Climate: the third day, the Durban conference still hopes an agreement

Climate negotiations played overtime Saturday afternoon in Durban (South Africa) to extract an action agenda for the coming years to curb global warming and its devastating announced.Cases in the corridors, workers unscrew the hand stands and removing panels, large entrance hall which plays almost deserted, or almost alone, a man at the piano: the Durban Conference Centre gave an amazing show after 12 days of intense activity with delegates from 194 countries.
Number of ministers, negotiators or NGO activists were leaving to catch a plane, raising questions about the possibility of approving - plenary - a possible agreement in the evening.
The last text under discussion proposes to commit to an agreement involving all countries to be adopted in 2015. The date of its entry into force and its legal nature ("protocol" or "other legal instrument"), however, remained unclear.
The objective of the international community is to limit the rise in global temperature to 2 ° C to avoid runaway climate machine.
"We are now, for reasons of time, in an extremely critical situation," said the German Minister of the Environment, Norbert Röttgen while the conference was originally scheduled to end Friday night.
"We risk failure," added, echoing the French Minister for Ecology Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet.
Many voices questioned the effectiveness of the strategy of the South African presidency of the conference accusing him lack a lack of direction of tempo.
"Have you ever read Sartre's No Exit?
A meeting with key players in the negotiations began in the early afternoon, but no information is filtered, including Chinese and American negotiators out without comment.
"The bottom line is that people are sitting and talking is what is happening," said Tosi Mpanu-Mpanu, chairman of Africa (54 countries), making its way among the journalists gathered outside the room.
The launch of a "road map" towards a global agreement is the condition imposed by European countries to take on new commitments under the Kyoto Protocol and thus keep him alive.
Only legally binding treaty on climate, whose first commitment period ends late 2012, Kyoto is a highly symbolic for developing countries. Its collapse would be a very negative signal two years after the psychodrama of the Copenhagen summit.
The draft text also refers, for the first time, the need to increase the level of ambition of commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, insufficient to date. According to a study presented this week in Durban, the world has embarked on the path of an increase of 3.5 ° of the thermometer world away from the target of 2 ° C.
Faced with uncertainty about the ultimate outcome of current negotiations, some delegates raised the possibility of a suspension of negotiations as was the case in 2000 at the climate conference in The Hague.
"Have you ever read" No Exit "by Sartre? I'm starting to feel like this after two weeks in the conference center," sighed Twit Kelly Rigg, Head of Global Campaign for Climate Action, a broad coalition of NGOs.