Global Warming Talks Make Little Headway : Environment: Work on international agreement is stalled by 10 days of procedural wrangling.

The first round of a monumental effort to write an international agreement to combat global warming ended here late Thursday after 10 days of tedious deliberation and disappointingly little to show for it.

Meeting under the auspices of the United Nations, delegates from 89 countries had hoped to produce a rough draft of a global warming convention, but the session bogged down in procedural wrangling. Delegates got no further than approving negotiating guidelines and the mandate for two working groups that will now bear most of the burden for drafting the treaty.

Only an eleventh-hour compromise between the United States and India prevented the session from ending in deadlock.

In a meeting that went on until the wee hours of Thursday morning, Indian delegates insisted that committee instructions make it explicit that developing countries will be compensated for economic sacrifices required of them by a global warming agreement.

U.S. officials do not dispute that financial and technological assistance will have to be provided to Third World countries that are required to limit exploitation of their vast rain forests. But India’s position was taken as a demand for a blank check at the outset of the negotiations.

After two days of dispute, during which Indian delegates got updated instructions from New Delhi and American negotiators consulted with the White House, compromise language was finally worked out hours before adjournment.

The blueprint calls for the signing of at least an outline agreement in June, 1992. Three more negotiating sessions are planned this year, two in Geneva and one in Nairobi, Kenya.

“We are happy that we have been able to agree to begin,” said Robert A. Reinstein, chief U.S. negotiator. “We have a very long way to go, and these last two weeks have demonstrated just how difficult it is going to be.”

Preoccupied with the bureaucratic arrangements, the session in the Washington suburbs did not come to grips with the question of whether protocols to put teeth in the agreement will be signed at the same time a framework is completed.

The United States wants to negotiate the specifics after the signing of the framework accord next year, but environmentalists and many European delegates insist that this would delay effective action against the global warming threat by years.

While the manifestations of global warming are still hotly debated, a scientific consensus has emerged that the Earth’s natural “greenhouse effect” is being accelerated by pollutants such as carbon dioxide, methane and chlorofluorocarbons. Some projections indicate that in the next century the Earth will be five to 10 degrees warmer than it was before the Industrial Revolution.

Although the United States battled to keep specific language on Third World assistance out of the charge to the working groups, it yielded to pressure that wording on carbon dioxide emissions be specifically included.

Most of the industrial countries of the world have set their own targets for reducing carbon dioxide emissions, but the Bush Administration has refused to join in, claiming the need for more research.

Rather than talking of carbon dioxide, the Administration has insisted that the negotiating instructions use the more general term “greenhouse gases.” There was concern that if the gases were lumped together, the United States would attempt to use overall reductions to avoid serious cuts in carbon dioxide.

After long debate and consultation with White House Chief of Staff John H. Sununu, the U.S. delegation earlier this week conceded to language instructing the principal working group to consider reductions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.

Initially, some 130 countries had been expected for the meeting. But the invitations--and travel assistance to delegates from some developing countries--were sent out a month later than expected.

Some environmentalists and visiting delegates privately suggested that the United States had also gone out of its way to downplay the session, even though it took place in the United States at the personal invitation of President Bush.

Meeting in a remote, newly developed area in Washington’s outer suburbs, they suggested, discouraged both press coverage and attendance by some Third World countries.