Will there be a deal this year?

Sadly not. American legislators won't entertain the idea of legally enforceable limits on their emissions. The Russians and Japanese say that without the US, they are not interested. Ditto China and India. That leaves only Germany of the top six national emitters still in favour of a binding deal.

Even optimists don't think US politicians will be in the mood to consummate a new deal until 2016 at the earliest. The best that can be hoped for is a "coalition of the willing" committed to a stop-gap extension of the Kyoto protocol which does not include the US. We are facing a "lost decade" in climate talks.

Most of the US Senate barely believes in climate change, let alone doing anything about it. Most other nations play lip service, but blame economic travails for postponing hard decisions. Some think the recession will buy us time. Not so. Last year saw the biggest annual increase in carbon dioxide emissions ever recorded – almost 6 per cent. This was mostly due to China, India and others burning more coal, the dirtiest fuel.

Isn't coal supposedly on the way out?

Quite the reverse. When the new climate talks started in 2006, the world got 25 per cent of its primary energy from coal; now the proportion is 30 per cent. Even Germany will likely burn more coal as it shuts its nuclear plants in the wake of the nuclear disaster at Japan's Fukushima Daiichi plant. Just 2 hours' drive from Durban, South Africa feeds the coal addiction with the world's largest coal export terminal at Richards Bay.

Meanwhile, CO2 is accumulating in the atmosphere. By 2016, concentrations will probably pass 400 parts per million, compared with 353 ppm when the climate convention was passed in Rio de Janeiro in 1992.