We’re about to hit the final week of negotiations.

Can’t help but feel pretty powerless right now.  I’m typing away in my student room.  I’ve been trying to plan a week of studying - my dissertation and I haven’t really bonded recently.  I keep getting distracted, organising global days of action and the like.  And it’s hard to sit studiously still in a library whilst knowing that across the North Sea, people are negotiating my future.

But yeah – once you’ve marched through London as one of 40,000 people; once you’ve performed a night-time flashdance in front of the Houses of Parliament, shouting “Don’t hold back!” to the beats of Galvanise; once you’ve written another letter to your MP – it gets a bit scary, because you suddenly realise you’re in their hands.

However, I’ve given this some more thought.  And I’ve decided I’m not as scared as I thought I was.

Bibi van der Zee has written a piece suggesting that displays of climate change themed art around Copenhagen are pointless.  I disagree.  Copenhagen is not just about getting some negotiators to sign a fair, ambitious and binding deal – although I will be jolly well annoyed if they do not (to put it very politely).  Copenhagen is also making us get our heads around the challenges we humans have created for ourselves.  Not just heating up the planet – although that is a pretty hefty problem.  We have created other, perhaps more entrenched, challenges; climate change is behaving like a theatre’s follow-spot operator, throwing a glaring white light onto the complexities and injustices of the human world.  New policies are necessary, but not sufficient, for sorting all this out.

The artists who have produced work inspired by climate change, in Copenhagen and elsewhere, are also doing some negotiating.  They’re negotiating what climate change means for the way we think and the way we value.

It’s not all in the hands of “Them” – the politicians and policy-makers.  Even if they do get the deal we need, that doesn’t just magically “solve” the “problem” of climate change.  We’re still going to have to sit down and think about the things that art and music, novels and films make us think about.

Also, some things really encourage me.  100,000 people took to the streets in Copenhagen alone on Saturday – not to mention countless other rallies across the planet.  That is pretty cool.  And my MP emailed me back last week, saying he happened to have been standing next to Ed Miliband, the Climate Change Minister, when he read my email – so he brought it up with him then and there.  And dancing on Parliament Square while the Houses of Parliament were emblazoned with the slogan “The World Wants a Real Deal” was just SO MUCH FUN.

I’m not going to write a conclusion, because there is so much left to be concluded.  Ministers are arriving in Copenhagen as I type.  On Thursday, more than 110 heads of state will rock up.  It seems many developing countries are wary of being pressured into signing a weak agreement.  There’s a lot of work to be done this week.