UN climate talks adjourn after modest gains

Delegates at UN climate talks in Poland said the deals they agreed to would lead to further advances in 2015. The Warsaw summit lasted two weeks and ended Saturday with agreement on broad outlines for an eventual treaty on worldwide reductions of global-warming emissions. "I think this is what they needed to move the ball forward, even if you can't say that it provided a lot of new ambition," Jennifer Morgan, director of the climate and energy program at the World Resources Institute, told The New York Times. Delegates saw the agreements as building momentum toward the 2015 summit in Paris aimed at reviving the controversial Kyoto Protocol. The Times said the Warsaw meeting was held in the shadow of the deadly Philippines typhoon, which spotlighted the issue of "climate justice," in which developed nations are held responsible for environmental damage linked to climate change. A compromise was fashioned under which the idea of a mechanism for determining damages was inserted to an existing climate treaty for the time being and will be reviewed in 2016. Rene Orellana, a member of the Bolivian delegation, told the Times: "It is important that the loss and damage structure has finally been created. There's a baby now, and we have to give him enough time to grow."