientific paper. And I've been kicking myself ever since, because it was such a crass mistake.

So the news article has been changed, and in line with BBC News website policy it's explicitly acknowledged on the story page.

In terms of what the research might suggest about the world of several decades hence, the paper in question doesn't materially change the picture painted in reports from such bodies as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR).

In 2006, CGIAR released as comprehensive an assessment as science would then allow. It's worth re-visiting what one of the authors, Louis Verchot, told me was the central message of that assessment:

"We're talking about challenges that have to be dealt with at every level, from ideas about social justice to the technology of food production.
 
"We're talking about large-scale human migration and the return to large-scale famines in developing countries, something which we decided 40 or 50 years ago was unacceptable and did something about."

This is not just a climate issue. Human population growth, growing demand for water, and declining biodiversity are other issues wrapped up in the warnings of a coming food crisis.

There is another school of thought - that human ingenuity and economic progress will get round the problem, as they have in the past, notably in the Green Revolution that transformed food-scarce countries such as India into lands of abundance, with food exports contributing to the national coffers.

In principle, of course it could happen again. But as others have pointed out, there seems to be a gap between the resources going into agricultural research now and the size of the potential challenge.

Anyway, in contrast to some e-mails I've had about the amended version of this week's article, the headline is accurate - a decline in yields hasn't been seen here, but it is projected from this research, and that is consistent with other studies.

Projections may not turn into reality, of course - but there it is.

Last month, on the occasion of Stephen Schneider's death, I blogged on the extraordinary vitriol to which he and some of his fellow climate scientists have been subjected.

Some of the same stuff comes the way of journalists too; and so it may not surprise to you learn that some of the e-mails I've received on the rice story have accused me not of sloppiness, but of deliberate manipulation of the conclusions through a desire, or possibly a remit, to promulgate some underlying theological stance.

That is not the case, and it's extraordinary to me that anyone could seriously reach such a conclusion - but clearly, some do.

If any positives can come out of a piece of poor reporting, here's one I would highlight.

A number of readers went beyond the news report into the press release - and presumably if Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) were an open-access journal, a number of you would have gone into the scientific paper as well.

Press releases sometimes don't give an entirely accurate account of a piece or work, so going into the paper itself has to be desirable, and that's as much a challenge for PNAS and other subscription journals as it was when the issue of open-access publishing first arose.

The web is the only news medium that offers you the opportunity. When we journalists make mistakes, it means we are more likely to be called to account, and that has to be a positive thing.

This blog is now about to be left untended for several weeks, as I head off for a badly-needed holiday.

But there's a couple of other things I want to flag up.

I had an e-mail this week from my former colleague Tim Hirsch. He sent me a link to an article he wrote for the then fledgling BBC News website back in 1999, a few years after the oil tanker Sea Empress ran aground on the coast of Wales, spilling more than 72,000 tonnes of crude along a coastline that's a favourite for ramblers and nature enthusiasts, not to mention the fishing grounds.

When Tim visited the site, three years had passed since the spill, and there were few signs of oil to be found. With the Deepwater Horizon leak fresh in mind, and questions abounding over whether its environmental effect has been exaggerated, his article made instructive reading.

The second issue is that in a couple of weeks' time - 30 August, to be precise - we should see the release of the InterAcademy Council's review of the IPCC.

It's the last of the major inquiries and reviews surrounding climate science that were commissioned in the wake of "ClimateGate", "HimalayaGate" and so on - and probably the most important, as it could significantly affect how the organisation pursues its work towards its fifth major assessment of climate change, due out in 2013.

You'll have to do without my reporting on that one as I'll still be on leave. But as I understand things, the report itself will be fully available online - so you'll be able to check and doublecheck interpretations put on it by we fallible journalists.

Last year, there seemed to be an unwritten rule in enviro-circles: whenever two or more enviro-folks were gathered together in a place of meeting, talk must turn to biochar.

Accounts would be exchanged of articles half-read and half-digested...the pros would be arrayed against the cons...the words "local" and "sustainable" would be flagged up early and often.

A common reaction was "Good idea, but..."

The notion of biochar takes us back to ancient human civilisations in South America.

The ground remaining when rainforest is cleared isn't very fertile, despite the luxuriant herbage of the forests themselves.

So about 2,500 years ago, people developed what Portuguese settlers later termed terra preta - black earth - created by ploughing carbon into the soil in the form of charcoal.

