Reporting from the climate conference in Mexico during the second week, Associated Press correspondent Charles Hanley says a spirit of compromise seems to have settled over the conference, as negotiators look for agreement on secondary tools for coping with global warming. His full report is available on Yahoo News.
"There were heated discussions at Copenhagen. Here the atmosphere is relatively mild," China's climate chief, Xie Zhenhua, told reporters.
Underlining the climate challenge, the U.N. Environment Program on Dec. 6 reported on the impact of global warming in Latin America.
"The effects of climate change in the region are already significant," it said, citing a surge in extreme climatic events, with a sharp rise in the number of people affected by extreme temperatures, forest fires, droughts, storms and floods growing from 5 million over the 1970s to more than 40 million in 2000-2009.
It also said that malaria and other mosquito-borne diseases that 40 years ago afflicted just a few countries in the Caribbean and Latin America can now be found, with warming, in the vast majority.
