The Paris climate talks have entered a period of diplomatic attrition, with round the clock negotiations inching towards a deal without forcing decisions in a way that causes a walk-out or breaks down the goodwill the French presidency has created.  After the French released the previous draft text Wednesday night, countries responded in a formal negotiating session until midnight and then met through the night until Thursday morning in two less formal meetings known as indabas (a Zulu word for meeting).  Each indaba had seats for about 80 negotiators, with more crowding in at the back. One, chaired by French foreign minister Laurent Fabius met until 5am Thursday. A second, chaired by the Peruvian environment minister Manuel Pulgar-Vidal met until 8am.  According to veteran negotiators the purpose of the indabas is primarily to ensure that every country feels their views have been heard.  “They spend about 80% of their time repeating their previous positions, maybe 10% outlining new positions and only about 10% of the time compromising,” said a negotiator who participated in one of the meetings.  US secretary of state John Kerry turned up at the Fabius-chaired meeting around 2am and had what observers described as an “animated” discussion with US climate change envoy Todd Stern at the back of the room for about 20 minutes, possibly about separate informal talks on the issue of “loss and damage” - the idea that the agreement should recognise some countries will suffer irreparable harm from climate change. The US is insistent any words about loss and damage should not suggest liability or compensation or open any possibility of legal action against US companies.  Australia was represented by officials. Foreign minister Julie Bishop was on call but spent the night hosting a dinner for Australian business and environmental leaders attending the conference.  The French presidency and the experts from the United Nations spent Thursday once again carefully paring back the very many areas of disagreement to further distill the big political issues that it is hoped will form the basis of the final trade-off deal.  A group called Parisagreement.org has analysed this task by counting the numbers of brackets - indicating disagreement. When the Paris meeting began there were 1,609 sets of brackets. In the Wednesday text there was 361.  But the key issues have not changed since the beginning of the conference 11 days ago and remain unresolved.  Alix Mazounie with RAC France acknowledged the lack of real progress.  “This process, however good, has not yet succeeded in dealing with all the crunch issues. The Paris ambition mechanism, the loss and damage language, and scaling up commitments by 2018—these issues all need to get sorted,” she said  And Alex Hanafi of the Environmental Defence Fund said countries “have got to get transparency right first. You can’t have effective compliance without information on what countries are actually doing, no matter what is written down on paper.”
Negotiators from governments around the world continue to work to iron out their differences over a draft text of the COP21 agreement to stop dangerous global warming