With ever more hungry mouths on the planet, with soils degrading in many places and with climate change threatening to reduce yields in coming decades, there's renewed interest in the ancient technology, which has been championed by James Lovelock of Gaia fame among others.

The vision put forward is of a world where waste is burned, where some of the heat from that burning is used to transform waste to charcoal, and where the charcoal is ploughed into soil, increasing its capacity to support crops and locking up carbon for centuries, possibly millennia.

The waste that can be used includes spare stuff from plants, such as husks and shells and stems, and even sewage and plastics - pretty much anything based on carbon, in principle.

What's proposed would be nothing less than a revolution in the way we handle waste - turning it from waste into fuel, fertiliser and climate saviour with a single blast of the charcoal oven.

Such grand notions always require quantifying in the cold light of day; and that's what we have this week in the form of a paper in the journal Nature Communications.

A group of researchers that includes Johannes Lehmann of Cornell University, the closest thing biochar has to a spiritual father, has attempted to calculate just how much impact the technology could have on climate change if societies all over the world transformed their waste streams into biochar production facilities - "the maximum sustainable technical potential of biochar to mitigate climate change".

Their answer is a large number - 1.8 gigatonnes of carbon emissions, or about 12% of humanity's total, per year.

The researchers identify six ways in which biochar curbs emissions, including reducing methane production from decaying plant waste, reducing nitrous oxide release from soils, and avoiding carbon dioxide emissions by storing carbon in the soil.

But there are negatives. Using plant waste this way means you couldn't simply burn it for fuel, reducing the world's biomass potential; and there are the carbon costs of transporting it and processing it and such like.

Putting all the numbers together gives the 1.8Gt figure, with an added but unquantified benefit through a presumed impact agricultural yields, especially in poorer parts of the world where the need for food is likely to become even more acute as the years go by.

Put in these terms, you might ask why we aren't doing it already. On the surface, biochar is a win-win-win technology: a win for the climate, a win for food production, and a win for reduction of the human waste stream.

Some of the caveats will be familiar to anyone who's followed the biofuels issue down the years.

Depending on where and how you do it, it can produce more carbon than it saves. And if you simply grew stuff to produce biochar, the carbon economics would be turned on their head, just as they are if old-growth forest is stripped for biofuel plantations.

There are also concerns about who would own and control biochar production and use, if it were to become the subject of a global, high-level political push - just as there is with geo-engineering and again with biofuels.

But the biggest hurdle to the widespread implementation of biochar is the economics would have to be right in each part of the world - not the carbon economics so much as the economic economics.

A study released earlier this year found that all kinds of factors affect this issue, including whether sending the stuff to biochar facilities would be cheaper or more expensive than how waste is dealt with now.

Currently biochar isn't something that can win money from carbon offset schemes. And just as with biofuel and biomass, the amount of money that should be issued would vary widely between locations, technologies and types of waste used, just as the amount of carbon storage varies.

Biochar is already a good idea in many peoples' books. What this paper does is to help sort out just how good it is, and where it sits in relation for example to biomass burning.

But the fact that it can take away a slice of global emissions isn't enough to ensure its adoption.

After all, pretty much everyone involved in Redd (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation) thinks that is a good idea, but we still don't have a global system for making it happen.

Energy efficiency is a good idea even from the simple standpoint that it will save you money. But not everyone practises it - even your humble correspondent is impeachable in that regard.

From a strictly carbon-saving point of view, biochar can now be added as a new wedge to the Stabilisation Wedge concept developed by Stephen Pacala and Robert Socolow.

In this notion, you break down the gap between the emissions level you want at some point in the future and the emissions level you will have at current rates of growth, and break it down into manageable fractions - wedges - that can each be addressed with specific policies.

They're all quantified, and most are technically achievable with today's technology. But it doesn't mean they will be; and the same, for all its Amazonian roots and win-win-win potential, is true of biochar.

While listening to the latest briefing on the Gulf of Mexico oil leak, I've been wondering whether the questions being answered are the right ones.

The key factoid presented by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) is that about three-quarters of the 4.9 million barrels that entered the Gulf waters has been dealt with.

About one quarter has naturally dissolved or evaporated, and another quarter was captured at source or skimmed or burned. Those portions have effectively been eliminated from the sea.

