Bottom line: I did not want to lie to my readers.

And puffing up their expectations for COP 26 would be doing exactly that.

A few paragraphs in, I was overwhelmed by deja vu making me look back on my files.

I’d already written the piece. five years ago, ahead of the Paris summit.

My skepticism was based on my covering COP 17 in Durban, back in 2011,

That meeting overran by more than 24 hours before delegations from nearly 200 countries arrived at a deal that would put the world on the the path to climate salvation.

It could not be said to actually save the world for the generations to come.

But it set a pattern that could be picked up in Paris.

Sound familiar?

My earlobes glow red with embarrassment when I recall that I actually told my readers and listeners this.

Within a day, Canada has reneged on the deal struck in Durban.

Just as the United States under President Donald Trump pulled out of the climate convention agreed in Paris four years later.

No punitive measures have been taken against either of these world powers.

Neither will there be anything more than  tsk tsk against India watering down the anti-coal mood of the Glasgow Agreement.

As a United Nations Correspondent in the 1970s, I recall all three of these nations taking an uncompromisingly  tough line against the apartheid regime.

They would not have brooked any backsliding on the arms embargo slapped on Pretoria in 1977. Rightly so.

Yet when it  comes to saving the planet, they give themselves some wriggle room.

I am an inveterate multilateralist. I never fail to support the United Nations against critics who dismiss it as a talk shop.

I am also a journalist committed to telling the unvarnished truth.

This means I cannot allow myself to be led by the nose to report on breakthroughs in fighting climate change that are nothing more than meaningless compromise.

Where is the commitment we expected from developed countries to pay developing countries to assuage the damage done by climate change?

So today, as they try to pick up the pieces and paint the bravest picture they can of what occurred in Glasgow, let me ask those journalists: Are you ready to do it all again at Sharm El Sheikh? 

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They are the most dramatic victims of global warming and yet again there’s no agreement that the rich polluters have to help mitigate its results.

Africa’s responsible for less than 10 percent of the planet’s  carbon emissions.

Yet it is food production is  often destroyed by the droughts and floods it causes.

It’s  large scale weather systems build excessive rains over its  extensive land-base.

Poverty undermines the capacity for adaptation by most African countries.

While the rich countries have left Madrid ready to keeping fighting until the next climate summit in Glasgow in 2020, the Africans will most directly feel the impact of their failure to commit to decisive action to save the planet

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The gathering in Madrid is being seen seen by environmental analysts as activists as a wasted opportunity.

United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres says he’s disappointed with the outcome of COP25 that went into two extra days and nights.

Exhausted delegates could only agree that  new pledges on the key question of curbing carbon emissions will have to be on the table by the next climate summit in Glasgow next year.

They could ntw agree on carbon markets and on closing the gap between what scientists say is necessary to avoid a global crisis and the status quo which will see the world pass the threshold in the next decade.

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