Celebrations! The Americans sign up to an agreement to engage in more negotiations on Climate Change mitigation at UN climate conference in Bali. It may only be talking about talking but at least there’s been some agreement. The nations have agreed to seek a new global climate-change treaty by 2012.

However agreement came at a heavy cost. Canada, the U.S. and Japan banded together to force removal of references to specific emissions targets for developed countries by 2020. References to longer-term targets were also removed.

Though I would like to be only positive about this news, it sits uneasily alongside a comment on BBC news a couple of nights ago from a scientist studying the retreat of the artic ice. He revealed that the ice was disappearing so much quicker than scientists have been expecting that all artic sea ice would be gone within five or six years.

Not only have we been astonishingly slow to get the message about global warming, but the scientists who have been studying this phenomena have, it seems, spectacularly underestimated the speed of warming.

Put alongside the emerging understanding that huge quantities of the powerfully global warming gas methane; currently held trapped in the permafrost & in the sea bed;  will be released as the planet warms; one wonders if our response to this ongoing calamity is about as useful a response as the 1950’s UK government’s ’Duck & Cover’ advice was in response to a nuclear strike.

The climate change conference seems to have made some progress, but is it enough. As the artic sea ice melts faster than our worst expectations, are we fiddling while the planet begins to burn?