A further quarter has been dispersed, either naturally or chemically - leaving the remaining quarter that, in Noaa's words...

"...is either on or just below the surface as light sheen and weathered tar balls, has washed ashore or been collected from the shore, or is buried in sand and sediments."

In the early days, the scale of the leak became a vital statistic, central to questions both about the incident's politics ("Is BP telling the truth? Is the government?") and about the eventual ecological impact.

Daily we followed maps of where the slick was blown; and the revelations of underwater oil plumes, and the succession of new estimates projecting successively higher flow rates, made for compelling reading.

But at what appears to be the tail end of the affair, arguably size matters less than ever.

Just as with fishing or anything else you do in the marine world, the issue isn't only "how much?" but "where?"

Heavy trawls dragged over grey, boring sea floor will leave behind grey, boring sea floor. Use the same gear on deepwater coral, and you wreak ecological carnage.

Likewise Deepwater Horizon. Oil flecked across the wide Gulf seas will have far less impact on wildlife or fish or anything else than if blobs of the stuff happen to congregate in a marsh vital for a threatened species of breeding bird, or an aggregation of spawning bluefin tuna.

Along some beaches, people are still rescuing oil-soaked pelicans; on others, they're already toasting themselves in the Gulf sun, as though the oil never happened.

At present, as I discussed in my analysis article on Tuesday, evidence for widespread ecological damage is thin; so we have to presume that as of now, the significant volume of oil that remains (even a quarter of 4.9 milion barrels is still far more than released by the Exxon Valdez) is not hitting enough of those key zones to be having a major impact.

The other question posed by the Noaa analysis is a "who?" question, as in "who looks good now?"

Away from the oil-washed segments of Gulf coast where hydrocarbons pervade the air, arguably the strongest aroma generated by this whole affair has been one of political fragrance.

It's been said that US politicians could heavily and publicly blame BP because of what the B stands for. That's not to excuse anything the company has done, and it has admitted culpability in a number of ways; but it's hard to imagine good ol' Southern boys being quite so disparaging if the oil company in question had been of good ol' Southern origin.

Shifting everything onto the company's shoulders was also a way of distracting attention from anything the Bush or Obama administrations, or indeed the Houses of Congress, could have done differently - such as insisting on a regulatory regime with more stringent safeguards.

With mid-term elections approaching, having a government agency proclaim a kind of victory over the oil now is what you might term a fairly slick piece of business.

Does Noaa's analysis add up? Not everyone thinks so, with Florida State University oceanographer Ian MacDonald saying:

"There's some science here, but mostly it's spin, and it breaks my heart to see them do it... I'm afraid this continues a track record of doubtful information distributed through Noaa."

Perhaps the most doubtful aspect of it, though, is that for ecological purposes it appears simply to be addressing a question that doesn't matter very much.

The journal Nature this week debates one of the most important questions of our age: how can we feed the Earth's growing population such that no-one goes hungry and nature is left with some land and water of its own?

Being a science journal, you'll not be surprised to hear that one of the things it considers necessary in this whole arena is, er, science - in particular information about land use and the potential of land for different uses.

Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University in New York and an advisor to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, and a key mover in the Millennium Development Goals initiative, argues that in fact this is the only way to make sensible decisions.

Actually, to say "he argues" is to downplay authorship of the article that bears his byline, as it's co-authored by 24 people either running or closely allied to land-use research projects such as Conservation International's Tropical Ecology Assessment and Monitoring Network.

They write:

"Making the transition to healthy, equitable and sustainable agriculture is a daunting challenge. To succeed, we will need to track and understand the diverse and changing impact of farming practices."

What they're suggesting is, in essence, a global network of research centres that can provide data that governments and farmers can use to make sensible decisions about land use.

Do this, they argue, and society will have the best opportunities to get more for less; to grow more crops, raise more cattle, whatever's needed, without spilling agriculture over into yet more millions of hectares, with all the consequences for biodiversity that would imply.

What might sound rather like a thought experiment is given tangible form by another article in Nature's set, looking at land use analysis in Brazil and the benefits it has brought.

As reporter Jeff Tollefson outlines:

"Despite rising production and persistently high commodity prices since the height of the global food crisis in 2007-08, Amazon deforestation plunged to a historic low last year, nearly 75% below its 2004 peak, and some expect more good news this year.
 
