The long-awaited implementation of the Kyoto protocol is without doubt cause for celebration but I can't help thining that the principal achievement is conscience-salving among the signatories rather than world-saving. A lot more needed to be done a lot earlier to have any chance of preventing what is now (and probably was before) a significant, harmful shift in the earth's climate. Many scientists believe that the tipping point, beyond which significant and harmful levels of global climate change become irreversible, is imminent and some even believe it has already been passed.

Even if we have a few years to try to reverse the trend, the scale of the problem in the rapidly developing world makes efforts to scale back global CO2 emissions resemble King Canute attempting to turn back a tsunami.

Forgetting about the fact that the USA, whose 250 million odd inhabitants alone consume one quarter of the world's energy, is a non-signatory, let's look for a moment at the UK. Britain's 60 million inhabitants currently use around a quarter of the energy of China, and two thirds of India's. It doesn't take a genius to work out the effects on the environment as these countries develop and their populations aspire to energy usage levels of those in the West. China plans to open dozens more coal-fired power stations in the coming years to support the rapidly growing needs of it's industrialising firms and consumers.

Kyoto is unfortunately a case of the (non-US) developed nations fiddling while the world cooks. That doesn't invalidate the fiddling - it just means that the treaty represents the first upward step onto a rapidly descending escalator, at the bottom of which lies a world in continual global conflict to control increasingly scarce energy resources, water and the means to protect our ultimately unsustainable way of life.

Promises to use energy more responsibly represent a sticking plaster on a gaping wound which is now starting to fester. Our only real hope lies in basic scientific research and a political will to develop practical solutions which may allow us to avoid the nightmare scenarios which loom only a matter of decades from now.