Day eight: As the week of high-level talks begin, there is progress over brackets, and a Danish protester hopes for a little localised climate change
Su Wei, head of China's climate change department. Photograph: David Longstreath/AP
The shape of brackets to come
As week two of the UN climate change talks in Copenhagen gets under way, and the political temperature rises, cynics may claim negotiators have failed to make sufficient progress.
Insiders respond with a one-word rebuttal: "brackets."
Sprinkled throughout the draft texts, the brackets contain different proposals for dates, emissions and sums of money.
Essentially, they are niggle marks. But the good news is that their size, and the frequency with which they appear, has been reduced.
More importantly, they have changed shape since the earliest days of discussions. "We are now using square brackets, which signify something solid, instead of squiggly brackets, which were far less substantial," one insider explained.
That's all right then. The world may be going to pot, but at least we have some chunky punctuation marks to signify our divisions.
Iron man
China's leading climate negotiator, Su Wei, has built up a following among the country's nationalist young netizens, who admire his terse and tetchy rebukes to journalists and the tough way he stands up to rich nations.
But the iron man may have lost a few of his harder core fans at the weekend when he adopted a distinctly softer tone, lauded the progress of the talks and even cracked a few jokes.
"I am trying to be humorous and nice to improve the ambience in this press room," he told stunned reporters.
More surprisingly still, he said the huge public protest might be considered "constructive as it shows the interest of the general public in climate change".
Just as the audience started to ponder how this approval of demonstrations might apply in Beijing, Su reverted to the party line, adding: "But you can also say they disrupt the negotiations and the freedom of other people."
TB upside down
Tony Blair appeared very moved by a slideshow of photographs showing the malign deforestation of Borneo by the palm oil industry.
There was good reason to feel horrified by the powerful images of orang-utan being killed, burned or orphaned by the clearance of trees. Perhaps, too, Blair felt respect for the dedication of the photographer, Matthias Klum and his wife, who spend months at a time living on canopy level platforms or dangling perilously from the branches of enormous trees.
But the pictures also appear to have stirred up a more personal memory of political extinction. As Blair joked after the slideshow finished: "I have never hung upside down with my wife, but it often felt like that in office."
Bitter winds
If there is one man in Copenhagen who has a good excuse to welcome global warming, it is Jorgen Manniche.
The 69-year-old has spent most of the last decade in a peace protest outside the Danish parliament despite wind, rain and temperatures that plunge below -15C.
Stirred to action by the war in Iraq, he has now broadened his focus to include the security threat posed by climate change, and his displays include images of Copenhagen's Little Mermaid and New York's Statue of Liberty about to be engulfed by a tsunami.
But, as bitter winds cut across the central square, he admits to a selfish wish for a personal change of climate.
"This is a tough life for me, especially in heavy rain or snow. A little more warmth would be nice," he said. "But I only wish for local warming. I know that in the world, people are dying from heat."
Underground science
It's got so feverish here that some of the world's top number crunchers have resorted to lobbying journalists on the Danish tube. MIT graduateshave devised a computer model to graphically show exactly how the different offers of global emissions cuts would affect rising world temperatures. With proposals as they stand today, we would end up 3.8C (6.8F) by 2100. Buiness as usual takes us to 4.8C and the three proposals by the Africans, least developed countries and small island states would take us under 2C, the level considered "safe" to avoid dangerous climate change.
Lobbyists
Over to the lobby group's centre. Analysis of the business delegate lists by Corporate Europe Observatory shows that the biggest group by far, with almost 500 in their team, is the emissions traders Ieta. Then comes the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, followed by the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) which includes our old friends Monsanto, Exxon and Co (incidentally, activists this morning blocked the entrance of LCC in London). Meanwhile, Bellona, the huge Norwegian group which is 30% funded by the oil industry, has brought 371 people.
Just like Las Vegas… sort of
Everybody knew that the start of week two — when the high level delegations fly in — would be big. But just how big? Too big even for the Bella, the cavernous 122,000 square metre conference centre in Copenhagen where the climate change negotiations are taking place. As one wag remarked: "It is just like the United Nations."
Those arriving before dark had a relatively easy time negotiating the lines from the metro, through the security checkpoint, and into the centre. But by 9am, it was taking 40 minutes to get into the building, from descent into the crush at the metro station to the bright yellow bins of the metal detectors. By 10am or so, guards were blocking off entry for 10 or 15 minutes at a time, stretching the wait to 90 minutes. By 11am, the metro station itself was being shut down for a stretch. Staff at the centre are expecting the crush to build even further as the weeks goes on.
Inside, it's the environmental equivalent of a Las Vegas casino — though sadly without the flashing lights — huge and harshly lit halls with hundreds of people milling about looking for somewhere better to be, or else hunched over their screens.
Redd faces
Remember how Obama made glowing reference to the publicly funded Norway-Brazil Redd forestry initiative in his Oslo Nobel prize acceptance speech last week? Forestry campaigners are now scratching their heads because it seems that the US delegation is now arguing the diametric opposite in the negotiations.
One world leader = 20 activists
Because of the arrival of the world leaders and super-twitchy security (over 1,000 arrests in week one and far more expected this week) the NGOs are having their numbers rationed in the Bella centre. As from tomorrow the larger ones only bring around half or two thirds of their accredited people. This will inevitably cause pain and accusations that civial society is being muzzled. Our back of the envelope calculations suggest this works out as one world leader needing as much as space as 20 activists.
Japan wins fossil award
Japan has kept its head down in these talks but it has won a Fossil of the Day award — an NGO booby prize for the country performing worst in the talks - for strongly opposing a second commitment period for Kyoto. Meanwhile Papua New Guinea received the second place award for openly opposing the small island states' proposal for two legally-binding agreements.
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