"This trend fuels hopes that Brazil is establishing a sustainable agricultural system that will help to feed a growing world in the decades to come."

In other words, Brazilian farmers really are learning how to get more for less.

The once-destructive soya bean industry is working - at least in some regions - alongside its arch critic Greenpeace. Using satellite images, they are working out which areas are ripe for more intensive growing, taking into account issues such as the volume of water available and what else needs it.

Cattle ranching is another hugely destructive business - not least in some of the places I visited in Acre state back in 2006, where fields ran alongside every road, and white cows stood on land that used to bear virgin forest.

With a bit of scientific input, it may be possible to double the density of cattle even in these relatively infertile fields.

Whether this sort of approach is scaleable to the entire planet, as the Sachs article argues, is something of a moot point - not least because, as he also points out, every region of the world is different - varying in temperature, rainfall, soil type, and myriad other things too - and that's without chucking in the social contexts.

There's another aspect to this that isn't tackled here: the requirements of nature itself, assuming that it is considered desirable to conserve nature as best we can.

In a nutshell, what do you do - what decisions do you make - when valuable agricultural land is also important ecologically?

More fundamentally, how do you know it is important ecologically? And given that ecology can be vital for effective farming, especially in developing countries, how do you make sure you manage the farming and the ecology together for maximal benefit to people, both through agriculture and through intact nature?

That complex kind of tapestry is being explored now in Tanzania, in the Valuing the Arc project. Here, local and Western specialists are mapping the Eastern Arc mountains for their "ecosystem value" - for what they bring through their ecological services to human residents.

It's home to three million people, and provides them with water, fuel and timber. But the three million are expanding, which potentially means more take-up of the land for farming; yet that could rebound on the services that everyone needs, farmers included.

Throughout the millennia of history, humanity has spread its footprint organically - building settlements on rivers, clearing forest for crops, moving into new areas as we expanded.

The vision presented in these papers and these projects is of a step-change in our relationship with the land - the beginning of an era where we zone our global development just as some cities zone themselves into industrial or residential areas and so on.

It should, in theory, be a more rational way of doing things. If we want to leave some reasonable portions intact for nature and ensure that nature continues providing services we need, it may be the only way of doing things.

But someone has to pay for the science that Jeffrey Sachs and others are proposing; in a recessionary world, who's that going to be?

Apologies issued by two campaign groups, WWF and Oxfam, may or may not bring to a close one of the more bizarre yet telling episodes that have materialised within the UN climate convention.

At the convention's annual two-week session in June in Bonn, activists removed the nameplate of the Saudi Arabian delegation from the conference hall, broke it, put it inside a toilet bowl and took a bunch of souvenir photographs.

The nameplate is what sits in front of delegations in the conference hall and what identifies them to the chair and everyone else; in symbolic terms, you can also view it as a totem of the country and its sovereignty.

The episode started with a proposal put forward to the conference by some small developing countries.

They were requesting that a technical analysis be prepared of options that the global community would have to consider taking should it be decided that the rise in average global temperatures since pre-industrial times should be limited to 1.5C.

The existence of such a document could influence wording put into draft treaties that might be drawn up in future.

And this was something that Saudi Arabia - supported by Kuwait, Qatar and Venezuela - did not want to permit, even in the teeth of some unusually frank criticism from their habitual allies in the developing country bloc.

The Saudis, in particular, have regularly been accused down the years of trying to stymie progress within the climate convention and other forums in an attempt to protect their oil industries.

Put this history together with their opposition to the 1.5C proposal, and you have the reason why the activists did what they did.

From a reporters' point of view, it led to a surreal morning in the corridors outside the meeting rooms.

Representatives of campaign groups who are usually only too happy to give journalists information or pictures suddenly clammed up.

The pictures clearly existed - but mysteriously, no-one seemed to know who had taken them or where they might be. Organisations that usually complain bitterly about lack of openness and transparency in the UN process became markedly less open and transparent themselves.

The Saudis were incensed by the act, seeing it as an insult to their nation, and their protests were backed by other national delegations, keen to preserve good order in the diplomatic ranks. The secretariat of the UN climate convention was asked to mount an investigation.

It was a dicey situation for the campaign groups involved - and at that stage, we didn't know who they were - because such an event could mean they would lose the right to attend UN climate talks, and in principle, other UN bodies as well.

