U.N. CLIMATE CONFERENCE Clinton encourages negotiators

He urged delegates to find a way to work with the Bush administration.
MONTREAL (AP) -- Delegates from around the world worked into the final hours of a U.N. climate conference on Friday to produce a plan for deeper cuts after 2012 in greenhouse-gas emissions, buoyed by a last-minute message of support from former President Clinton.
Clinton, in an applause-filled appearance at the Montreal meeting, said President Bush was "flat wrong" to claim that reducing greenhouse-gas emissions to fight global warming would damage the U.S. economy. But the ex-president urged the negotiators from more than 180 nations to find a way to "work with" the current U.S. administration.
Throughout the two-week conference, the Bush administration repeatedly rejected Canadian and other efforts to draw it into future global talks on emission controls, just as in 2001 it renounced the existing Kyoto Protocol and its mandatory cuts.
Discussion
Canadian officials said the U.S. delegation was displeased with the last-minute scheduling of the Clinton speech. But U.S. delegation chief Paula Dobriansky issued a statement saying events like Clinton's appearance "are useful opportunities to hear a wide range of views on global climate change."
Despite Clinton's message, many here seemed resigned to waiting for a political change in Washington.
"It's such a pity the United States is still very much unwilling to join the international community, to have a multilateral effort to deal with climate change," said the leader of the African group of nations here, Kenya's Emily Ojoo Massawa.
"The administration just doesn't seem to get it. They don't understand the world is suffering from climate change," said Jennifer Morgan of the environmentalist group Climate Action Network.
The U.S. delegation had little public comment, maintaining the low profile it has generally kept at recent annual climate conferences.
This was the first such meeting since the Kyoto Protocol took effect last February, mandating cutbacks in 35 industrialized nations of emissions of carbon dioxide and five other gases by 2012.
A broad scientific consensus agrees that these gases accumulating in the atmosphere -- byproducts of automobile engines, power plants and other fossil fuel-burning industries -- contributed significantly to the past century's global temperature rise of 1 degree Fahrenheit.
Continued warming is melting glaciers worldwide, shrinking the Arctic ice cap and heating up the oceans, raising sea levels, scientists say. They predict major climate disruptions in coming decades.