United Nations climate talks opened Monday in Bangkok, Thailand, as another step in the process of drafting a successor to the Kyoto Protocol climate-change treaty that expires in 2012. Officials admitted they didn’t expect any breakthroughs at the meeting this week, but there is hope that the countries can manage to agree on an agenda for the new treaty as well as other procedural matters. The meeting might not be particularly riveting for bystanders, but it’s an exciting time to be a U.N. bureaucrat. “With the 2009 deadline, we have just one and half years in which to complete negotiations on what will probably be the most complex international agreement that history has ever seen,” said U.N. Climate Change Secretary Yvo de Boer. “And I’m confident that it can be done.”