Well, now WWF and Oxfam have 'fessed up.

"The incident was gravely offensive to the government of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and to the meeting as a whole,"

... said WWF, whose delegate appears to have actually taken the plate and put it in the toilet bowl. (There are stories that both male and female toilets were involved, but these waters are far from clear.)

"The act itself was offensive, inexcusable and inappropriate. It broke UN rules that govern NGO behaviour,"

... said Oxfam International's executive director Jeremy Hobbs.

Oxfam's delegate was in the room when the decision to remove the nameplate was taken, but didn't actually carry it to the can.

The WWF person involved doesn't work for them anymore; the Oxfam employee has been suspended. Both have been barred from future UN climate meetings; and WWF is drawing up a code of conduct for its campaigners.

Clearly, part of both organisations' strategies in issuing such fulsome public apologies is to ensure that the damage stops there, and that the groups' influence in the climate arena doesn't disappear down the pan.

They're planning to apologise again to the full meeting of the climate convention when negotiations re-open next week.

Whether this will be the end of the affair isn't certain, but it looks likely.

I haven't yet received a reply to an e-mail I sent asking whether Saudi Arabia considers the matter closed; but even if it doesn't, there's unlikely to be wider support for stronger measures such as the suspension of either organisation.

Both have done and continue to do a lot of research and analysis on climate change, sometimes working with governments, and often valued by them.

Many governments in the rich and poor worlds alike are likely to have more sympathy for these groups in private than for the Saudis.

Within the wider community of environmental groups and other organisations campaigning on the issue, there's a general recognition that the toilet incident was unwise at the very least and damnably stupid at the worst.

As well as risking the banning of the groups involved, the wider community sees its credibility diminished in some peoples' eyes; and the arguments that some countries make for keeping civil society organisations out of intergovernmental processes receive new ammunition.

But some are asking a different question: who is the real villain here?

Is putting a nameplate under water, albeit in the unpleasant context of a toilet bowl, more or less serious than blocking a proposal that could help prevent some small island states and heavily-populated coastal zones from disappearing under the sea?

After all, Saudi Arabia signed up to the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessment, so logically the government accepts its projections as at least credible.

At the end of the June meeting, the diplomatic noise over the toilet episode obscured this wider concern; and that's another reason why activists generally appear to think it was a stupid thing to do.

But that one incident doesn't turn everything the NGOs are saying into a busted flush; and once the waters subside, the bigger concerns will still be there.

Turn the clock back four years, and you could not have slipped a cigarette paper between the climate policies of the administrations in Washington DC and Canberra.

With the election of Kevin Rudd in December 2007, paths diverged.

Against the backdrop of opinion polls showing climate change as a major concern for Australians, Mr Rudd's Labor government ratified the Kyoto Protocol, unveiled new targets for cutting carbon emissions and announced that a new emissions trading scheme (ETS) would be the principal vehicle for reaching those targets.

A year later, Barack Obama entered the Washington White House, talking a positive game on the issue but making clear his desire or even his need for legislation to proceed through both Houses of Congress, and maintaining his opposition to re-entering the Kyoto fold.

Now, there's a case for arguing that the old days are back, and that Canberra and Washington are once again in step.

Mr Rudd no longer holds the reins of power, having been deposed as Labor leader and prime minister in a bloodless coup by his former deputy Julia Gillard - at least, until the forthcoming election.

There were many reasons for Mr Rudd's fall, but one was that voters were dismayed by his plans to weaken and delay advent of the ETS.

Ms Gillard was expected to - indeed, had hinted that she would - restore the fully-fledged measures that Mr Rudd had watered down.

Now, she too is being accused of dilution. In a televised pre-election debate that my colleague Nick Bryant has written up, she shrank from restoring the full ETS scheme and instead proposed setting up a "citizens' assembly" on climate change.

There's an argument that, like committees everywhere, it would simply kick the issue into the long grass. And that's exactly how it's being perceived by swathes of the Australian electorate, according to some analyses.

Meanwhile in the US, there's been a deal more cogitating over the causes and effects of the Senate Democrats' decision not to push for a full climate bill during this session, as mentioned at this blog last week.

Ross Douthat in the New York Times argues that for all the finger-pointing that's going on, there's one analysis that makes sense:

"If their bill is dead, it was the American conservative movement that ultimately killed it."

