Dolphin surprise

negotiators told a private meeting. Yet, in the event, climate change and the need for a 'green recovery' only made paragraph 27 and 28 of the 29-paragraph communiqué. Language, already weak in the final draft, was watered down even further by the leaders at the end of the summit and, after the initial euphoria, commentators have been increasingly concerned that the summit delivered too little and that environmental concerns and climate change failed to make a mark. The main reason was that China and other developing countries refused to agree to anything that might preempt the negotiations on the new climate treaty. The result was not just a lost opportunity to put some political momentum behind the talks in Bonn — the first of four negotiating sessions leading to the Copenhagen meeting — but it actually set the talks back. Developing countries have also been disillusioned by how little of the stimulus money promised by the G20 summit participants has so far been pledged to green investment, despite all the rhetoric. Though many of the biggest — such as China, India and Mexico — are ready to take their own measures, they are reluctant to commit to them when richer nations are doing so little. The deadlock is made worse because developed countries have also failed to make good on promises made at the end of 2007 to set aside money to help poorer countries tackle climate change and adjust to its effects. to be agreed at a vital meeting in Copenhagen at the end of the year. And while the delegates met in London, researchers monitoring ice cover in the Antarctic recorded the dramatic split of the Wilkins ice sheet into the sea, as a likely result of climate change. Participants in the negotiations ahead of Copenhagen — now underway in Bonn — say that, partly as a result, they are now further from reaching agreement than they were towards the end of the George Bush presidency, despite the new energy and commitment brought to environmental matters by the Obama administration. Rich and poor countries now appear to be further apart than at the end of 2007, when the former president was still trying to obstruct progress. Gordon Brown and the other leaders — with the notable exception of Silvio Berlusconi — have long been verbally signed up to 'low carbon growth' as the best way out of the …