Humanity faces oblivion if it fails to reach agreement on global warming, Ban Ki Moon, the UN Secretary General, said yesterday as the US and the European Union continued to scuffle over a successor to the ten-year-old Kyoto treaty on climate change.

“The world’s scientists have spoken with one voice: the situation is grim and urgent action is needed,” Mr Ban said at a gathering of 190 countries on the Indonesian island of Bali. “The situation is so desperately serious that any delay could push us past the tipping point, beyond which the ecological, financial and human costs would increase dramatically. We are at a crossroads: one path leads to a comprehensive climate change agreement, the other one to oblivion.”

Scientists and government officials have been meeting on the tropical island since the beginning of last week, but it is over the next three days that the most intense and important negotiations will begin. Environment ministers from around the world, including Hilary Benn, from Britain, will debate a “road map” for a successor to the Kyoto Protocol, the first treaty to impose on its signatories legally binding cuts in greenhouse gases, which expires at the end of 2012.

This week’s meeting will not agree on a successor to the treaty, which was finalised in the ancient capital of Japan ten years ago yesterday.

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It will, however, set parameters for debate and negotiation, and give an important indication of the state of the ongoing struggle between the opposing sides. The governments of the European Union favour strict targets for rich countries to reduce emissions of the gases that cause the Earth’s atmosphere to warm up, while the United States wants to leave out specific figures and insists that the burden must also be borne by developing economies such as China and India.

The draft of the conference document circulating yesterday included “guidelines” calling for rich industrialised countries to cut their emissions by between 25 and 40 per cent by 2020. Such a cut is in keeping with recommendations by the UN scientific panel that to avoid devastating environmental catastrophe global warming must be kept below an average increase of 2C.

“We need this range of reductions by developed countries,” Stavros Dimas, the European Commissioner for Environment, said yesterday. “Science tells us that these reductions are necessary. Logic requires that we listen to science.”

The US delegation has insisted that it will block this, because precise numbers will be the subject of negotiation over the next two years and it does not wish to narrow its options too early. It was because the US failed to ratify the Kyoto Protocol that the treaty will largely fail to achieve its goal: the reduction of greenhouse by an average 5 per cent below 1990 levels by 2012. But much has changed since 1997, when President Clinton gave his support for Kyoto only for it to be blocked by a Republican-controlled Congress.

Now Democrats control Congress, and President Bush, who has been so opposed to fixed carbon-reduction targets, has less than a year left in office. This month the US lost its principal ally in rejecting fixed targets when Kevin Rudd, the newly elected Australian Prime Minister, ratified Kyoto.

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