Gleanings from Poznan - JUSSCANNZIMROK, 13,000 tons of CO2 and $35 million

Key negotiating groups at the just concluded climate meeting in Poznan, Poland included AWG-LCA, the Ad hoc Working Group on Long-Term Cooperative Action; and AWG-KP, the Ad hoc Working Group of further commitments for Annex I parties under the Kyoto Protocol.

JUSSCANNZ represents the non-EU industrial countries -- Japan, the US, Switzerland, Canada, Norway and New Zealand. Iceland, Mexico and the Republic of Korea occasionally attended JUSSCANNZ meetings, which presumably then becomes JUSSCANNZIMROK.

GRULAC is the Group of Latin American and Caribbean States, and AOSIS is the Alliance of Small Island States -- 42 currently, although their numbers may decrease as sea levels rise. LULUCF stands for Land Use, Land Use Change and Forestry.

COP, or Conference of the Parties, is the supreme body of the UNFCCC, and meets once a year, as at Poznan. CMP, or Conference of the Parties serving as the Meeting of the Parties, represents the parties to the Kyoto Protocol. The first meeting of the parties to the protocol at the COP in Montreal in 2005 was called the MOP. Therefore, the Montreal meeting was a COP/MOP, which sounded like something you'd find in a broom closet at the local police precinct house.

Critics suggest there is something hypocritical about a process that requires participants to travel thousands of miles resulting in tons of carbon dioxide emissions to attend UN meetings tasked with controlling CO2 emissions.

An initial estimate of emissions carried out by the Polish government covering air travel, hotels, meeting rooms and local transport, concluded that the Poznan meeting would result in approximately 13,000 tons of carbon dioxide. The estimate was based on 8,000 participants (actual attendance was more than 11,000, including representatives of non-government organizations or NGOs, and the media).

However, the Polish government plans to offset total emissions resulting from the conference once a final calculation has been made. Individual delegations have already put measures in place to offset emissions attributable to the meeting, the UNFCCC said Many individual organizations attending the conference also prepared emission reduction and offset schemes.

R.K. Pachauri, chairman of the IPCC (International Panel on Climate Change, the UN's climate science body), uses his share of carbon jetting around the world. It's a necessary evil, he told a group of reporters recently, to get the word out about the perils of global warming.

However, he joked, as a Hindu, "I know I have six more lifetimes to neutralize my carbon footprint," reported a Science News magazine blog.

Incidentally, these annual COPs don't come cheap. The Polish government estimates that the total cost of the conference in Poznan, a small industrial city, to be about $35 million. That might seem like a bargain compared to the likely cost of next year's COP in Copenhagen, a major European capital.