I am tempted to get David Cameron an atlas for Christmas as he doesn’t seem to know the way to Warsaw. Mind you, he has recently managed to visit both India and China to boost trade, so perhaps taking climate change seriously is not a priority for him.

He wasn’t the only national leader to miss the United Nations Climate Change conference that’s just finished, and indeed Australia didn’t even send one elected representative. This absence does prolong the process, and as this meeting was the 19th since the first one in Rio in 1992, it does suggest the leaders are reluctant to agree the necessary policies. Perhaps they are wary about the response from their electorates.

This time, real progress has been made even more difficult with the withdrawal of co-operation by three developed nations because of their economic agendas. Canada wants to develop its oil and tar sands, Japan is looking for an alternative to nuclear power, and Australia is determined to sell as much coal as possible. The result can only be a greater CO2 challenge for the rest of us.

However, the representatives of 195 nations beavered away, day and night, for two weeks to plan for another meeting, in Paris, in late 2015, which David Cameron probably won’t need to attend. It’s to replace the formal commitments made at the Kyoto conference in 1997, as earlier in the year they are all expected to have decided on the amount of CO2 they intend to cut, starting from 2020.

A previous stumbling block has been the reluctance of the developing countries to cut growth because their CO2 production is minimal compared with the industrial nations who have been pumping out carbon dioxide for the last two centuries. However, the developing nations have now accepted some limitation on their growth in exchange for an absolute reduction of emissions by the industrial ones. This must be a step forward.

They have also agreed to set up a system to verify and monitor the reductions that take place, and to establish a loss and damage fund to help with disasters, such as the recent Philippines typhoon, though they are still working on how large it will be.

Additionally, they were able to confirm the importance of protecting forests as a way to control CO2, and they intend to build on progress already made with a new green climate fund that will support the work already started.

The UK now has 15 months to show how it’s going to reduce CO2 emissions at a time of growth, and against a background of an impotent Green Deal, lower fuel duty, less support for renewable energy, and tax relief for fracking.