In his book, there's a strong case for saying the conservative movement was correct to do so and that inaction is actually the wise course.

That's not the message, however, coming from the latest look at the US electorate.

"Our surveys reveal a small decline in the proportion of people who believe global warming has been happening, from 84% in 2007 to 74% today..."

...says Jon Krosnick of the latest in a series of polls conducted from Stanford University.

Whatever the reason for the decline - and Mr Krosnick cites figures showing cold weather in heavily-populated parts of the US was behind it - 74% still represents a pretty sizeable majority.

Against this background, you might expect that activists in favour of climate legislation would be mightily miffed by last week's abandonment.

Not a bit of it, according to an analysis in The Hill, the Washington political website. Activists were so disappointed by what they saw as the limited scope of the Kerry-Lieberman bill, the latest version of the draft legislation, that some at least are saying "good riddance".

"Given that the energy bill was already a big capitulation to polluters, the failure to move it will not exacerbate the enthusiasm gap that was already there due to its underlying lameness..."

...says Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee.

The problem facing Mr Green and his counterparts in Australia is this: given that their regimes are both failing to deliver what the public apparently wants, despite all the groundwork they had put in and despite all the rhetoric that has been spouted, what can they do to make sure regimes do deliver anything more than words once they eventually get into office?

In both societies, some might argue that the tipping point is easy to identify: that it will come when climate change is a big enough electoral issue that leaders are prepared to take on powerful business lobbying once they actually attain office.

But that's to ignore a simple reality. Both nations have bipartisan politics, which tends to drag parties and leaders towards the middle ground.

Once again, then, not a cigarette paper between the two nations. Once they stood together to destroy the Kyoto Protocol; now their leaders are talking a greener game, but still failing to deliver what their electorates say they want.

And in both countries, proponents of climate action are scratching their heads and wondering what to do about it.

It's not being touted as such, but the latest document from the United Nations climate convention (UNFCCC) is the clearest admission we've yet had that UN talks are in the mire.

Add it to the latest word from the US Senate, and "mire" hardly seems strong enough.

Let's take the global document first.

At the last round of UNFCCC negotiations in Bonn, the convention's secretariat was asked to prepare a "what if?" document.

In this case, the question is "what do we do if the Kyoto Protocol discussions don't agree a set of carbon cutting targets and other outstanding issues that can come into effect in 2012 when the current set of targets expires?"

The secretariat's role in this isn't political, but legal. Its mandate was to set out options that governments could elect to pursue; what to do is their choice.

The reason for the discussion of Plan B options is this: if there are no agreed industrialised country targets agreed by the time the current ones expire, how are governments supposed to set regulatory frameworks on carbon emissions, and what would induce companies to make low-carbon investments when the financial carrots and sticks might vanish in less than two years' time?

The document throws up a range of options.

One would see governments agreeing to continue the existing arrangements until 2014 rather than 2012. A second would see the adoption of some kind of "opt-out" rather than "opt-in" rule; another would see measures adopted by a majority of countries rather than by consensus, as of now.

Stepping back from the minutiae of what's being proposed to the wider issues thrown up here, there are two to pull out.

One is the sheer complexity under which the UN negotiations are currently labouring.

Try this for size:

"The acquisition and transfer of emission reduction units (ERUs), certified emission reductions (CERs), assigned amount units (AAUs) and removal units (RMUs)27 under Articles 6, 12 and 17 of the Protocol for the purpose of fulfilling commitments under Article 3, paragraph 1, of the Kyoto Protocol relating to the first commitment period until one hundred days after the date set by the CMP for the completion of the expert review process under Article 8 of the Kyoto Protocol, otherwise known as the true-up period..."

As Star Trek's Mr Spock might comment: "It's English, Jim, but not as we know it."

Or maybe the UNFCCC has been infiltrated by the spirit of James Joyce bent on penning a sequel to Finnegans Wake.

The more complex things get, the more scope there is for governments to pick holes in any text and prolong negotiations, whether for genuine or for tactical reasons.

The other issue is what's signified by the document's mere existence: essentially, that the UN process is in trouble.

Yes, the rounds of talks go on and yes, a wide range of governments have pledged action, through the Copenhagen Accord, than ever before.

But the carbon curbs so far generated are a pale shadow of what is needed if you accept the 2007 conclusions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) - which virtually every government says it does - and the process doesn't look like generating anything stronger any time soon.

