Poznan - The UN climate summit has ended with delegates taking very different views on how much it has achieved.

    Western delegates said progress here had been encouraging, but environment groups said rich countries had not shown enough ambition.

    Developing nations were angry that more money was not put forward to protect against climate impacts.

    The meeting is the halfway point on a two-year process aimed at reaching a deal in Copenhagen by the end of 2009.

    As envisaged at last year's conference in Bali, that agreement is supposed to have two major elements - an expanded Kyoto Protocol-style deal committing industrialised countries to deeper emission cuts in the mid-term, perhaps by 2020, and a longer-term agreement encompassing all countries.

    "The conference enabled us to make real progress on every topic on the Bali roadmap," said Martin Bursik, Environment Minister of the Czech Republic, which assumes the EU presidency in January.

    "All the elements exist for us to reach an efficient and equitable agreement in Copenhagen."

    But the comments of Tim Jones of the World Development Movement summed up the feelings of many groups campaigning for environmental protection and poverty alleviation.

    "There has been disappointingly little progress on the agreement reached last year in Bali," he said.

    "Yet again the rich countries, who carry the historical responsibility for climate change, have failed to offer sufficient cuts."

    Poznan, Poland - The United States and other rich nations must pledge by the end of next year specific targets for cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 to win agreement on a U.N. climate pact, the UN's top climate official said on Tuesday.

    Some analysts say that President-elect Barack Obama may not be ready to set formal emissions targets for 2020 within a year, and that economic recession could delay an end-2009 deadline by 190 nations for agreement on a new UN global warming pact.

    "We have to have numbers on the table from industrialized countries (by the end of 2009) otherwise the other dominoes won't fall," Yvo de Boer, head of the U.N. Climate Change Secretariat said during December 1-12 talks on global warming.

    Poor nations such as China and India would not sign up for more action to slow their rising emissions, mainly from burning fossil fuels, without leadership from the rich, he told a news conference during U.N. talks of 11,000 delegates in Poznan.

    And he gave a one-word answer - "Yes" - when asked if he would rate the negotiations a failure if they set no 2020 greenhouse cuts for rich nations to succeed 2012 goals set by the existing Kyoto Protocol.

    A U.N. official said de Boer's remarks covered the United States, even though President George W. Bush kept the country out of Kyoto. Bush said Kyoto was too costly and wrongly excluded 2012 targets for developing nations.

    But de Boer also cautioned against too much ambition for a new global deal due to be agreed in Copenhagen next year, saying that many details of a new pact could be worked out later.

    Former Vice President Al Gore-now a Nobel Prize winner and the world's most prominent environmentalist-isn't looking for another job in Washington. But his eloquent warnings about the dangers of global climate change have obviously helped shape the priorities of the incoming Obama administration. Gore sat down with NEWSWEEK's Fareed Zakaria recently to talk about a bailout for Detroit, the greening of China and the elusive promise of "clean coal." Excerpts:

    Zakaria: Would you bail out the carmakers?

    Gore: Whatever assistance might be forthcoming should be focused on speeding the changes that are absolutely essential to ensure that our companies are competitive in the global marketplace. When I was vice president, I initiated a program called the Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicles. The federal government invested over a billion dollars in partnership with the Big Three to focus on the accelerated development of advanced high-efficiency vehicles. But as soon as they felt they were off the hook at the end of 2000, they pulled the plug and walked away.

    How would you do it? Would you provide loans but force the automakers to raise fuel efficiency or speed up hybrid production?

    I think the whole industry should be transformed. It's really tragic that General Motors, for example, allowed Toyota to get a seven-year head start on the hybrid drivetrain in the Prius. I personally believe that the U.S. auto fleet should make a transition as quickly as possible toward plug-in hybrid electric vehicles.

    Barack Obama and congressional leaders are preparing rapid legislation to cut US emissions that cause global warming and to kick-start a clean energy revolution.

    Two bills are to be introduced as soon as the president-elect takes office in January. One will provide $15 billion (£10.1 billion) a year to encourage innovation in renewable energies as part of a thorough overhaul of the highly polluting US energy system. The other will pave the way to setting up a system of tradable emissions permits to combat global warming. The moves, to be taken quicker than expected, will galvanise top-level international negotiations on a new climate treaty that reopens in Poznan, Poland, next week, and will greatly boost attempts to bring in a "green new deal" as the best way out of the financial crisis.

    Yesterday - as exclusively predicted in The Independent on Sunday three weeks ago - Mr Obama took the first steps towards creating green jobs, a crucial element of the proposed deal, as a top priority for his forthcoming administration. In his weekly radio address, he announced that he has ordered his advisers to produce an economic recovery plan that will create 2.5 million new jobs in two years by building windfarms, making solar panels and fuel-efficient cars, as well as in modernising schools and re-building crumbling infrastructure.

    Senior Democratic sources added that the president-elect had picked Timothy Geithner, head of the New york Federal Reserve Bank to be his Treasury Secretary. "We are facing a sea change," said Barbara Boxer, the Democratic head of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, of the two new bills. "Instead of denial we will have resolve; instead of procrastination we will have action. The time to start is now."

    The world's oceans are becoming acidic more quickly than climate change models predict, according to scientists who claim it will have a dramatic impact on marine ecosystems.

    Water samples collected around an island in the eastern Pacific over the past eight years showed seawater had acidified more than 20 times faster than scientists expected. The effect could be devastating for shellfish and other crustaceans, because acidic waters dissolve calcium carbonate used by the organisms to make their protective shells.

    Oceans absorb about a third of the carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere by human activities. When the gas dissolves in water, it forms carbonic acid, which alters the ocean's delicate chemical balance.

    The increasing acidification of the oceans is likely to have impacts that run throughout the marine ecosystem, because the organisms most affected are at the bottom of the foodchain.

    Timothy Wootton, a biologist at the University of Chicago, led a team of researchers who analysed the acidity, salinity and temperature of water around Tatoosh Island off the northwestern coast of Washington state.

    Over eight years, the pH level of the water fell by 0.36 to about 8.1, more than 23 times more than the predicted fall of just 0.015 points. Water is neutral if its pH is seven, and becomes more acidic as the pH falls below that.