Two months ago, 12 boys and the coach of a Thai football team were rescued after being trapped in a cave in northern Thailand for 18 days.
Many termed their rescue against heavy odds a miracle.
Sadly, the six-day United Nations Special Climate Conference that concluded on September 9 was not able to rescue the trapped Paris Climate Agreement in the well-lit conference centre in southern Thailand.
Many of the delegates wondered if it was about pronouncing the promises only to dodge them.
The Paris Climate Agreement has been hanging from a cliff right from the day US President Donald Trump, a year back, announced his official plan to withdraw from it.
Though hundreds of American mayors and thousands of businesses - and even its allies like France - have been seeking to defy the consequences of Trump’s withdrawal, the agreement is getting dangerously close to its fatal consequence.
Indeed, the agreement in its present form is just an agreement of intent.
These “rules”, as per the time-table agreed in Paris, have to be ready no later than 2018.
The Bangkok Climate Conference was a late addition to the schedule after dismal progress was made at the annual meeting of the subsidiary bodies of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change ( UNFCCC) in Bonn in May.
The Bangkok conference was the last major negotiating meeting before the 24th Conference of the Parties (COP24) in Poland in December, when finally the Paris Agreement will be in mission mode.
The agreement remains trapped in a complex maze of the caves of finance for mitigation and adaptation for the developing countries, deployment of market mechanisms, periodicity of stocktaking and transparency, flexibility for developing countries in reporting.
Formulating the rules on the cyclic and iterative nature by enhancing the nationally determined contributions (NDCs), earlier considered an innovation in international agreements, is now proving to be formidable.
It all boils down to the fact that world is now setting the new norms of not keeping the promises made on global co-operation. Not walking the talk and smartly gyrating the agreed goals is now the global attire of diplomacy.
And each of these new patterns is being justified, sometimes diplomatically and, many times with international arrogance. Take, for example, financing for mitigation and adaptation for the developing countries.
The “polluter to pay” norm has been the anchor in the multilateral environment agreements right from the 1992 Rio Agreement, but is now being openly flouted.
The promise of providing “additional” finance through the Green Climate Fund (GCF), which was first proposed by then US secretary of state Hillary Clinton and then president Barack Obama in Copenhagen in 2009, is supposed to become fully operational in 2020, meaning developed countries would provide - starting with $10bn per year in 2012 to reach $100bn per year from 2020 onwards - to help developing countries pay for climate adaptation and mitigation.
What has happened to that promise? As of today, GCF has pledges of $10.4bn whereas the actually committed is only $3.5bn.
Not walking the full talk by the star performers on climate change has also resulted in the angry reaction from civil society, and supported by countries, on such climate-hypocrisy.
When state leaders arrive in Poland in December, they would have to muddle through the mess of the draft “rule book” mired in diminishing trust.
By that time, the GHGs concentration, already higher by 42% compared to 1992 levels, would have risen to the “next level”.
A rescue operation for the trapped Paris Agreement would be near impossible.

Indeed, the agreement in its present form is just an agreement of intent
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