Climate researchers said Thursday the planet could warm by more than 3.5 degrees Celsius, boosting the risk of drought, flood and rising seas. The UN's target is a 2 C limit on warming from pre-industrial levels for manageable climate change. In a report, scientists said Earth's average global temperature rise could exceed the dangerous 3.5 C warming they had flagged only six months ago.

A yearly review of countries' greenhouse gas emissions cut pledges under an extension to the global climate pact the Kyoto Protocol could be a way to raise climate ambitions, the European Union's lead climate negotiator said on Wednesday.

Negotiators from over 180 countries are meeting in Bonn, Germany, until Friday to work towards getting a new global climate pact signed by 2015 and to ensure ambitious emissions cuts are made after the Kyoto Protocol expires at the end of this year.

UN climate talks are going nowhere, as politicians dither or bicker while the pace of warming dangerously speeds up, one of the architects of the Kyoto Protocol said.
‘It seems to me that negotiations are returning to square one,’ said Raul Estrada, the ‘father’ of the world’s only treaty to specify curbs in greenhouse gases, as the first talks for a new global pact took place in Bonn.
In a telephone interview from Buenos Aires this week, Estrada defended his beleaguered accord and said efforts to engineer a replacement were in trouble.

A row over planning how to bind all emitters under a global climate pact from 2020 at U.N. climate talks in Germany is blocking negotiations to deepen nearer term emission cuts and raise cash to help poor countries cope with a warming planet, the EU said Tuesday.

Delegates have failed to start work on a new Durban Platform negotiation track after four days of talks in Bonn spent arguing over an agenda to organize work this year and appoint a chair to steer the process.

Reluctance to raise ambitions to cut greenhouse gas emissions due to economic constraints is threatening progress towards limiting global warming, delegates at United Nations' climate talks in Germany warned on Monday.

The talks in Bonn, which end on May 25, are partly to discuss ways of raising the level of ambition on cuts but the worsening eurozone crisis and battered global economy have increased reluctance to commit to more financially onerous cuts by the end of the decade, delegates told Reuters.

Old divisions between developed and developing countries in who should lead the fight against climate change should be laid aside, according to ministers from some of the world's poorest countries and European representatives meeting on May 8.

The vexed issue of which countries should bear the greatest responsibility for cutting greenhouse gas emissions has been a sticking point in international negotiations for two decades. Under the original settlement reached in 1992 at the Rio Earth summit, and formalised in the 1997 Kyoto protocol, some rapidly emerging economies such as China were left out of the roster of obligations to curb emissions.

EU nations have yet to come up with a plan on how to fill a multi-billion euro fund to help tackle climate change, even as the region's executive body hosts talks with countries likely to bear the brunt of extreme weather.

The European Union recommitted to providing 7.2 billion euros ($9.4 billion) for the fund over 2010-12, according to draft conclusions seen by Reuters ahead of a meeting of EU finance ministers next week.