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The United States on Tuesday pressed China, India and other emerging powers to make clearer commitments to fighting climate change, warning that last year's Copenhagen accord risked being "stillborn."
The 194-nation UN-led summit in the Danish capital pledged to limit global warming to two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) along with billions of dollars in financing. It gave countries until January 31 to sign on.
China, India, Brazil and South Africa each submitted to the United Nations their plans to fight climate change but described them as voluntary and did not formally endorse the Copenhagen deal.
Todd Stern, the US special envoy on climate change, described the positions of the four developing powers as "a bit ambiguous" and said they wanted to "limit the impact" of the accord.
"I do believe that they will sign on to the accord because the consequences of not doing so are so serious -- in a word, leaving the accord stillborn, contrary to the clear assent their leaders gave to the accord in Copenhagen," Stern said at the Center for American Progress, a Washington think-tank.
The Copenhagen summit in December worked on a framework for fighting climate change after 2012, when developed nations' commitments to curb carbon emissions blamed for global warming run out under the landmark Kyoto Protocol.
Stern voiced hope the next major meeting in December in Cancun, Mexico would complete a new treaty but declined to make predictions, saying he was "not going to fall into the trap of saying if it's not that, we've got a failure."
Developing nations insist that wealthy nations are historically responsible for climate change and therefore should be the only ones with legal obligations.
Stern said the United States was ready to do its part but added: "The imperative of bringing all major emitters into a regime of climate commitments is clear -- there is simply no other way to head off the coming crisis."
The United States joined other developed nations in signing on to the Copenhagen accord, in a new sign of the change since the presidency of George W. Bush, a diehard foe of Kyoto.
But President Barack Obama's administration is still trying to overcome opposition in the Senate to approving the first US nationwide plan to cut carbon emissions.
Obama flew to Copenhagen and negotiated with Chinese and other officials to reach the deal, which he and other world leaders acknowledged did not meet their hopes.
Stern did not mince words about the Copenhagen summit, calling it "a snarling, aggravated, chaotic event -- and that doesn't even go into the food, the lines and all the rest."
He accused unspecified "rabble-rousers" of trying to scuttle the conference. Under the rules of the UN Framework Convention of Climate Change, all agreements must have consensus for approval.
A handful of developing states -- particularly Sudan, Venezuela and Cuba -- were harshly critical of the Copenhagen accord, with the Sudanese envoy even likening Western nations' policies to the Holocaust.
Momentum for climate action has also been hit by a scandal at the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
The panel admitted last month that a grim prediction in its influential 2007 report on climate change -- that Himalayan glaciers were at risk -- was poorly substantiated.
It has also come under fire after leaked emails, which critics say show attempts to skew the evidence.
Stern called for open scientific dialogue but said he had little doubt that human activity was heating up the planet.
"It's obviously not useful when mistakes are made, but the overwhelming body of evidence is not at all disturbed by those events," he said.
