2007 was the year in which global warming finally began to be taken seriously. However, it remains to be seen whether it was the year in which the world agreed on measures to deal with the crisis.

The global conference in Bali that was supposed to kick off negotiations for a new treaty to replace the Kyoto accord after 2012 ended ambiguously. The American delegation did not succeed in wrecking it, but it did manage to get all specific targets for cuts in greenhouse gas emissions removed from the text of the agreement.

The other countries went along with it in order to stop the United States from walking out, on the assumption that next year?s presidential election will produce an administration that is willing to cooperate. Then the hard targets for cuts will get put back in, and United States will sign up to them, and the Indians and the Chinese and the other big developing countries will make a deal that commits them to some cap on emissions in return for much technological and financial help from the developed countries in installing clean energy technologies.

That is the theory, and you can?t blame the other countries for going along with it because the alternative was a rogue America and no agreement. On the other hand, the history is not promising. It was Saint Albert Gore himself, then vice-president, who led the US delegation to the Kyoto talks in 1997 and drove the proposed emissions cuts down from fifteen percent to five percent, in the hope of coming up with a deal that Congress would accept.

But Congress never did accept the Kyoto accord, because its paymasters in the US energy, transport and natural resources sectors said not to. Things may have changed a bit now but on the big issues it is still largely subservient.

George W. Bush will no longer be there in 2009, but even a more climate-friendly president will probably still face a sold-out Congress. The crisis has finally been acknowledged around the world, but we may not be anywhere near a coordinated global response yet.

In the Asia-Pacific region, the year opened with China?s January test of a satellite-killing missile, which was probably meant mainly as a warning that it will react badly if Taiwan holds a referendum on changing the island?s name from « Republic of China » to « Republic of Taiwan » before next year?s election. China?s anger over India?s growing military relationship with the United States was underlined by the restatement in June of its claim to the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh ? but the Indian parliament?s refusal to ratify the nuclear part of the US-Indian deal in November suggested that the drift towards an Asia-Pacific cold war is not yet unstoppable.

The fall of Shinzo Abe?s government in Japan in September, after less than a year in office, sparked speculation that the Liberal Democratic Party?s half-century monopoly on power may be staggering to its end. Given the nationalistic style of the faction that has controlled the LDP since the turn of the century, this would come as a relief to the country?s Asian neighbours ? and also to many Japanese. In the Koreas, an agreement on dismantling North Korea?s nuclear weapons programme led, in October, to the first serious discussions about an actual peace treaty to replace the 54-year-old armistice that ended the Korean War.

The thinly disguised military take-over in Bangladesh in January was followed by the arrest of both the main party leaders, whom the army seems determined to exclude from any future elections. The assassination of Pakistan?s former prime minister Benazir Bhutto less than two weeks before the January election that might have returned the country to civilian rule put not just the election, but the country?s whole future as a democracy in doubt. Democracy has not had a good year in southern Asia ? but despite the upheavals, the economies of all these countries (except Burma, of course) continue to grow rapidly.

Farther west, the war in Afghanistan intensified in 2007, with foreign forces heavily engaged all across the south of the country against Pashtun rebels fighting under the Taliban banner. Nevertheless, the country?s export trade is thriving, with Afghan heroin accounting for 93 percent of global production. And Turkmenistan?s ruler for the past 21 years, Saparmurat Niyazov, was succeeded by his former dentist, Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov.

In the Middle East, President Bush?s troop « surge » in Iraq bought him an extra two years and ensured that he would be able to drop the mess in the lap of his successor, but it is still an unwinnable war. Some militias have switched sides for the moment for tactical reasons, but a poll conducted by ABC News, the BBC and Japan?s NTV in August found that 57 percent of Iraqis believe that attacks on US forces are acceptable. On the assumption that most Kurds are pro-American, the implication is that around three-quarters of Arab Iraqis have no problem with blowing up Americans.

The great and frightening imponderable of the year was not the fate of Iraq, but the question of whether the United States would also attack Iran. Both President Bush and Vice-President Cheney repeatedly accused Iran of working on nuclear weapons, and warned that « all options are on the table » including a US attack. In December, however, the US intelligence agencies produced a new National Intelligence Estimate which asserted that Iran has not been working on nuclear weapons for the past years. Mr Bush grumpily insisted that Iran was still a threat because it MIGHT do so, but the likelihood that he could actually launch another war dropped dramatically.

