It's October and global warming campaigner Al Gore has won the Nobel Peace Prize. In November the UN's climate scientists are expected to issue a grim capstone report on where the planet is headed. And in December envoys of almost 200 countries will gather in Bali, Indonesia, hoping for action to head off the worst of climate change.
But because of something that happened in September, their chances look slim.
That was when the Bush administration, at a 16-country "major emitters'' meeting in Washington, signalled it intends to stick with its opposition to any global treaty mandating reductions in the heat-trapping greenhouse gases.
So, for all this year's buildup, the real "year of climate'' may have to wait for 2009, with a change at the White House.
But critics say the climate won't wait.
In this year's reports, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the network of scientists that will share the Nobel with Gore, produced a string of authoritative reports showing that global warming has arrived.
Among other things, they documented a global average temperature increase of 0.7 degrees Celsius between 1906 and 2005. The seas, swelling from warmth and melted land ice, are rising more than 2.5 centimetres a decade.
Manmade "greenhouse gases'' are almost certainly to blame, the reports say, and a changing climate portends a changing world, because of drought, severe weather, dying species and other effects.
Meanwhile, a five-country research team reports that global emissions of carbon dioxide, the biggest greenhouse gas, are increasing at a rate three times faster than in the 1990s.
U.S. government scientists say this summer's shrinkage of the Arctic ice cap was the greatest on record.
The impact of rising temperatures is also seen in everything from the devastating northward march of pine beetles into western Canada's forests, to a steady rise in humidity in the air around us -- and potentially in human heat stress.
In countless other ways, too, things will grow worse, scientists say. For the first time this summer, for example, European researchers predicted that future hurricanes may strike Mediterranean countries.
What's needed, say the Europeans, Japanese and most of the rest of the world, is agreement in Bali on fashioning a stronger, broader level of global co-operation to reduce greenhouse gases emitted by power plants, automobiles and other sources.
"There is still much work to do and no time to waste,'' said Eileen Claussen of Washington's Pew Center on Global Climate Change.
Gore was in Kyoto, Japan, a decade ago as the U.S. vice-president when he and other international negotiators signed a deal by which 38 industrialized countries pledged to reduce their greenhouse emissions by 2012 to an average five per cent below 1990 levels.
Almost all are working to meet those targets. But the Clinton White House couldn't win Senate ratification of the Kyoto Protocol.
President George W. Bush delivered a final blow when he formally rejected the pact, saying its modest cuts would damage the economy of the United States, historically the biggest emitter, and complained that quotas should also be imposed on such poor but fast-growing countries such as China and India.
Now the world will assemble at the annual UN climate conference in Bali, hoping to draw the United States -- and in some way China, India and other developing countries -- into a new, post-2012 regime of mandatory, deeper emissions reductions.
But at September's conference in Washington, however, U.S. officials made it clear they still back only voluntary measures.
Is it too late anyway? Two former Bush administration aides seem to think so.
"Without a technological or economic miracle, it would take a political miracle to reach an international agreement that would mandate the necessary emissions cuts to reverse the momentum behind our evolving global climate system,'' Paul Saunders and Vaughan Turekian wrote in a recent Foreign Policy article titled, "Why Climate Change Can't Be Stopped.''
James Hansen doesn't agree. A pioneer in climate research, the NASA scientist in his most recent paper appeals for "insightful leadership'' to show the way, and dismisses such "out of our hands'' talk.
"Humans are now in control of the carbon cycle and, as a result, in control of climate,'' he writes.
But for how long? In its citation honouring Gore and the hundreds of researchers whose labours have awakened a planet to its possible fate, the Nobel Prize committee warned of a point of no return. "Action is necessary now,'' it said, "before climate change moves beyond man's control.''
