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made towards a 2015 agreement – a new ‘‘work plan’’ for negotiations for the new agreement and consolidation of two sets of parallel negotiations under the UNFCCC.

World Resources Institute climate director Jennifer Morgan said that it ‘‘wasn’t pretty but Doha delivered just enough to keep the process moving’’.

‘‘By resolving the key issues, all countries are now on a single track to enter into a new international climate change agreement by 2015,’’ she said.

The downbeat assessments of Doha largely reflect the growing pile of scientific reports charting the inexorable rise of emissions. Even on new emission pathways published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the increase is at the upper end of projections.

According to the latest findings of the Global Carbon Project, countries need to cut annual emissions by 3 per cent until 2020 to limit an increase in temperature to 2 degrees Celsius – a target agreed to at the Copenhagen conference in 2009. As it is, emissions rose 3 per cent in 2011 and are set to increase 2.6 per cent in 2012, so the chances of meeting the 2-degree target are falling.

‘‘If it is completely unchanged, we are on track to [a rise of ] 4 to 6 degrees Centigrade,’’ says Pep Canadell of the Australian research institute CSIRO.

The growth in emissions is largely due to one country – China. Despite its pledge to reduce the emissions intensity of its energy mix by 40 per cent, in 2011 80 per cent of global emissions growth came from China. In contrast, emissions are falling in the EU and the United States.

To make matters worse, there is new evidence that the Arctic permafrost is thawing, potentially releasing 1700 billion tonnes of carbon stored in it and potentially delivering a climate tipping point.

However, much of the IPCC’s time is spent in the face of stubborn disbelief from a vocal minority.

‘‘Globally, concern is being raised that the advancement of the frontier of basic climate knowledge still dominates public investment ... even though the science values this serves are not always aligned with the public values of responding effectively to climate change,’’ say the CSIRO’s Mark Howden and Steven Crimp, and the University of Tasmania’s Rohan Nelson.

One of the few tangible outcomes from Doha was a second commitment period to the Kyoto protocol. But it’s with a greatly diminished membership – it includes the EU and Australia but not Japan, Russia, New Zealand, Canada, the US or China.

Australia signed up to little more than has already been pledged along with other countries in 2009. UN documents make clear Australia’s pledge under the second commitment period of Kyoto is to reduce emissions by 5 per cent on 2000 levels.

‘‘[It] does not amount to a new legally binding commitment under this protocol or its associated rules and modalities,’’ says the Kyoto agreement struck in Doha.

According to UNFCCC executive secretary Christiana Figueres – speaking before Doha – countries are now ‘‘beyond’’ the notion of a global cap and trade scheme.

‘‘You have to engage in a second process, which is then how do you ensure that mitigation that is being done is comparable, so that you know that one tonne in one country is equivalent in another country,’’ she said.

But if a deal is to be reached by 2015, the divide between developed and developing countries, based on historical responsibility for emissions established under the 1993 UNFCCC, will require bridging (to use Hedegaard’s terminology) to achieve a comprehensive response.

Yet the chances of this occurring look shaky: one other notable outcome of the past two weeks of talks was a commitment from developed countries to compensate poorer countries for the loss and damage caused by climate change.

While the commitment was worded vaguely enough to achieve some consensus, it provoked strong resistance from the US, whose negotiator, Todd Stern, was reported as saying: ‘‘I will block this. I will shut this down.’’

Unless countries can come up with a solution to this central dilemma by 2015, it may well be that future efforts are shut down.