Doing my Sunday morning coffee and internet newspaper routine and had to share this promising news from the Montreal Climate Conference that just wrapped up in Canada. The background, for those of you who haven't been following the news:

The Montreal meeting was the first of the annual climate conferences since the Kyoto Protocol took effect last February, mandating specific cutbacks in emissions of carbon dioxide and five other gases by 2012 in 35 industrialized countries.

A broad scientific consensus agrees that these gases accumulating in the atmosphere, byproducts of automobile engines, power plants and other fossil fuel-burning industries, contributed significantly to the past century's global temperature rise of 1 degree.

Continued warming is melting glaciers worldwide, shrinking the Arctic ice cap and heating up the oceans, raising sea levels, scientists say. They predict major climate disruptions in coming decades.

The United States is the world's biggest greenhouse-gas emitter, and the Clinton administration was instrumental in negotiating the treaty protocol initialed in 1997 in Kyoto, Japan a pact the Senate subsequently refused to ratify.

My excitement stems from this article:

The fight against catastrophic global warming scored its greatest success to date yesterday, when negotiators from more than 180 nations unexpectedly agreed to develop far-reaching measures to combat climate change.

In the process, the delegates to the climate summit in Montreal dealt a humiliating blow to President George Bush's five-year attempt to destroy the Kyoto Protocol. The United States, which tried to sabotage the meeting at the last minute by walking out of the negotiations, was forced to join the agreement after failing to persuade a single nation to join it.

Many delegates - including Margaret Beckett, the UK's Secretary of State for the Environment - were openly in tears when agreement was finally reached yesterday morning after two successive all-night sessions and as many dramas and cliff-hangers as a second-rate soap opera.

Taken from an excellent (and a tad sensational) article in The Independent online.

Of course, it's not a complete win as the final agreement was a watered down version of the initial one:

"The Bush administration, which rejects the emissions cutbacks of the current Kyoto Protocol, accepted a second, weaker conference decision, agreeing to join an exploratory global "dialogue" on future steps to combat climate change. However, that agreement specifically ruled out "negotiations leading to new commitments."

Taken from the ABC news website.

I am ashamed that my own Government has been supporting the Bush administration on this petulant and ignorant path of inaction. Some days I worry myself sick about the future of the planet. And even though I recycle, and refuse plastic bags, and use a bicycle as my main form of transport, I know that by my very existence I am just another part of the problem. Humanity, the scourge of the planet.

Crappy cold gray skies today. Think I'll have a day in, in front of a DVD screen.