GLOBAL warming has a way of prompting metaphors so bad they destroy a claim to seriousness. This week’s prize goes to Klaus Toepfer, head of the Kenya-based United Nations Environment Programme.

Climate change could lead to Earth “spinning out of control”, he warned, neglecting to describe the time when the planet’s climate, or rotation, have been under control.

Africa, he continued, is where “the hammer of global warming will . . . likely hit hardest”, using an image of a targetted blow to describe the threat of unpredictable and diffuse change. The “spectre at the feast”, he concluded, was the chance that models had underestimated the effect.

It is part of the politics of global warming that there can be no let up in the warnings of catastrophe, in case people think the problem solved. Toepfer’s vocabulary perfectly illustrates the genre, with its muddle of inflated expectations and supernatural threats. Such prophesies have poured in this week even though yesterday, the Kyoto Protocol, the most ambitious concerted attempt to combat climate change, finally came into force, seven years after the summit which gave it its name.

The alarm calls are understandable politics, if some have more scientific basis than others. Even though Kyoto is now in force, it has created new headaches. Inflaming public concern may seem like a good way to tackle them.

The first is that it has huge gaps, as critics see it. According to the Protocol, the 34 industrialised countries which have ratified the treaty are legally bound now to slash output of greenhouse gases before 2012, with different targets set for each depending on the level of emissions in 1990.

But the US is absent, and there are no binding curbs on the giants of the developing world, China and India.

Critics of the Bush Administration find these “flaws” endlessly provocative. They fret about how to bring these rebels within the corral. But this should not be a distraction.

There was never any question that the US Congress would sign up to a treaty which would have required the US to make cuts of 7 per cent in its emissions, given the country’s dependence on cars.

That is a point which Tony Blair grasped early on. But his notion of a “Kyoto-lite” to include the US — a scheme for rewarding new “green” technology, without binding commitments on emissions — has brought him brickbats within Europe and the Labour party.

One of the mysteries of the politics of climate change is why Blair has boxed himself into such an awkward corner. His interest in the subject appears to have sprung from the darkest days of the Iraq row. Whatever his own convictions, the political use was clear.

A commitment to the cause of climate change was a useful offer to those who loathed the war, particularly to those who claimed it was “all about oil”, and to young, “green” voters.

But it has taken him quickly into difficult territory, otherwise known as the loathing of nuclear power in parts of his party. Britain has no easy way to explain how it will counter the sharp rise in its emissions once existing nuclear stations close, without building more.

Nor, to take the second “flaw”, is the dispute with China and India susceptible to a quick burst of pressure. They are resentful that the industrialised world, which grew rich on the unpenalised use of coal and oil, does not want to allow them the same freedom.

Their resistance on this point is simply one aspect of a new assertiveness on many fronts. It is helping to stall the current Doha round of global trade talks, among others. But that may be a better forum in which to unpick their objections, offering deals which are more clearly of reciprocal benefit.

Rather than railing at Kyoto’s shortcomings, a more pressing task is to thrash out how it will work as it stands. The immediate problem is that some signatories are set to break the treaty.

Japan, to its embarrassment, having given birth to the treaty, is one. It is obliged to cut emissions by 6 per cent on 1990 levels, but they had already risen by 8 per cent by last year.

Signatories need urgently to work out the rules for the “carbon trading scheme” at the treaty’s core. This should allow countries to buy permits to pollute, in return for investing in clean technology elsewhere.

But the rules as they stand, are too complicated, demanding proof that the investments would not have been made otherwise, a task often impossible.

Answering that technical question is the key to devising a treaty to succeed Kyoto. Stirring up public anger against the US, China and India, with a vocabulary of fabulous threats, is a waste of breath.

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