But two years of negotiations set in motion by the so-called Bali Action Plan have fallen terribly short, failing to bridge a rift between rich and poor nations on how to share out the twin burdens of slashing carbon pollution and coping with its potentially devastating impacts.

Hopes for a legally binding agreement by year's end, once high, have faded to the vanishing point.

"It is physically impossible to finalise all the details of a treaty in Copenhagen," UN climate chief Yvo de Boer said this week.

Diplomats have instead set their sights on a political accord "that will probably come on the last night" of the December 7-18 conference, predicted a senior European negotiator who asked not to be named.

A substantive deal in Copenhagen must have four cornerstones, said de Boer, who is Executive Secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

To keep heat-trapping greenhouse gases at safe levels, developed countries must commit to deep cuts in CO2 output over the next 40 years, while major emerging economies -- especially China and India -- must agree to sharply curtail the carbon-intensity of their growth.

UN climate scientists have said global emissions should peak no later than 2015, and must be halved by 2050.

But each side, waiting for the other to commit first, has been reluctant to put numbers on the table that could achieve these goals.

The other cornerstones are financial: how much money rich nations historically to blame for warming will give poor ones to cut emissions and adapt to inevitable climate change, and how those dollars, euros and yen will be disbursed.

"Finance is the key to a deal in Copenhagen. Money is the oil that encourages commitment and drives action," de Boer told journalists by phone.

But what he described as one of two "major opportunities" to make headway on finance before December was lost on Friday when divided European leaders failed -- despite a pledge last year -- to say at the close of a two-day summit how much the 27-nation bloc would cough up.

Central European countries led by Poland say their lagging economies should not be forced to shoulder the burden of developing countries elsewhere.

The other opportunity is a meeting of G20 finance ministers in St. Andrews, Scotland on November 6 and 7.

The UNFCCC says climate change costs for poor and emerging nations could run into the hundreds of billions of dollars per annum within a decade, and has called for a "quick start" down payment of at least 10 billion in Copenhagen.

The European Commission estimates that developing nations will need 100 billion euros annually between 2013 and 2020, and five-to-seven billion per year before then.

Up to now, the EU has taken the lead on climate change by unilaterally promising to cut its own CO2 pollution by 20 percent before 2020, and by 30 percent if other rich countries follow suit.

But the inability to lay money on the table threatens the bloc's "moral leadership" on the issue, the senior diplomat said with chagrin.

The talks next week in Barcelona are not high-octane enough to punch through these big issues, and will focus instead on "narrowing down" the rough draft of what could be the Copenhagen accord, de Boer said.

For the moment, however, the nearly 200-page document is a fragmented and contradictory laundry list of positions.

If negotiators do not succeed in beating it into shape, host nation Denmark could submit its own text to environment ministers in Copenhagen, diplomats have said.

Any major breakthroughs ahead of the December conference are more likely to come in a flurry of informal and bilateral meetings over the next five weeks.

Besides the G20 gathering of finance ministers, Denmark will bring together ministers from 30 key countries for a third round of the so-called "Greenland Dialogue" on the eve of the Barcelona talks.

A Sino-US summit of the world's top two carbon polluters -- which together account for 40 percent of CO2 emissions -- is scheduled in Beijing on November 17.

Other key meetings include an APEC summit of Asia-Pacific nations on November 15 and 16, and a visit by India's Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to Washington the following week.

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