Another annual United Nations conference on climate change has ended and international negotiators once again failed to agree to a new treaty on reducing global greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels.

Countries gathering the past two weeks in Warsaw made earnest speeches, said they understood the challenge that humans face from increasing levels of carbon in our warming atmosphere and then, as at past conferences, they did very little to address the increasingly complex problem.

The end result — a weak agreement to continue working towards a pathway for a new global legally-binding climate change treaty by 2015 — was more than frustrating since there are already proven alternatives to using coal, oil and gas to power our world.

Christiana Figueres, Executive Secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, said some progress had been made at the conference, which ended Saturday.

Less than three years after the disaster at a nuclear power plant in Fukushima, a hotly-anticipated floating offshore wind turbine began operating 20 kilometres from the damaged site on Monday.

A number of news organisations reported that Yuhei Sato, governor of Fukushima, said that the floating turbine could become a symbol of the region’s desire to become a green energy centre.