Copenhagen Summit Ends in Climate Deal

COPENHAGEN (AP) -- The historic U.N. climate talks in Copenhagen ended Saturday after a 31-hour negotiating marathon, narrowly avoiding collapse by accepting a compromise that gives billions to poor nations to deal with global warming but does not require the world's major polluters to make deeper cuts in their greenhouse gas emissions.

Two weeks of wrangling exposed sharp divisions between rich and poor nations -- and even among major greenhouse-gas emitters like China and the United States -- on how to fight global warming. Yet in the end, nearly all 193 nations at the U.N. climate conference agreed to a deal brokered by President Barack Obama that points toward deeper emissions cuts for rich nations, but without mandatory limits.

Obama's successful 11th-hour bargaining Friday with China, India, Brazil and South Africa -- the world's key developing nations -- sets the stage for future cooperation between developed and developing nations.

But the resulting "Copenhagen Accord" was protested by several nations that demanded deeper emissions cuts by the industrialized world and felt excluded from the major-nation bargaining process.

Obama's day of hectic diplomacy in the snowy Danish capital, where more than 110 presidents and premiers had gathered for a rare climate summit, produced a document promising that rich nations would provide $30 billion in emergency climate aid to poor nations in the next three years, and set a goal of eventually channeling $100 billion a year to them by 2020.

The accord includes a method for verifying each nation's reductions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases -- a key demand by Washington, because China has resisted international efforts to monitor its voluntary actions.