The scientists and experts working under the United Nations have issued reports this year saying they are 90 percent certain that humans are the cause of climate change and that Earth will suffer enormously without urgent action.

Amid such dire forecasts, the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) began meeting in Bangkok on Monday to devise a masterplan that would reduce the amount of greenhouse gases that are blamed for climate change.

However delegates told AFP it was fanciful to believe all the delegates had the interests of the planet at the top of their agendas.

"We all know the IPCC has become politicised. It's like a battle in there sometimes," one delegate from a poor African nation, who did not want to be named, told AFP.

Peter Lukey, a delegate from South Africa's Department of Environmental Affairs, described the negotiating process as "highly frustrating", as each nation inevitably fights to protect its own economic and political interests.

"Countries that have a strongly established fossil fuel-based economy are going to fight against mitigating against fossil fuel," Lukey said, referring to calls to cut back carbon pollution such as coal and oil.

"Countries that are building their economies on fossil fuel are going to be equally as strong because that has an impact on their future economic growth."

Lukey said the only way forward was to find compromises that suited rich nations as well as poor.

"(But) it's very difficult at these negotiations to try to find that level of compromise and to try to find sustainable solutions that are equitable," he said.

Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the IPCC, acknowledged as much.

"The IPCC doesn't have any muscle, it has grey matter," Pachauri said. "The muscle will have to come from somewhere else."

The WWF and other environmental groups that are also involved in the IPCC process have said repeatedly that saving the planet from the worst impacts of climate change does not require huge economic sacrifice.

"This is affordable. This is only going to cost the world 0.1 percent per year of our GDP (gross domestic product)... it's peanuts," WWF global climate change director Hans Verolme said here.

However, not everyone agrees that cutting greenhouse gas emissions and turning to alternative technologies that pollute less heavily can come that cheaply.

The United States and China, the world's biggest greenhouse gas polluters, refuse to accept any internationally binding caps on their emissions, saying the economic costs would be too great.

This has drawn sharp criticism from the European Union, which has pledged to reduce its carbon dioxide emissions by 20 percent from 1990 levels by 2020.

China meanwhile made it clear it did not want rich nations to dictate how the rising Asian powerhouse should develop its economy after the Europeans and other enjoyed a carbon-heavy ride to prosperity.

"I hope this gathering can produce balanced views, not just the views of the developed countries," Sun Guoshun, a delegate from China's foreign affairs ministry, told AFP.

Nevertheless, delegates agree a consensus will be reached at the end of the IPCC meeting on Friday. The question is how compromised the masterplan will be.

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