Whitehall officials are frantically negotiating with their G8 counterparts over the text of the final communiqué.

Yesterday they played down the leak of a draft showing that crucial sentences on climate change were under threat from the White House.

It showed that key phrases on the causes of global warming and ways to address it have been placed in square brackets, indicating that there is a dispute over whether they will appear in the final version.

One sentences under threat is: “Our world is warming”, suggesting that President Bush still challenges mainstream science on the subject and will not accept that there is a problem.

Another sentence in jeopardy is: “We know that the increase [in global warming] is due in large part to human activity”.

The US has also objected to: “[There is] increasingly compelling evidence of climate change, including rising ocean and atmospheric temperatures, retreating ice sheets and glaciers, rising sea levels and changes to ecosystems.

“Inertia in the climate system means that further warming is inevitable.”

The White House wants it to read: “Climate change is a serious long-term challenge that has the potential to affect every part of the globe.”

Negotiators met in London this week to try and hammer out an agreed text for the summit. Government officials said yesterday that there were still three weeks to go and that a firm commitment to address global warming was one of Tony Blair’s top priorities.

“There are multiple versions of texts doing the rounds, but the only one that counts is the one at Gleneagles, so we would urge people to reserve judgement until then,” said a spokeswoman for the Department for the Environment, Farming and Rural Affairs.

Oliver Letwin, the Shadow Environment Secretary, said it would be tragic if the latest leaked document reflected the final version. “Unless the world’s rich nations put together a serious agenda, we will wake up some years from now and realise that the costs of addressing climate change have become almost unbearable.

“We should act now to ensure that change is progressive and affordable.” Campaigners also voiced their disappointment. Catherine Pearce, international climate change campaigner at Friends of the Earth, described the latest draft as disastrous.

“There seems to be no kind of real commitment at all in some of the essential areas. And I think that just goes to show just how the Bush Administration are so completely swallowed up by the oil industry it is really very hard to see the difference between the two,” she told BBC Radio. Sir John Houghton, a former chairman of scientific assessment for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for the UN, said he found the leak very worrying.

He told the BBC: “It is very surprising that the White House is still seemingly listening to misinformation from vested interest lobby groups, rather than to their own leading scientists, and indeed to this shouting from all the world’s leading scientists that they have got to do something.”

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