Durban climate summit unlikely to get big commitments

— -- As prospects for a major global accord on climate change look dim, ensuring that negotiations continue may be the most a United Nations climate summit will achieve next week. .

Beginning Monday in Durban, South Africa, the 12-day U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change picks up where last year's meeting in Cancun left off.

What eluded negotiators then, and still does today, is a grand bargain in which 194 nations commit to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions that most scientists contend are contributing to a warmer climate.

"Almost everyone agrees that some kind of big deal is unlikely," says international negotiations expert David Victor of the University of California-San Diego. Economically, he says, "these are dark times and we have made that choice already in past meetings."

Nations with struggling economies remain fearful that restrictions on emissions will curtail economic activity.

Over the last two years, world leaders have failed to agree on a successor to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which obligated industrial nations, but not the United States, to lower greenhouse gas emissions. The goal was to help keep global surface temperature warming to less than a 3.6-degree-Fahrenheit average increase over pre-industrial levels.

In the past century, temperatures have risen 1.4 degrees, according to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. Now a deadline approaches: The Kyoto Protocol expires next year.

"It is clear that Durban is the end of the line for some of these pressing climate change issues and we cannot delay it any longer," South Africa's Maite Nkoana-Mashabane, presiding official over the meeting, said last month. In particular Nkoana-Mashabane and others have called for the meeting to settle:

• Whether wealthy nations really will pony up the $100 billion a year they pledged at Cancun to help poor ones buy cleaner power facilities and adjust to climate effects.

• Verification standards for emissions cuts.

• Management of clean energy project "credits" for forest conservation, in which poor countries are paid to preserve rainforests from development after 2012.

"Any number of outcomes are possible," says Jennifer Morgan of the World Resources Institute in Washington D.C., an environmental think tank. "Definitely in (the) discussion is a new look for the Kyoto Protocol because time is running out."

Prospects for such a replacement have dimmed. Japan, saddled with a decade-long weak economy and recent earthquake losses, has shown little appetite for signing on to a sequel to the protocol.

U.S. and Chinese negotiators, meanwhile, have sparred for years over whether developing nations, which were not required to make cuts under the protocol, should pledge to do more to curb their emissions.

As occurred on the eve of a 2009 meeting in Copenhagen, a cache of e-mails from climate scientists at the United Kingdom's University of East Anglia were hacked and released before the Durban meeting this week. They revealed researchers bickering with one another and taking shots at climate science critics, who had alleged that the earlier e-mails showed scientists were manipulating data to support the case for global warming.

Investigations last year into the earlier e-mail release cleared scientists of improper actions, but criticized them for not engaging with their critics.