Mega-Gipfel mit Mini-Ergebnis

There are many kinds of truth. Al Gore was poleaxed by an inconvenient one yesterday.

The former US Vice-President, who became an unlikely figurehead for the green movement after narrating the Oscar-winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth, became entangled in a new climate change "spin" row.

The agreement merely repeated an aspiration to keep the global temperature increase to 2C without explaining how that would be achieved. The final text also failed to mention any deadline for turning it into a binding treaty.

The one positive outcome for developing countries was a commitment by rich countries to provide $30 billion of climate aid over the next three years and $100 billion a year from 2020.

The US announced by far the lowest pledge. It will contribute $3.6 billion between 2010 and 2012, while Japan will give $11 billion and the European Union $10.6 billion.

As fairy-tale snow gently descended on Copenhagen, the great global warming conference degenerated through pantomime, boredom, chaos and anger to its entirely predictable conclusion – a colossal pile of fudge with a very hard and nasty rock hidden at its centre. The "world summit" on climate change was never really going to be about saving the world from global warming at all. Even if the delegates had got all they wanted, it would no more have had any influence on emissions of CO2 – let alone on the world's climate – than the 1997 Kyoto Protocol before it.

As was argued in 1997 by Tom Wigley, one of Al Gore's trusted allies and formerly head of the East Anglia Climatic Research Unit, or CRU (recently at the centre of the Climategate scandal over rigged temperature data), even if the world had implemented Kyoto to the full, it would only have delayed global warming by six years. In fact, as was revealed last summer by the German renewable energy institute IWR, CO2 emissions are now 40% above their level in 1990, the baseline Kyoto was meant to return them to.

Copenhagen was not about global warming but money. The cash that Hillary Clinton so dramatically plonked on the table, rising to $100 billion by 2020, which includes the £1.5 billion offered by Gordon Brown (money which of course he hasn't got) and which like a crazed gambler he last week upped to £6 billion (even more money he hasn't got), was merely a "sweetener" to persuade the developing countries to maintain the money-machine set in motion by Kyoto.

This is the new global industry based on buying and selling the right to emit CO2, estimated soon to be worth trillions of dollars a year, which through schemes such as the UN's Clean Development Mechanism and the EU's Emissions Trading System is making a small minority of people, including Al Gore, extremely rich.