The year 2012 is an obvious deadline because of the expiry of the Kyoto targets.

If that's missed, then effectively there is no target date for a new set - extension to 2014 can easily become 2016, then 2020, and before you know it governments will still be talking about what to do by the time CO2 concentrations top the 450 parts per million figure that some profess to regard as an unbreachable upper limit.

The single biggest factor missing from the negotiations is, as it has been for a decade, the lack of a strong and equitable US commitment.

The emergence of such a thing looks even less likely following the admission that the Senate will not be able to pass domestic cap-and-trade legislation during this session.

With mid-term elections due in November, the mathematics of the Senate next term are likely to be worst for those backing legislation.

And already, less than two years after green fanfare surrounding Barack Obama's election, some observers are giving the bill its last rites.

If President Obama couldn't deliver climate legislation, who can? There are reasons to argue that a Republican president would be better placed than any Democrat - but only, of course, if he or she backs such legislation in the first place.

As I've mentioned before, the mood and tone within the UN process has shifted a vast distance since the run-up to December's Copenhagen summit.

You could say it's now much more in tune with the political realities than the ebullient trumpeting of seismic global optimism that characterised the arrival of delegates into the snowy Danish capital.

There are something like 700 international environmental agreements in operation across the world now; about most of them, we hear nothing. Meetings happen, progress is made or not, delegates come and go, and the years pass by.

Back in December, it would have seemed unthinkable to raise the possibility that the UNFCCC, charged with tackling what many held to be the planet's most pressing problem, could join their ranks.

Based on facts on the ground since, it doesn't seem half so incredible now.

I didn't know Stephen Schneider, the Stanford University climatologist who has just died from an apparent heart attack, well enough to pen a comprehensive account of his life and works.

RealClimate has an appreciation by his close colleague Ben Santer; and the Los Angeles Times and Washington Post have obituaries, among others.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has an In Memoriam note [46.60KB PDF] that describes Dr Schneider as...

"...a major contributor to the IPCC and one of its fiercest supporters... a warrior for honesty and a dedicated campaigner for giving people the complete story.
 
"Steve's scholarly approach, combining world-class research with deep commitment to broad communication, set a remarkable standard of excellence."

As a journalist covering climate change through the Kyoto conference of 1997, the Bush administration's decision to absent itself from that arena, the seminal IPCC report of 2007 and last December's UN summit in Copenhagen, Stephen Schneider was someone whose influence you could hardly miss, from his pioneering work on developing numerical models of climate to the interviews and conversations and speeches through which he sought to convey the implications of all that science to the public.

Of course, that didn't necessarily make him a popular man.

I last spoke to him about three months ago. The context was abuse: the vitriolic, sustained, personalised and sometimes apparently organised abuse that has been levelled against scientists in the climate field, including him.

It materialises in blogs and newspaper articles that appear to start from the standpoint that everyone in the field is corrupt, incompetent and crooked. It streams into scientists' e-mail inboxes.

Some of those receiving it see it as a deliberate, malicious and politically-motivated campaign of harassment.

Australian journalist Clive Hamilton has documented the threats and abuse levelled against scientists in his country in a series of online articles commencing with "Bullying, lies and the rise of right-wing climate denial".

He cites cases of scientists being compared in emails to Pol Pot, and being told that unless they stopped what they were doing, they would "end up collateral damage in the war".

From my own enquiries, such harassment does not appear routine in the UK, though it does happen. Prominent climate scientists I spoke to have encountered abusive e-mails, some registering a crescendo in the run-up to the Copenhagen conference, and others noting that it emerged whenever they published a paper or spoke in the media.

It has reached its apogee, however, in North America - not least in the threatening e-mails and indeed events that have followed Stephen Schneider, Ben Santer and several of their colleagues in recent years - events that the former detailed to some extent in his book Science as a Contact Sport.

In one of his recent e-mails to me, he said that title was probably "too wimpy an analogy" given how far things had gone.

We're not only talking here about messages accusing scientists of being communist traitors whose raison d'etre is world government - though there are enough of those - but threats to life and limb.

We're talking about a threat perceived to be serious enough that a prominent climate researcher had to be escorted to last December's American Geophysical Union (AGU) meeting by security guards.

We're talking about a dead rat left on a doorstep around midnight, the perpetrator driving off hurling abuse in - perhaps inevitably - a huge 4x4.

