It may seem a bit odd for countries to begin discussing in Montreal this week the future of the Kyoto treaty seven years before its current provisions run out in 2012. But climate change negotiations move at the pace of glaciers (remember them), and the first instalment of Kyoto took several years to negotiate. Moreover, the whole philosophy of Kyoto is based on the belief that the earlier international action is planned to curb greenhouse gases, the greater the chance for all to adjust smoothly.

The jury is still out on Kyoto, and on whether the 39 developed countries that have fully signed up to it will still be able to keep, by 2008-2012, their emissions a collective 5.2 per cent below 1990 levels. At least until 2003 they were on course to do this but were considerably helped by the one-off collapse during the 1990s of heavy industry across the old Soviet bloc. But there are great gaps in Kyoto. Its binding limits apply to less than two-thirds of developed country emissions, chiefly because the US, the world's biggest polluter, refuses to sign up to it, and do not cover big developing country polluters, such as China and India, at all. In at least the first phase of Kyoto, the onus of cleaning up the side-effects of the industrial revolution was put on countries that led that revolution.