And so the climate show moves on. Last week it was Barcelona. We've been in the out-of-town tryouts phase, everyone trying hard to get it right before the curtain opens in Copenhagen a month from now.

Or maybe not so hard. Governments, and international negotiators, keep lowering expectations just as fast as they can. "Of course, we are not going to have a full-fledged binding treaty-Kyoto type-by Copenhagen," European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso said last week. "There is no time for that." Of course not-the Copenhagen meeting was only scheduled five years ago. Added the UN Secretary General, "I am reasonably optimistic that Copenhagen will be a very important milestone. At the same time, realistically speaking, we may not be able to have all the words on detailed matters."

That's not because there's t-crossing and i-dotting that will take too long. It's because there are deep and fundamental gaps, two of them, still waiting to be crossed.

The first I've dwelt on at some length in the past: Most rich countries are still unwilling to deal with the latest science. Barack Obama, John Kerry, the EU, even some of the old-line environmental groups continue to toss around outdated figures: 450 ppm CO2, 2 degrees rise in temperature, 80 percent cuts by 2050. These date from two or three years ago, before it became clear just how fast the planet's temperature was rising.

Numbers like those guarantee the slide straight into a globally warmed hellhole, as the emerging science keeps making clear-and in the UN context, they guarantee that many "member states" will disappear beneath the waves or succumb to spreading drought. That's why some of those nations will hold a Vulnerable Nations Forum this week in the Maldives-as that country's environment minister, Mohamed Aslam, explained, "Climate change threatens every country on Earth. But some nations are at the front line of this battle. And many developing, front-line states, who do not have resources for adaptation, are most vulnerable." Like Nepal, for instance, where the government will hold a cabinet meeting on the melting slopes of Mt. Everest, a follow-up to the underwater session in the Maldives last month.

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