COP21: Yes it Was a Great Surrender.

It's clear that the agreement to come out of climate change talks in Paris yesterday stinks so bad that it is going to linger around us for a long while yet.

After taking a few days to clear my head I will endeavour to work through the 31 pages line-by-line to detail just how destructive it is.

The section on finance in particular is unlikely to contain much cause for intentional laughter. It is based on an unenforceable pledge that the Green Climate Fund (GCF) will receive USD100bn per year, every year.

This 100bn figure is not new. It was first agreed when the the GCF was established at COP16 in Cancun, Mexico in 2010. In the five years since the GCF has received a grand total of USD52bn. That figure includes pledges that are unlikely to ever be translated into actual funding.

It works out at an average of USD10.4bn per year - around 10% of the figure the agreement refers to.

In the UK alone around USD0.75bn is spent of flood defences every year and they rarely work.

Therefore the total funding available under the Paris agreement to tackle all elements of climate change such as mitigation, adaptation and loss & damage is enough to supply just 14 nations with UK-style flood defences. By global standards UK floods are still pretty mild.

Now wonder then that the UK Secretary General Ban Ki-moon - the world's top diplomat - appeared to react to the agreement by saying;

"In this agreement the World's governments have collectively failed to tackle climate change. The private sector now represents our only hope to prevent unstoppable, runaway climate change."

Away from the deep problems with the text of the agreement indications have begun to emerge of significant procedural problems with the way the negotiation was handled yesterday.

UNFCCC meetings take the form of a plenary. This means that before anything is agreed you first have to go around the room and allow the delegates from each of the 195 delegations three minutes to express their views on the issue.

If delegates simply use those three minutes to announce they agree with what is being discussed then the discussion simply moves on.

However if a delegation expresses a concern about what is being discussed that then that needs to be address before the discussion can continue. Normally this is done by opening an officially record to list any concerns. However if the concerns are serious enough it means that whatever is being discussed is automatically rejected.

Last night's plenary - which is being re-broadcast on TV's across the globe - began with a short apology for the delay explaining that due to tiredness negotiators had made serious mistakes in the text. The COP21 President Laurent Fabius then announced that the draft had been accepted and banged his gavel.

It was only after about 40 minutes of standing ovations and wild cheers that the plenary actually began. Over the course of the next several hours at least a dozen nations expressed concerns about the draft. These concerns were never formally addressed.

So it appears that in his rush to bask in the glory of success Fabius not only allowed a text riddled with mistakes into discussion he actually failed to have it formally adopted.

12:10 on 13/12/15 (UK date).