Global warming talks spark friction between US and China

Others add that the charged atmosphere shows that the talks are finally catching up with 50 years' worth of changes in global geopolitics. Today's players represent a far more economically diverse world than simple notions of rich and poor countries would suggest.

Bigger than Kyoto

And unlike the 1997 Kyoto protocol, which involved only major industrial countries, any new agreement will embrace virtually every country on the planet.

"What we're seeing in the negotiating process now are these differences in economic status and differences in national self-interest," says Andrew Deutz, director for international government relations at the Nature Conservancy in Arlington, Va. This is particularly true among developing countries that were once treated like one bloc, he adds.

As if to underscore the point, the G77 actually embraces 132 countries, all at various stages of economic development.

Even though these differences already were apparent during the 1992 Rio conference that led to the Framework Convention on Climate Change, negotiators retained the simplistic categories, he says.

Not surprisingly, one of the main areas of contention remains centered on emission-control offers currently on the table, and what they imply for global average temperatures. It opens a window on the increasing diversity of perspectives.

The emissions reduction offers made by the US and China so far are aimed at holding global average temperatures to around 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels. Other major developing economies appear to share that goal.

But Sudan's Lumumba Di-Aping, chief negotiator for the G77, told reporters that a 2-degree target has no scientific basis; it is merely one option the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) gave policymakers, along with the kinds of emission reductions needed to stand a 50-50 chance of hitting that target. Instead, African countries and small-island nations have been pushing to hold global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. He based his demand on IPCC modeling that showed a 2-degree Celsius global average would lead to an even hotter sub-Saharan Africa, with disastrous effects on water supplies and agriculture.

Science policy specialists say that while estimating the level of emissions needed to reach a particular temperature goal is guided by research, the choice of which temperature goal to pick is political. It's based on any given country's sense of the risks its citizens face if temperatures overshoot the goal, the cost of changing paths, and the country's capacity or willingness to handle that level of risk.

The economic self-interest of Kenya, Tanzania, and Nepal, for instance, is quite different from that of China and other major developing economies, Dr. Deutz says.

In the past, Deutz says, the G77 plus China negotiated among themselves behind closed doors and tended to emerge with positions based on fragile internal compromises.

That left the bloc "with little room to negotiate with everyone else because of those delicate compromises," he says.

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