Some of the scientists have been most concerned by a posting on the website of the white supremacist organisation Stormfront.

It shows photos of eight prominent people working in climate change, either as scientists or on the policy side - including Stephen Schneider - and labels them all as "Jews".

Further down, a comment on the thread contends that the "global warming scam has always borne the stench of the same old Jewish liars, thieves, swindlers and murderers".

Dr Schneider regularly engaged with scientists and politicians sceptical of climate science, through peer-reviewed publications, books, advice to a succession of US administrations, and the IPCC.

But how is anyone supposed to engage with Stormfront?

Here is perhaps an issue that ought to concern people sceptical of human-induced climate change.

It is a broad spectrum. But how does propagation of the "Jewish liars" or "world government" arguments affect perceptions of those who challenge the mainstream picture along scientific lines?

Doesn't the climate of abuse overshadow the real issues that sceptics are flagging up, and reduce the chances of "sceptical" science being taken seriously?

And what is the abuse supposed to change? Does anyone really expect committed scientists to stop doing science just because they are labelled "scum" or "paid liars"?

It's an approach to winning hearts and minds that must have a limited chance of success.

Stephen Schneider didn't feel inclined to pull back. In a recent e-mail to me and others, he decried the attempt by Senator James Inhofe [639.15KB PDF] and others to seek legal redress against 17 climate scientists, including Phil Jones of the University of East Anglia, as "a smokescreen of denial and deceit".

He recounted that he was working an extra four hours every evening trying to put the record straight, as he saw it, on issues such as "ClimateGate" and alleged mistakes in IPCC assessments - "No time to stop now..."

The fungal disease chytridiomycosis has sometimes been compared to a forest fire, sweeping through the world's amphibians and consuming them in its remorseless flame.

It's not a perfect analogy, not least because many species survive the passing conflagration; but it's not bad.

Just as you can see a forest fire coming (particularly now that "seeing" involves the use of hi-tech gadgets such as satellites), in principle you can see chytrid coming too.

Heading southwards through Central America, it's extending the boundary of its range by about 30km per year - apparently unaffected by what kind of terrain it's passing through.

Karen Lips, one of the world's foremost authorities on the disease, realised some years ago that in principle you could pick a site in Central America that was in the path of the blaze, do an amphibian census, and then wait for chytrid to arrive.

Unusually, you'd get a before-and-after snapshot of a real-life, local and unpreventable extinction event.

So it happened that about a decade ago, Dr Lips and colleagues came to begin pre-chytrid surveys at El Cope in Panama.

And in this week's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, you can read what they found and what happened in 2004/5 when the fungus arrived.

Before the fungus, 63 confirmed amphibian species were in residence at the site.

Now, 25 of them are absent; and a further nine have declined by 85-99%.

In other words, more than half of the species were wiped out or taken to the brink of disappearance from the area in just two years.

For some, that may mean extinction globally, as El Cope is the only place where they have been identified.

Andrew Crawford, the lead author on this paper, said the extent of the damage had surprised the team, even though the initial estimate of when chytrid would arrive in El Cope turned out to be pretty accurate.

Since the post-chytrid surveys, the fungus has continued its spread and has now crossed over the Panama Canal. How it made that crossing is, said Dr Crawford, still something of a mystery - though transport by people, possibly as spores on the soles of shoes inside cars, has to be a strong contender.

Among all the forces that are driving plants and animals towards extinction, chytrid is unusually violent, predictable and intractable; which is why the picture.painted by these before-and-after snapshots is painted in such stark colours.

Years ago, a coral reef scientist in Australia told me of his suspicion that one of the reasons people weren't more concerned about reef declines was because you'd need to observe for a human lifespan in order to experience them as something spectacular and widespread.

That may change, if ocean warming and acidification continue. But the point is well-made; which is perhaps why the UN Environment Programme (Unep) several years ago brought out its Atlas of our Changing Environment, which uses before-and-after satellite images to make changes taking place over decades visual and immediate.

Thanks to the work of Andrew Crawford and Karen Lips, we have a snapshot of what chytrid can do in an instant.

But loss of habitat, including deforestation, continues to be the bigger cause of decline, even among amphibians, as we've discussed before on this blog.

Unep's images show us the disappearing forests; but the changes in the life they support is still hidden from view.