An outbreak of bitter recrimination has erupted among politicians and delegates following the drawing up of the Copenhagen accord for tackling climate change.

The deal, finally hammered out early yesterday, had been expected to commit countries to deep cuts in carbon emissions. In the end, it fell short of this goal after China fought hard against strong US pressure to submit to a regime of international monitoring.

The Chinese prime minister, Wen Jiabao, walked out of the conference at one point, and sent a lowly protocol officer to negotiate with Barack Obama. In the end, a draft agreement put forward by China - and backed by Brazil, India and African nations - commits the world to the broad ambition of preventing global temperatures from rising above 2C. Crucially, however, it does not force any nation to make specific cuts.

"For the Chinese, this was our sovereignty and our national interest," said Xie Zhenhua, head of China's delegation.

After two weeks of international deadlock and an all-night marathon negotiating session that produced a thin and toothless accord, the biggest climate talks in history devolved from "Hopenhagen" to "Nopenhagen".

The Copenhagen Accord - brokered at the last minute by Barack Obama, the US president, with China, India, Brazil and South Africa - did not receive universal support from the 193 countries participating in the climate summit.

The accord, which gutted a comprehensive agreement to pay poor countries to protect their forests, since the mass cutting of trees accounts for 20 per cent of global emissions, is not binding and does not have a set date for capping carbon emissions.

It provoked reactions from fury to despair.

Lumumba Stanislaus Dia-ping, Sudan's chief negotiator, compared it to the Holocaust, while Hugo Chavez, the Venezuelan president, referenced the sulfur of hell and suggested that Obama was Satan.

Ian Fry of Tuvalu, the drowning island-nation that has become the poster country for the perils of rising sea levels, likened the accord to "being offered 30 pieces of silver to betray our people and our future".

What a disaster. The climate summit in Copenhagen has failed because of the hardball politicking of the United States, China and several other countries -- and because people just can't seem to fathom how catastrophic climate change will be. They probably won't have long to wait before things become a bit clearer.

The global climate summit in Copenhagen has failed. There will be no concrete goals for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Industrialized countries extended no concrete offers of hope to developing countries. Newly industrializing countries, such as India and China, can continue to grow their economies without any checks and balances for the climate.

In the run-up to the conference, scientists, environmentalists and politicians alike called it one of the most important in history. But now it's just a missed opportunity. Likewise, it might just be one of the last of its kind in the battle against climate change.

It took governments from around the world 17 years to come together for this summit in Copenhagen -- 17 years of talking, seemingly endless negotiations, ideological debates, delays and maneuvering. It's been 17 years since the first climate-related meeting, held in Rio in 1992. It's been 17 years of searching for solutions to confront the threats resulting from climate change. And this is what we're left with. Many of the hopes that had been building up since 1992 have now been shattered.

The United Nations climate change conference ended in recrimination yesterday without reaching a clear deal on emissions targets.

After a stormy session in Copenhagen, in which a vociferous anti-American minority brought the talks close to collapse, most countries agreed simply to "take note" of a watered-down agreement brokered by President Barack Obama and supported by Britain.

This accord -- which had been drawn up in discussions with China and 30 or so other countries on Friday -- sets a target of limiting global warming to a maximum of 2C above pre-industrial times.

Above this temperature, scientists say, the world would start to experience dangerous changes, including floods, droughts and rising seas.

Dec. 19 (Bloomberg) -- U.S. President Barack Obama called a climate change agreement with China and about 25 other nations an "unprecedented" move to slow global warming. Environmental groups and at least five developing nations called it a failure.

The accord, which pushes off signing a treaty for at least a year, is "a first step," Obama said yesterday before leaving Copenhagen, where he spent 14 hours cobbling together the agreement in meetings with world leaders, and addressing 8,000 envoys from 193 nations.

Delegates from the countries failed to reach consensus on the accord today after discussing it through the night, agreeing instead to "take note" of the document, or recognize that it exists. The agreement seeks voluntary cuts in greenhouse-gas emissions that scientists blame for global warming without binding countries to take action.

"The meeting was a disaster," Lars-Erik Liljelund, the director general of Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt's office, said in an interview today. "The process needs to be changed because if we continue like this, we won't be any further a year from now."

The most progressive US president in a generation comes to the most important international meeting since the Second World War and delivers a speech so devoid of substance that he might as well have made it on speaker-phone from a beach in Hawaii. His aides argue in private that he had no choice, such is the opposition on Capitol Hill to any action that could challenge the dominance of fossil fuels in American life. And so the nation that put a man on the Moon can't summon the collective will to protect men and women back here on Earth from the consequences of an economic model and lifestyle choice that has taken on the mantle of a religion.

Then a Chinese premier who is in the process of converting his Communist nation to that new faith (high-carbon consumer capitalism) takes such umbrage at Barack Obama's speech that he refuses to meet - sulking in his hotel room, as if this were a teenager's house party instead of a final effort to stave off the breakdown of our biosphere.

Late in the evening, the two men meet and cobble together a collection of paragraphs that they call a "deal", although in reality it has all the meaning and authority of a bus ticket, not that it stops them signing it with great solemnity.

The International Organization for Migration warned on Friday the world must prepare for a mass increase in climate-linked migration as leaders battled to save a deal on global warming in Copenhagen.

"Climate change and environmental degradation are already triggering migration or displacement all over the planet," the IOM warned on the critical last day of the Denmark summit, which coincides with International Migrants Day.

Right now, "it is the world's poorest countries that are bearing the brunt" of the migration, said the Geneva-based body, calling for leaders to make "greater efforts, beyond Copenhagen," to tackle the complex issue.