In one of the most poignant moments of the Doha climate talks, the Philippine climate change commissioner, Naderev M. Sano, appealed to his fellow negotiators at a session deciding the contours of the second commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol.

“Please let Doha be remembered as the place where we found the political will to turn things around,” he said as he choked back tears.

Just days before, Typhoon Bopha had hit the Philippines, killing hundreds of people. The typhoon, having been both unusually forceful and out of season, was deemed — like Hurricane Sandy — to be an extreme weather event, exacerbated by climate change.

You can see Mr. Sano addressing the plenary of the working group dedicated to the increasingly ineffective Kyoto agreement above and here.

Despite the pleas of the Philippine commissioner and those of many others, the Doha summit was almost politics as usual. It did take 24 hours of overtime, but the Doha Climate Gateway was finally approved Saturday. The agreement extends the Kyoto Protocol until 2020, when a more global emissions reduction agreement is to take effect.

“The Doha package represents a modest but important step forward,” said Connie Hedegaard, the European commissioner for climate action, according to news reports.

Though the new, tougher and more inclusive treaty will be under negotiation until 2015, environmentalists warn that any deal that goes into effect in 2020 comes too late.

“We can’t wait until the 2020s to start cutting emissions. We are going to have to do it this decade,” said Samantha Smith, who heads the Global Climate and Energy Initiative of the World Wildlife Fund, in a telephone interview from Doha.

The American news media reported little on the climate talks, compared with Europe. That may be in part, as my colleague John Broder reports: “It has long been evident that the United Nations talks were at best a partial solution to the planetary climate change problem, and at worst an expensive sideshow. The most effective actions to date have been taken at the national, state and local levels, with a number of countries adopting aggressive emissions reductions programs and using cap-and-trade programs or other means to help finance them.”

But, as John writes, climate change is “a problem that scientists say is growing worse faster than any of them predicted even a few years ago.”

“What this meeting reinforced is that while this is an important forum, it is not the only one in which progress can and must be made,” said Jennifer Haverkamp, the director of the international climate programs at the Environmental Defense Fund. “The disconnect between the level of ambition the parties are showing here and what needs to happen to avoid dangerous climate change is profound.”

Kumi Naidoo, the head of Greenpeace International, who also spoke to Rendezvous from Doha, said, “The biggest problem is the disconnect from the science.”

“We should peak in 2015 and then come down,” he said, referring to global emissions, “and we are just so far from that.”

Environmentalists charge that national economic interests took priority over the fight against global warming at Doha, even as an increasing number of people worldwide are becoming aware of the urgency of the problem.

A popular Twitter message that went around on the final days of the two-week summit:

“Scientists must be the most frustrated people on the planet right now.” #climatechange #cop18 upworthy.com/the-most-devas… — Occupy Sandy (@OccupySandy) December 7, 2012

Environmentalists also call on developed nations to be more transparent, both in their plans for emission reduction and their green financing pledges for the developing countries.

In a best-case situation, the United States would have “come in explaining how they would cut 17 percent from 2005 levels,” Ms. Smith said.

The secretary general of the United Nations, Ban Ki-moon, also called for transparency in Green Climate financing. Mr. Ban arrived in Doha earlier this week to demand that rich countries show how they will fulfill their pledge of $100 billion a year in financing by 2020 to help poor countries deal with the negative effects of climate change.

“It is important that developing countries, especially those that are poor and vulnerable, are presented with a road map on how this commitment on long-term financing will be met,” Mr. Ban said.

An agreement on pledges between now and 2020 will be put off for another year, though individual countries and bodies — including the United States and the European Union — have already made firm pledges for the coming years.

The European Union, long seen as the dominant force in these negotiations, was criticized as showing weak leadership at this summit. Strife within the European family on whether unused emission credits — dubbed “hot air” — should be carried over into the second commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol weakened the European position.

Experts say that certain countries — like Russia and Poland — were allotted too many credits in the first Kyoto commitment period and that the unused and tradable credits would weaken future emission goals under the protocol, if carried over to the second commitment period.

More important, the Union backed down from previous suggestions that it would cut its emissions by 30 percent from 1990 levels by 2020, remaining committed to the target of a 20 percent cut it had initially promised.

Poland is still heavily reliant on the most-polluting fossil fuels. The country, which was recently declared site of the COP19 meeting in 2013, is seen as opposing both “hot air” compromises and more severe emission reduction targets within the larger European Union. (Each annual meeting is formally known as the Conference of the Parties, or COP.)

Despite such failures, the European Union is still seen as the most plausible leader among rich nations.

“Europe still offers us the best opportunity to be the global environmental champion,” said Mr. Naidoo of Greenpeace, while insisting that the bloc needs to do a lot more.

Despite the discord within the Union on “hot air” credits, Ms. Hedegaard, the European climate commissioner, still worked at getting assurances that the credits, or assigned amount units, would not be bought by others.

In the final session several other countries — Australia, Liechtenstein, Monaco, Norway and Switzerland to name a few — declared they would not buy unused credits.

Actions by U.S. negotiators were under special scrutiny this year both because of the extreme weather events the country has suffered and President Barack Obama’s post-election vow to make climate change part of the national agenda.

“It was a year when the U.S. could have come by putting more money and more cuts on the table,” Ms. Smith said.

“Obama’s team exhibit no improvement from previous COPs,” Mr. Naidoo of Greenpeace said in a press statement issued on Saturday. “Obama’s legacy could turn out to be no better than his predecessor’s.”

In one session, the Alliance of Small Island States was seen to be fighting the United States on the issue of loss and damage, a proposal that was ultimately adopted and would pave the way for heavy emitters to be held financially liable for the effects of climate change in developing countries affected by climate change (For those interested, here’s a short primer).

“The disaster of Copenhagen happened on Obama’s watch and a failure in 2015 would be really bad for his legacy,” Ms. Smith said.

Despite Canada’s first place finish at the Climate Action Network’s Fossil of the Year award and the clever trick of activists who claimed to have registered the Canadian environment minister in some undergraduate atmospheric climate science classes, environmentalists said not enough official reprimand had been made of Canada’s decision last year to leave the Kyoto Protocol.

“Another good outcome would have been for other countries to publicly chastise Canada,” said Ms. Smith of the World Wildlife Fund.

Despite a commitment to grow its own renewable energy share to 2 percent by 2020 (read John’s report here), Qatar, the oil-rich host country, was also criticized as not showing enough leadership at the summit.

Activists who dared unfurl an unregistered banner that read “Qatar, why host not lead,” were immediately thrown out of the convention center by U.N. security guards and had their access privileges revoked. Several news sources reported that the activists were then deported from the country.