Hopenhagen, schmopenhagen. Yesterday, the papers were awash with claims that the US, the almighty saviour of mankind, had stepped in at the last moment to deliver the world from eco-death. Well, that may be putting it a little bit strongly. To avoid such an eventuality, global carbon concentrations need to peak in 2015, and gradually return to 350 parts per million, thus avoiding a global temperature rise of more than 2 degrees. That isn't what is on offer. Instead, this veritable god, in the person of Hillary Clinton, laid down the new world order in bold headline grabbing commandments. First, the US would not reduce its carbon emmissions below 3% on the 1990 levels by 2020. Second, in order to protect the poor countries from the ravages of climate change, the US would launch a fund of up to $100bn a year specifically earmarked for that purpose. Now, such a solution is clearly amenable to one of the denialists' favourite last resorts: namely that, even if the environmental catastrophuck (copyright Malcolm Tucker) is man-made, then the most appropriate solution is not to try to stop it by restructuring global systems of production, but to adapt to it. That way, there won't be any nasty socialist surprises in the post. In this case, the US was simply telling the most likely victims that those most responsible for the problem would not meaningfully try to solve it, but would send a little compensation cash to make its effects a little more bearable.

That cash will probably end up in those dollar reserves that Third World countries have been compelled to amass over the last decade, thus making them net creditors to the world's superpower, but forget about that for a second and think about this:

Now, I told you - didn't I tell you? - that this summit was going to be a flop. Half of the world's species facing extinction while the planet both burns and floods looks like a flop to me. Bear in mind that the Stern report is relatively conservative in its estimations. Recent research by the World Wildlife Fund suggests that the arctic ice-caps are melting much more rapidly than previously anticipated and that even an average global temperature rise of 2 degrees could be catastrophic. It may be enough to reach that tipping point where the year-round arctic ice disappears for good. Melting permafrost will unleash enough methane to cause a major extinction event. Islands will be submerged, southern Africa will dry up, and global hunger will surpass its already disgraceful levels. And it isn't just those unpleasant poor people down south you've got to worry about (though you see how the politics of climate change is already being structured by imperialism). As Mark Lynas has pointed out, if you increase average temperatures in the sea in that fashion, even with a 1 degree global temperature increase, you get more hurricanes, more frequently, and much closer to home for Europeans. You also get dustbowls in previously fertile food-growing areas across North America, which wasn't particularly fun when it happened last time round. You get soaring temperatures in Europe, more extreme and death-dealing summers, water shortages as precipitation declines in the Mediterranean region.

At the 3 degrees rise predicted by the UN on the basis of current negotiating positions, you can declare the game over. That is potentially the tipping point beyond which it is impossible to regain any control over global temperatures, the point at which positive feedback mechanisms cause temperatures to increase exponentially. I cannot adequately describe the full horror of such a scenario - the food shortages, the droughts, the floods, the fleeing of millions of people from newly uninhabitable territory, the intensified geopolitical competition over basic resources, the extinction of half or more of the species on the planet... it's just unthinkable. But, as Copenhagen shows, unthinkable horror is exactly what the rulers of the world have in store for us.