Eloise Gibson: Feel-good factor loses out to reality

About halfway through the final evening, people started running. Journalists flung themselves at the door to the Bella Centre's press conference and demanded to be let in. After a frenzied minute, somebody asked the person next to them what was happening.

"I don't know," came the answer, "I saw people running and so I thought there must be something going on."

It turned out to be nothing at all. A moment later, a security guard appeared and said: "It was a rumour. There is nothing happening here."

He was almost right. The agreement that emerged a few hours later was better than nothing but not even close to the hype.

The Copenhagen Accord has no collective targets and a crucial date for peaking emissions - which scientists estimate should come between 2015 and 2020 to meet the 2C goal - was scrapped. It is a step up from Kyoto because it includes the United States and China, but neither are bound.

United Nations-sponsored scientists said individual country pledges that were likely to be tacked on by January 2010 would give an estimated 3C warming if nothing better was offered. In hindsight, the feel-good factor leading up to Copenhagen never matched up to political reality.

For a start, too little had been agreed in the years leading up to the conference. Watchers knew that but hoped the magic presence of Barack Obama would heal the three-way rifts between rich, poor and fast-growing nations. His Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, gave the conference its only shot of adrenaline with a pledge to raise US$100 billion ($140 billion) a year for poor countries by 2020. It was not enough for a strong agreement without tougher US cuts, particularly given tensions with China.

John Key left frustrated, having been convinced at the last minute that the odds were on a strong deal. Having failed this time, it may be tougher to get 120 world leaders to Mexico.

In the end the lack of political trust did not match the "Hopenhagen" rhetoric. There was no argument that 2C was the uppermost warming countries should allow, but they could not agree on the basics to do it.

The conference will be remembered for its overcrowding, its miscalculations and the Herculean efforts of a few (including British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Obama) to claw back an outcome from the brink of disaster. On the final day, the feeling was one of disappointment but not of surprise.

Rather than "avoiding a Kyoto" - shorthand in Copenhagen for avoiding an agreement that caused few real cuts - the goal next year may be to "avoid a Copenhagen".

That may come to mean a hard-won deal wrung from a long, fraught process that ultimately bound no one to anything.