The 17 biggest emitters will work to “identify a global goal” for emissions cuts, but the one the G8 proposed – 50 per cent, was rejected.

And even though the prime minister points out that the G8 signed up to what he calls a “historic” target of 80 per cent cuts itself, what they are talking about are goals and aspirations, not binding commitments. The prospect of a new global framework for tackling climate change being agreed  in Copenhagen in about five months from now seems daunting indeed, though we have a UN Climate Change summit in New York and the G20 in Pittsburgh before we get to Denmark itself.

Various bricks need to fall into place. Barack Obama needs to drag climate legislation through the US Senate, despite objections from his own Democrats representing coal states; a vast green technology fund will have to be created, despite the global recession, to persuade China, India, Brazil, Mexico and the rest that they will have not have to foot the entire bill for a greener future themselves.      

And the rich nations may have to reach some compromise on interim cuts, cuts by 2020 rather than 2050, to get China and India to budge. So climate change negotiators certainly have their work cut out, and for all the talk here in Italy this week, I still can’t help feeling we are still fiddling while Rome burns.

Today we have the G8 + 9 + 7, which includes African nations and international institutions like the UN, but perhaps we should take away 1 from that list – so G8 + 9 + 7 – 1, because the Chinese president flew home to handle riots on day one of this summit. 

Still, amid handwringing over whether the G8 has lost its potency, because power is shifting from the old world powers to the new, the arguments over what to call this talkfest seem pretty academic to me – as long as everybody who matters agrees to show up and does not mind being a +1, or in China’s case, a – 1.

Even Colonel Gadaffi of Libya is here today as a + 1, looking like an ageing rockstar, wearing a white suit with so many military ranks and honours pinned to his chest – most of which he has presumably awarded himself – that they are in danger of falling off

The Italians have pulled this summit off so far, but only just. They spent $75 million converting a police barracks – where I am now – into the summit venue with a tented media centre attached. And this is on top of the many more millions they spent on the original summit venue, in Sardinia, where the plan was to keep the media an hour’s ferry ride away from the leaders themselves.

This is much better. Yesterday it took us about five minutes to be escorted to interview Gordon Brown: one question each, though good reporters are naughty people and some managed to get away with asking two.

There have been a few hiccups for the 3,700 journalists registered to attend. There are no men’s urinals. Not any that I can find, anyway. The unisex loos have run out of toilet paper and those bathrooms which actually have sinks don’t necessarily have water coming out of the taps.

But such complaints seem petty in comparison with the plight of L’Aquila’s earthquake victims, whose blue tents are dotted all over town. On one hillside overlooking a car park the town’s residents have written a message to the world, riffing on Barack Obama himself: “yes we camp”, it says.

I think it will be an aspiration.

Both sides, the developed and the developing world are arguing over the details.

It seems China and India will not agree to a 50 per cent cut in their emissions by 2050.

They want the Americans to set interim targets for America and the other developed countries and they want the Americans to agree to a target for what they are going to do by 2020 for example, which we still don’t have.

And they also want the developed world to pay for the reductions in emissions for the developing world.

They want a fund of possibly billions of dollars so they can spend money on green technology.

And as long as this dance between east and west continues it’s very hard to see how progress is going to be made for the really important climate change summit which is supposed to agree a global framework for cutting emissions and that is in Copenhagen under United Nations auspices in December.

The demure Sarah Brown is here, and the funky Michelle Obama, but Carla Bruni – a former naked model – has not yet joined this year’s G8 festivities, in an apparent snub to the host, Silvio Berlusconi.

Mr Berlusconi knows a thing or two about naked models himself, judging from photographs of them cavorting in his Sardinian villa. But the present Mrs Sarkozy’s beautiful nose has apparently been put out of joint.

This is because Mr Berlusconi told the French president that he had given him the Italian-born Carla as a gift from Italy – and because Carla was reportedly horrified when Silvio commended Barack Obama on his “suntan”.

