The blogosphere (and not only that) has been full of the “global warming is taking a break” meme lately. Although we have discussed this topic repeatedly, it is perhaps worthwhile reiterating two key points about the alleged pause here.

(1) This discussion focuses on just a short time period – starting 1998 or later – covering at most 11 years. Even under conditions of anthropogenic global warming (which would contribute a temperature rise of about 0.2 ºC over this period) a flat period or even cooling trend over such a short time span is nothing special and has happened repeatedly before (see 1987-1996). That simply is due to the fact that short-term natural variability has a similar magnitude (i.e. ~0.2 ºC) and can thus compensate for the anthropogenic effects. Of course, the warming trend keeps going up whilst natural variability just oscillates irregularly up and down, so over longer periods the warming trend wins and natural variability cancels out.

Workers build a sea wall defence in southern Thailand as climate negotiators discuss a replacement to the Kyoto protocol in Bangkok. Photograph: VINAI DITHAJOHN/EPA

The US threatened to derail a deal on global climate change today in a public showdown with China by expressing deep opposition to the existing Kyoto protocol. The US team also urged other rich countries to join it in setting up a new legal agreement which would, unlike Kyoto, force all countries to reduce emissions.

In the forecourt of Euston station sits a tractor-sized sculpture called Piscator. “Silvery and enigmatic”, said the Telegraph in its obituary of Sir Eduardo Paolozzi. He’d crafted the piece in honour of Erwin Piscator, the German exponent of so-called “epic theatre”.

I pondered Piscator during a break at a Quaker conference on the “zero-growth economy” – linking climate change and the credit crunch. Piscator just brooded, stolid and squat. But the scene shifted. In some epic theatre of my own mind he became an old-fashioned locomotive … elemental, unstoppable, stoked by fires of the human predicament.

Top: Aerial photograph of the Khumbu Glacier and the Everest Himalayan range. Bottom: Glacially eroded mountains in Jotunheimen in Norway. Photograph: David Lundbek Egholm (bottom) and Paula Bronstein/Getty Images

Glaciers in the Himalayas and the Tibetan plateau that feed the river systems of almost half the world’s people are melting faster because of the effects of clouds of soot from diesel fumes and wood fires, according to scientists in India and China.

Carbon-dioxide emissions are turning the waters of the Arctic Ocean into acid at an unprecedented rate, scientists have discovered. Research carried out in the archipelago of Svalbard has shown in many regions around the north pole seawater is likely to reach corrosive levels within 10 years. The water will then start to dissolve the shells of mussels and other shellfish and cause major disruption to the food chain. By the end of the century, the entire Arctic Ocean will be corrosively acidic.

The Copenhagen conference on climate change will most likely fail. And two parties will bear the principal responsibility for its failure: the United States and India. No one should be surprised by President Hu Jintao’s pledge to significantly reduce his country’s CO2 emissions. Beijing’s dictatorship is keen to assuage international anxieties. But Washington and New Delhi cannot indulge international opinion at the expense of alienating their domestic constituencies.