The wrong type of gas was the talk of town in Copenhagen. Instead of discussing CO2, attention was on the tear gas that police threw into a marquee party being held in the traditionally free and easy Christiania area. Helicopters circled overhead and party goers were left choking and baffled. As mentioned in yesterday’s blog, the Danish parliament recently gave the police the power of psychic policing - the right to arrest people who they think are about to break the law. But clearly that wasn’t enough.

Gordon Brown still plans to pack his gas mask and arrive two days earlier than planned. “The Prime Minister has reprioritised his diary” said a Downing Street spokesman. Ed Miliband, the UK Climate Change secretary has been busy trying to up the pace of the talks for several days. “It’s 4 minutes to midnight”, he said.

Sheikh Hasina, the Bangladesh premier, is flying in early too. It’s hard to imagine that his country has anymore pressing problem than this one. It’s already seeing it’s coastal developments and rice fields disappear under rising sea levels.

But it could all be in vain. The cracks are starting to show. “Developed nations won’t come to the table with real numbers. That is the main obstacle preventing progress,” said Su Wei, China’s top negotiator.

The US did come in with some numbers however. Namely a $350m (£215m) fund for clean energy technologies.  “We need a game-changer like the green revolution was for agriculture,” said the US energy secretary, Stephen Chu. He then went on to reveal his game changer.

1. The US has discovered that there is the potential to make fridges, lighting and buildings more efficient.

2. The US will spend $400 million on implementing these efficiencies. This is a quarter of what Germany is already spending on doing the same thing. Germany has one third as many houses.

3. The US has discovered new ways of heating buildings by extracting the heat from water. Maybe this was unearthed in an old plumber’s manual from the Royal Festival Hall, which in 1951 became the first building to use this technology.

4. The US will make a “very big investment” in improving wind turbines. This investment will be almost as much as the US spends on fossil fuel subsidies every 2 days.

In the US, you can find amazing cutting edge climate change solutions. California has been leading the charge for years. Why has no one told the Energy Secretary?

Someone who needs no telling is Al Gore. He arrived amid much fanfare and adulation. But then he made a bad mistake. He told his listeners that there was a 75% chance the entire arctic ice cap could melt within the next 5-7 years. This wasn’t quiet what the scientist behind the report had said. Dr Maslowski didn’t want to be as specific as that. What’s daft about this is that arctic melting needs no exaggerating at all. It’s happening far faster than the worse case scenarios of 2007 predicted. But slip ups like this are meat and drink to the like of James Dellingpole, the climate sceptic writer who featured earlier in these blogs and who professes to be “right about everything”.

For him it was more evidence that meltdown talk was all a big tax-raising invention, and there is no more or less ice at the poles than natural variations can account for.

He should make sure this news gets as far as the Greenland town of Ilulissat. ”We don’t see icebergs today,” said Steen Bangsgaard, Commercial director of the Ilulisat Chamber of Commerce. ”The end of the fjord was packed with very tall icebergs and we don’t see those anymore”.

The Illulisat glacier has shrunk by 15 km in the past five years.

Which is the kind of news that lies behind the arrival of the Horsemen Of the Apocalypse, clear winner of the ‘costume of the day’ award.

Nick Griffen, the leader of the British National Party, believes the real evil horsemen are the scientists talking up global warming. It’s all a ‘hoax’ he said.

Not only that, its ‘totalitarianism’. Or so says Bret Stephens of The Wall Street Journal. Meanwhile, he’ll no doubt be adding to his Greenland Oil Portfolio. The ice is melting so fast that we’ll soon be able to access the vast reserves of oil that lie underneath.

On a positive note, Todd Stern, chief negotiator for the United States, was busy explaining how America’s emissions targets are more ambitious than those of Europe under 5 out of 6 criteria. Sadly for him, it’s criteria number 6, the reduction of CO2, that everyone is focused on.

Even hard and fast commitments to CO2 reductions are of concern to Friends of the Earth. They described loopholes - from excess carbon permits in the system, to lack of accounting on emissions from planes and ships - which in total mean that total emissions are almost certain to rise by 2020 even if we get an agreement. Any treaty will be “leaky as a sieve” unless these are dealt with they said.

Any treaty may be beyond us. Even the plan to end deforestation by 2030 has been placed in the dreaded square brackets, meaning that the date could be deferred. A system to identify illegal logging is now described in the text as optional, where before it was compulsory. And as yet there is no date agreed for a global peak in greenhouse emissions.

Writing in the Guardian, George Monibot was becoming reflective about the big picture.

“This is a meeting about chemicals: the greenhouse gases insulating the atmosphere. But it is also a battle between two world views. The angry men who seek to derail this agreement, have understood this better than we have. A new movement, most visible in North America and Australia, but now apparent everywhere, demands to trample on the lives of others as if this were a human right. It will not be constrained by taxes, gun laws, regulations, health and safety, especially by environmental restraints”

He also noted that nowhere at Copenhagen is there any proposal to limit the amount of fossil fuels we take out of the ground or to place a limit on prospecting for more. Earlier in the year, scientists in Nature magazine concluded that if we take out more than 40% of what’s left, it will lead to runaway global warming.

The majority of online comments on newspaper pages remain unbothered about any of this. The global warming ‘scam’ remains as popular as ever, though noone has as yet come forward to explain how or why scientists from across the globe got together to form the biggest scam in history, and why people keep forging pictures of melting glaciers, abandoned farmland and expanding deserts to back it up.

A popular comment came from someone who claimed that CO2 taxes would hold us back from the final frontier. It was our destiny to reach the stars and fossil fuels were the way to get us there. It seems a very long bet to carry on in the hope that we’ll find a way of getting 9 billion people to Mars over the next hundred years or so.

Mired in the earthly detail, Pan Jiahua, adviser to the Chinese government on climate change is adamant that China’s emissions must be allowed to rise above the developed world’s on a per capita basis.

Mr Jiahua says the rich world has built the infrastructure it needs and must now make major cuts to its emissions. But as long as China is still developing it’s emissions need to keep going up. If more than one billion Chinese end up emitting more carbon per head than Europeans, we’d better hope the intergalactic escape plan runs on time.

Andy Cato