So Carla is having as little to do with Silvio as possible. “I am very happy to have become French”, she commented last November. The chanteuse to whom Mick Jagger once fell prey is apparently oblivious to the charms of the 72-year-old Casanova, who is so concerned about his looks that the prime minister’s advisers once asked an ITN cameraman (here with me today) to put a stocking over his lens – seemingly to soften the picture so that Silvio’s wrinkles would become less obvious.

Mr Berlusconi – whose hair thickness and colour becomes more miraculous by the day – held a press conference last night, if you can call it that, which you can’t. The Italian La Repubblica is reporting this morning that there were no microphones for the press to ask questions, and that when Silvio asked “are there any questions?” he ignored an eager reporter from the New York Times and walked out of the room.

Tonight the lovely Carla is scheduled to visit a camp of tents at San Demetrio inside the earthquake zone – not in the company of Silvio, but with the actor and fellow hearthrob, George Clooney. I gather Gordon Brown would also like to witness the destruction  – but if Silvio hears about that he’s likely to want to come along too and turn the whole thing into a domestic media opportunity, as he did with Barack Obama and Angela Merkel yesterday.

I don’t suppose you will read a word of this on Sarah Blown’s daily G8 blog but, never let it be said that Channel 4 News takes the high ground and ignores the latest hot gossip. Speaking of hot, I’ll blog about climate change later.

After that he took his fellow G8 leaders to a concert of classical music last night, where he was seen conducting the orchestra from his seat, even though the actual conductor was doing a perfectly good job.

The Italian Ansa news agency is reporting that the Italian premier didn’t go to bed till 2am, presumably on his own as his wife says she is divorcing him over the attention he has paid to an 18-year-old girl.

Mr Berlusconi was kept up late, not by the attentions of a teenage starlet, but by the flagpoles outside the spartan police barracks where this summit is taking place.

Beneath each flagpole there is apparently a loudspeaker playing the national anthem of each country, and Mr Berlusconi was seen singing along to each.

A rogue, but loveable in his way, which is surely why the Italians haven’t dumped him.

The reality will probably be that I shall be going through umpteen security scanners along with some 3000 other journalists queuing for the G8 summit in the earthquake zone of L’Aquila, and helping our cameraman in my own puny way to lug camera and editing gear past Italian police in the summer heat.

And as I do this along with the 3,000 others, while traumatised Italian earthquake victims watch us in disbelief from their tents, no doubt I shall be wondering why, in the age of videoconferencing and the internet, do thousands of people have to go to so much time and expense to enable other people – the world’s leaders – to be seen eating mozzarella di bufala together in the same room?

What follows is my shot at an answer. Let me get the “boring but important” stuff over with first, before we talk about Brylcreem Berlusconi and the latest gossip.

ECONOMY
On the global economy, which supposedly dominates discussions on this the first day, I’m not holding out too much hope of anything significant, even if Gordon Brown and other leaders will be spending the night in the training school of the Italian financial police.

British officials are portraying this summit as a “stepping stone” between the G20 London summit in April and another such gathering scheduled for September in Pittsburgh.

There will be another attempt to spur the international banking system into extending more loans, as the world economy may not be returning to health as quickly as was hoped; and Gordon Brown is joining Nicolas Sarkozy in calling for controls on oil price speculation.

What this seems to amount to is calls for more transparency from oil producers (who aren’t at the summit) on their production figures, and more clarity from consumers on demand. The real fear driving this is that oil prices will surge to the levels of last year, which contributed to the economic malaise, and that this will choke off any hint of growth.

There will also be the usual talk of a World Trade agreement under the so-called “Doha round”, but waiting for this to materialise is like waiting for Godot to arrive.

ENVIRONMENT
More signfiicant that the economy, I think, is climate change, which will be discussed on Thursday.

Now the Obama administration has put a climate change bill through the lower house of Congress, the Americans and British are hoping this will create some sense of momentum – and some sense of obligation on developing countries to do their bit; a sense of “it’s your turn now”, which was hard to generate when President Bush was at the G8 Hokkaido summit a year ago.

