Ten years ago, protesters gathered in a port city; politicians arrived for intense backroom negotiations; the city’s hotels were booked out by representatives of thousands of NGOs from all over the world. In 1999 Seattle, like Copenhagen this week, was a big international meeting attempting to exert some governance over globalisation. There’s a fitting symmetry that these two meetings bookend this decade. For while the Seattle protests were deliberately misrepresented and widely misunderstood at the time, their agenda has proved unanswerable. Copenhagen is belatedly grappling with just one aspect of Seattle’s unfinished business.

For those for whom Seattle is a hazy memory, let’s recap. The World Trade Organisation had become the bete noire of a heterogeneous global coalition bizarrely labelled as the anti-globalisation movement. The WTO meeting to hammer out an international trade agreement became the touchstone for riots, and a draconian police response of teargas and truncheons. Seattle made it on to the front page of every newspaper. Some Starbucks windows were smashed; the protesters were ridiculed for their taste in lattes, Naomi Klein’s No Logo and their trendy crusades against brands such as Nike. For a decade Seattle has been dismissed as illogical, self-indulgent posture politics that, not surprisingly, went nowhere.

None of the 43 small island states has been included on the vast UN globe right outside the Bella Centre. Photograph: Christian Charisius/REUTERS

Copenhagen Hope-o-meter Photograph: guardian.co.uk

Conference hordes

The longest text floating around the COP15 meeting here on day five is the full list of people formally accredited to the summit. The figure is 30,123 but this does not include the 5,000-odd media, the business and financial conferences, or the hordes at the parallel alternative summit. The biggest government delegation? Brazil, by a mile, with over 1,000 people, followed by Denmark (800), the EC (400) and China 250. The US, surprisingly, has only 200 people, and the UK a discreet 70.

Staggering teams

At the other end of the scale, Vanuatu, Uzbekistan, and Syria have sent only two, Sao Tome three and the minute Pacific state of Niue has sent five. This sounds not many until you know it is nearly 3% of its total population. The biggest NGO delegation is Friends of the Earth International which has a staggering team of 600. This dwarfs Christian Aid with over 200, the WWF with 133. Whoever said NGOs were cutting back?

Strange delegates

One of the strangest delegations is from Papua New Guinea, the country leading the rush to getting a Redd forestry deal. The PM is coming, but also in the party of 60 are 10 media specialists, representatives of the World Bank and the UN, a security adviser, several lawyers and a swanky US business consultant. Even more strangely, our own dear fashionista Vivienne Westwood, as well as Bianca Jagger are included in the delegation. What these two femmes formidable bring to the negotiations is not clear yet.

So as we career towards a mediocre outcome in Copenhagen, why do roughly half the people in this country not believe in man-made climate change, when the overwhelming majority of scientists do?

Firstly we have the psychological issues. We’re predisposed to undervalue adverse outcomes which are a long way off, especially if we might be old or dead soon. We’re inherently predisposed to find cracks in evidence that suggests we should do something we don’t want to do, hence the enduring appeal of stories about alcohol being good for you.

Thousands of glassfish, on the edge of the coral reef near Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt. Photograph: Tarik Tinazay/AFP/Getty Images

The world’s oceans are becoming acidic at a faster rate than at any time in the last 55m years, threatening disaster for marine life and food supplies across the globe, delegates at the UN climate conference in Copenhagen have been warned.