Matters were much less military in Europe, where the great non-surprise of the year was the revelation this month that Russia?s President Vladimir Putin, who cannot run again in next year?s presidential election, will re-emerge as Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. To be fair, that is just the way most Russian voters would have wanted it : as they credit Putin for restoring Russia?s prosperity and its prestige.

Tony Blair finally relinquished the prime ministership in Britain in June to take up a lucrative career on the lecture circuit and a symbolic post as prominent-person-in-charge-of-doing-something-for-the-Palestinians, while his successor Gordon Brown struggled to get the hang of being prime minister after ten years in the number two job. Nicolas Sarkozy won the French presidency in May, promising to reanimate the French economy with sweeping free-market reforms ? but his wife promptly divorced him, and he soon ran into resistance from the beneficiaries of the existing system in the form of strikes.

In July Turkish democracy weathered a major crisis when voters supported the « Muslim democrats » of the ruling Justice and Development Party against veiled threats of intervention by an army that sees an Islamic party as a threat to the state. Polish voters threw out the government of the « toxic twins » in October, rejecting two years of ultra-nationalism and witch-hunts against anybody linked to the old Communist regime even in the most menial capacity ? but one of the twins, Lech Kacynski, will stay on as president until 2010, which may make it hard for Donald Tusk?s new centre-right government to get legislation through. And Belgium remained without a government six months after last June?s election, amidst alarmist talk that the country might break into its French- and Flemish-speaking parts, but agreement on an interim government was reached.

You have to look hard to find encouraging news from Africa. Ivory Coast has reunited, at least for the moment, after five years of civil war. The civil war in the Congo is still mostly over, although there was a flare-up in the north-east in September. Nigeria had a peaceful transfer of power from one elected president to another ? although only after the outgoing president was defeated in his attempt to change the constitution and run for a third term. But the victor and new president of Nigeria, Umaru Yar?Adua, won by an absurd four-to-one majority in an election that European Union observers described as « not credible » and the United States called « deeply disturbing ».

That?s the good news. The bad news is that almost all of north-eastern Africa is already at war or drifting in that direction. The Darfur war in south-western Sudan has spilled over into Chad and the Central African Republic, exacerbating the local conflicts there, and the peace deal that ended the far bigger, decades-long war between southern Sudan and the centre is breaking down. Ethiopia is fighting its own rebel citizens and waging a brutal campaign against civilians and resistance fighters alike in occupied Somalia, while to the north Eritrea, Africa?s Sparta, is gearing up for another war with Ethiopia. These are some of the poorest countries in Africa and perhaps also among the earliest victims of climate change, which may explain why they are also being ravaged by war.

East Africa and southern Africa are in far better shape, apart from the ongoing disaster of Zimbabwe, but even there very few countries have an economic growth rate that is more than one or two points higher than their population growth rate. It will be a great many years, at that rate, before the majority of their people escape from grinding poverty.

The main story in Latin America all year has been the advance of the left, fuelled in part by Venezuelan oil wealth. Hugo Chavez was the role model in Ecuador, where President Rafael Correa won power in January on a platform of radical reform. Venezuela paid the legal bills when Bolivia nationalised its gas fields and extracted more revenue from the foreign companies that operate them. And Venezuela is now providing so much aid to Cuba, mainly in the form of cheap oil, that the subsidies compare with those that Castro used to get from the Soviet Union. That certainly helped to stabilise Cuba?s transition from Fidel Castro?s rule to the new « collective leadership » ? but there was a sigh of relief when Castro indicated that he did not intend to take power back.

In the United States, the war in Iraq fell off the front pages as American military casualties declined, though it will probably be back there by next summer : everybody, including the Iraqi insurgents, knows how the Tet offensive turned American opinion against the Vietnam war in the election year of 1968. The presidential primaries were already taking up almost all the available media space by year?s end, but no candidate in either party had established a lead. The dollar was collapsing in external markets, but most attention focussed instead on the collapse of the domestic mortgage market and the risk of a recession.

What else ? A theatrical competition for rights to the Arctic seabed opened up, with Russian submarines planting flags on the bottom at the North Pole and Canada investing in new armed icebreakers to patrol the Northwest Passage, but the rival claims will really be settled by geological evidence in front of an international court. Australia dumped its long-serving prime minister, a serial climate change denier, and promptly signed the Kyoto accord. And a British court told the Chagos Islanders that they could finally go home to their home on Diego Garcia, now a key US airbase in the Indian Ocean, only 41 years after Britain illegally expelled them to make room for its American ally.

So it wasn?t all bad, was it ?