The Environment Secretary, Ed Miliband, is the only British minister expected to join Brown at the summit, which tells its own story about UK priorities.

“We want developing countries to sign up to a target around temperature change,” says a British official involved in negotiations. What this means is that the emissions of China and India have to grow more slowly over time, and peak earlier, supposedly without sacrificing economic growth.

But as with the economic talk, this G8 is a stepping stone to another meeting – the Copenhagen negotiations later this year on a global climate deal.

AFRICA and DEVELOPMENT
Africa has become an inescapable feature of G8s since Tony Blair put it on the agenda at Gleneagles in 2005. The supreme irony, of course, is that no G8 member has done more to cut its aid budget than Italy, the host of this summit.

British officials are talking about reinforcing previous G8 commitments on transparency and accountability, because they know that all their work at Gleneagles 4 years ago – and the credibility of the G8 itself – is on the line here in Italy this week, probably on Friday.

The African rabbit being pulled out a hat this year is a $15bn fund for agricultural development, with the UK giving $1.8bn over three years. This could mark a shift away from spending on emergency food supplies through the World Food Programme – though the WFP hopes not and says we should do both.

The idea is to get countries to come up with agricultural development plans which are then vetted by the World Bank and funded by governments in a more coordinated way than bilateral assistance currently allows. Will it silence Bob Geldof and the G8’s critics? Nope.

FOREIGN POLICY
Iran, again. Each year the G8 seems to issue statements, and each year we seem to be coming closer to a realisation that it may prove impossible to negotiate with Iran over its nuclear programme.

No doubt the Russians and Chinese will be sounded out on a possible new round of UN sanctions, and the G8 will absorb the significance of the last few weeks of political unrest, spurred on by the British who are trying to balance (a) the importance of keeping the EU in talks with Tehran, and (b) the need for a coordinated response to the detention and possible trial of a British embassy employee.

The Brits want to put Burma and the house arrest of Aung San Suu Kyi higher up the agenda too, after the UN Secretary General was not allowed to meet her last week.

BERLUSCONI
Will the earth move for Silvio this week? Well, it could, in more ways than one. L’Aquila has been dogged by seismic aftershocks and if these continue the summit could be moved to Rome.

The organisation of this year’s G8 has been dire, and juicy photos of young women frolicking in the nude at Silvio’s Sardinian villa have added to concern that the Italian PM’s foibles could dominate this summit, especially if they prove more interesting than anything else.

Don’t rule out further revelations, timed to embarrass him, though his domestic popularity has barely slipped according to the polls. Prosecutors in the city of Bari are investigating a prostitution ring which may have supplied scantily clad women to Silvio’s parties.

What if those prosecutors announce that they want to question the Prime Minister himself, just as he is politely pecking Sarah Brown or Carla Bruni-Sarkozy on the cheek?

I am told that the wife of Italian President Giorgio Napolitano has been put in charge of the “spouses programme”, which includes an audience with Pope Benedict at the Vatican. One doubts whether Berlusconi’s wife, Veronica Lario, will appear at Silvio’s side, after she accused her husband of “frequenting minors” in May and demanded a divorce.

Brown relaxed and on good form. The worst month of his premiership behind him? Though of course this could be his last G8, with election next year.

Downing St is seemingly determined to combat any sense of complacency that the worst of recession is over and wants G8 to send message to oil producers not to get greedy and choke off growth.

Will there still be tremors when our bus gets to earthquake zone? A BBC colleague says the Beeb has offered him this advice: if you are in bed during an earthquake, stay there, only put a pillow over your head.

Let’s hope the G8 exceeds expectations, as there is already an impending sense that the appearance of progress on climate change and helping Africa will matter more than progress itself.

I know earthquakes are terrible things, but we could do with something – new photos of goings on at Berlusconi”s villa perhaps? – to shake this summit up.