How climate negotiations proceed: just like an action movie

LE BOURGET, France (AP) — With world leaders back home, it's time for the hardcore climate negotiators to work on the more mundane guts of a deal.

For the next two days negotiators will be working to get the less controversial subjects finished and explore possible compromises on the bigger sticking points, all before work gets kicked up to higher levels.

The lower-level negotiators have a Thursday night deadline to come up with language for a new text of a deal that narrows the options to something the big guns start with, according to negotiations experts.

Jennifer Morgan, global climate program director for World Resources Institute, said the thousands of lower-level negotiators are in smaller groups where they have to narrow options on each issue from, say, six to two for the higher-level officials to peruse.

Purvis gave an example in 2008 of an issue that boiled into public worries, but was solved by the insertion of a single comma — "a magic comma" — in the language of the deal.