U.N. climate talks to test U.S. shifts

By Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent - Analysis

OSLO (Reuters) - Up to 190 nations will start work on a new U.N. climate treaty in Bangkok on Monday, in a test of how far the world has progressed after years of deadlock highlighted by a U.S. outburst about a duck in 2005.

"If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it is a duck," chief U.S. climate negotiator Harlan Watson said in Montreal, denouncing what he called a veiled bid to launch negotiations on a pact to combat global warming.

Opposed to the start of any negotiations, he gathered up his papers and walked out of a late-night United Nations meeting, leaving the other, stunned delegates around the table. He returned only the next day after concessions were made.

Less than three years later, Watson will sit down for the March 31-April 4 meeting in Bangkok with many of the same officials who were in Canada to start negotiations due to end in late 2009 with a tough global treaty to fight climate change.

But questions remain over whether the United States, the only rich country opposed to caps on emissions of greenhouse gases under the U.N.'s Kyoto Protocol, has really changed or is merely being dragged into negotiations.

Bangkok may also give signs about how far developing nations led by China and India are willing to go in rein in their rising emissions, mainly from burning fossil fuels. They worry that any curbs could slow their economic growth.

"I think the U.S. really has changed," Yvo de Boer, head of the U.N. Climate Change Secretariat in Bonn, told Reuters. He also praised willingness by developing nations to act.

He said President George W. Bush had come to office in 2001 saying scientists disagreed about whether climate change was a threat but now saw it as a serious problem.