UN pushes ahead on 2015 climate deal after marathon

UN members pressed ahead Sunday with a vision for a historic pact to defeat climate change by adopting a format for national pledges to cut Earth-warming greenhouse gases.
      
At a marathon conference in Lima, they also approved a blueprint to guide negotiations for the deal due to be sealed in Paris in December 2015.
      
But agreement came after a bitter dispute flared anew, requiring major compromise that campaigners said pointed to a mountain of work ahead.
      
"The document is approved," Peru's Environment Minister Manuel Pulgar-Vidal announced in the small hours, to wild cheers from exhausted delegates.
      
The annual round of talks under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) had been scheduled to end on Friday evening, after 12 days.
      
Instead, it overran by 32 hours, an exceptional delay even in the tradition of the notoriously fractious UNFCCC meetings.
      
The hard-fought agreement -- dubbed the Lima Call for Climate Action -- sets down the foundations for what is envisioned to be the most ambitious agreement in environmental history.
      
Due to take effect in 2020, it would for the first time bind all the world's nations into a single arena for curbing heat-trapping carbon gases that drive dangerous climate change.
      
Its aim is to limit global warming to two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) over pre-industrial levels, averting potentially catastrophic damage to Earth's climate system by the turn of the century.
      
At its core is a roster where all nations will enter voluntary commitments to reduce their carbon emissions.
      
But the Lima deal came at the price of a compromise to bridge a deep rift between rich...