Perhaps there were sincerely high hopes that the nineteenth annual two-week conference would finally be the charm, but the United Nations climate-change meeting in Warsaw is drawing to a close and a consensus on formulating the latest rendition of a [basically meaningless] Global Climate Treaty doesn’t seem any more resolved than it was after 132 developing countries staged a walkout on Wednesday. The more prosperous countries are oddly disinclined to acquiesce to the virtual shakedown to which less developed countries are trying to persuade them to comply by funneling cash out of their own countries and into the treasuries of the less developed countries with a new “loss and damage” mechanism, and the ceremonial downplaying of expectations has already begun, via the NYT:

The United Nations climate conference ambled toward a conclusion on Friday, with delegates saying that the meeting would produce no more than a modest set of measures toward a new international agreement two years from now. As usual, the biggest dispute was over money.

The talks, the 19th annual meeting of parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, opened nearly two weeks ago in the shadow of a devastating typhoon in the Philippines. …

With the clock winding down and the talks likely to extend into Friday night, the so-called loss-and-damage proposal remained alive. But the wealthy countries that would presumably provide financing for the plan were offering a weaker alternative that would wrap it into an existing area of the climate treaty. …

Surveying the state of negotiations on Thursday, Christiana Figueres, the executive secretary of the United Nations climate body, sought to play down expectations about the outcome, saying the Warsaw talks should be seen as a “steppingstone” toward reaching a successor agreement to the Kyoto Protocol at a climate summit meeting in Paris, scheduled for December 2015.

That’s not to say that developing countries didn’t manage to garner some pretty hefty concessions in the form of foreign aid, though, as Bloomberg reports:

Industrial nations have so far held back from detailing how they will fulfil a four-year-old pledge to boost climate-related aid to $100 billion by 2020. About $10 billion a year flowed in the past three years. Nations such as the Philippines, India and Brazil say they need predictability for their budgets. Developed nations put forward $100 million of new pledges to fill a fund that helps poorer nations adapt to climate change. …

Individual nations have made some commitments. Japan said it will provide $16 billion in the next three years, an announcement that was eclipsed by the Asian nation’s decision to shelve plans for cutting emissions from 1990 levels by 2020.

Norway said it will pay out at least $500 million a year through 2020, and it joined with the U.K. and U.S. in a $280 million promise to a forest-protection program. Germany said it will put $40 million to help build the capacity of the Green Climate Fund, an organization established by the UN that’s yet to receive capitalization.

Not that anything would ever be enough to satisfy the august bureaucrats of the United Nations and their globalist, redistributive wishes, never mind that richer countries themselves are up to their eyeballs in debt, deficits, and green-energy failures — but hey, I’m sure the next conference will produce something more lasting, meaningful, and effective. Next time.