A whale of a week for climate
Two of my five picks of environment stories to watch this year may have significant new chapters written this week - and the new US administration of Barack Obama is a key player in both.
In Copenhagen, climate scientists, economists and policy makers will be meeting for that will share some of the latest thinking on the likely impacts of climate change, how the natural world is already being influenced, the costs and benefits of various types of action to mitigate it and adapt to it, and so on.
About 1,000 miles due south, in Rome, the (IWC) holds discussions that may indicate whether the to reform the fractured organisation, and to bring some more order and oversight to whaling and whale conservation, will end in harmony or discord.
The Copenhagen meeting is an important one. It will be the final major global attempt to weave the various strands of climate research together before the , in the same city, in December, which is supposed to formulate a new global climate treaty - bigger, longer-lasting and more profound than the Kyoto Protocol.
The proper global body for this, of course, is the (IPCC), but that produces major assessments only every five years or so, and they are by definition somewhat out of date because of the organisation's lengthy collation and review processes.
So the Danish government thinks there's a need for something a bit sharper off the mark, yet still authoritative - hence this week's meeting.
Prominent on the agenda are some of the big unknowns. By how much are sea levels likely to rise (an issue on which the IPCC was, by its own admission, cautious in its 2007 assessment)? Are natural "sinks" such as forests and oceans absorbing less carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, as ? Can practices in agriculture or forestry be modified so more CO2 is absorbed?
On the economics side, there will be discussion of what various plans for curbing emissions might cost the global economy, and which economic tools would be the best ones to deploy.
The scientific conclusions will all still be couched in the language of probabilities, but the political dignitaries, such as Denmark's Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen, are likely to use more concrete terms when they outline the implications.
Whatever the demands are for "action now", the conference is unlikely to change the underlying political realities.
Many Kyoto adherents are some way off meeting even their protocol targets for reducing emissions and in difficult economic times, it will be hard for industrialised countries to make the financial contributions that the developing world is likely to demand as the price of a new global agreement.
So many eyes will again turn to Barack Obama and his anew on climate change.
But given that US emissions have risen by about one-sixth since 1990 - the baseline year for all these calculations - his administration will struggle to pledge carbon cuts by 2020 that look huge in the context of scientists' and activists' demands for immediate and drastic reductions.
There was talk a couple of months ago that one of Mr Obama's senior energy or environment people - or even the president himself - might pitch up in Copenhagen, though that now seems to be off the agenda, which will presumably save them being asked lots of questions about a US climate policy that has not yet been formulated.
Where the Obama administration has acted decisively is on whaling.
More than a year ago, the US chair of the IWC, Bill Hogarth, opened a process of dialogue aimed at finding some kind of compromise "package" that both the whaling nations and anti-whaling campaigners could live with.
One of the big unknowns was how the incoming Obama administration would view the issue. Heavily lobbied as it has been by conservation and animal welfare groups, would it endorse the process, or would it despatch Dr Hogarth summarily from its payroll and bring in someone who would maintain a "no whaling at any price (except for indigenous peoples)" line?
On Friday, the White House revealed its hand in what is, to my mind, .
The most significant sentence is that "failure to resolve these issues is not an acceptable outcome to the United States". That places fresh weight behind the Hogarth initiative.
However, the US remains opposed to commercial whaling, thinks that lethal scientific catches (the under which Japan now hunts) are "unnecessary", and has "significant concerns" over to re-open the international whalemeat trade.
Accordingly, for any eventual deal to be acceptable to the US, it "must result in a significant improvement in the conservation status of whales".
The statement is so close to the thinking of some of the less radical conservation groups that it could almost have been written by them, although it remains the case that some campaign organisations will be implacably opposed to any deal.
What the statement does not say explicitly, but implies heavily, is that even if no deal results by the forthcoming IWC annual meeting in June, Washington will remain committed to achieving reform - which is important, because the original timeline was beginning to look impossibly tight.
As to what will transpire this week, we must wait and see. The Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun that Japan will reduce the size of its Antarctic catch next season; and although this has been denied by Fisheries Agency officials, it would be an obvious next step for Japanese negotiators to take, offering something as a token of a desire to progress, but not something so significant as to indicate a desire to progress at any cost.
(As one long-term observer of whaling issues observed to me recently, this is to a large extent a game of chess - although perhaps poker would be a better analogy).
Whatever the outcome of the week's deliberations, the importance of the intervention from Mr Obama's administration cannot be exaggerated. Its attitude is vital on this issue - as it will be in achieving a workable climate treaty at the end of the year, which is, on the face of it, a far more complex undertaking than sorting out how many whales are killed each year.
What both whaling and climate negotiators will strive to avoid is the fate of one of my other five picks of the year, Nasa's satellite, which last month. No ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ blog is certified as 100% jinx-free, but here's hoping this one is.
I'm Richard Black, environment correspondent for the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ News website. This is my take on what's happening to our shared environment as the human population grows and our use of nature's resources increases.
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