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BALI, Indonesia (AP) ― Government leaders started arriving Sunday for what is expected to be lengthy and contentious negotiations on how best to combat global warming, which has the potential to cause devastating sea level rises, send millions further into poverty and cause mass extinction of animals.

Delegates from more than 180 nations will attempt to jump-start talks during the Dec. 3-14 meeting on how to replace the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012. They also will consider whether cuts in carbon emissions should be mandatory or voluntary, how to reduce deforestation and ways to help poor countries, which are expected to be hit hardest by severe droughts, floods and violent storms brought on by rising temperatures.

"There is a very clear signal from the scientific community that we need to act on this issue," said Yvo de Boer, the general secretary of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change. "We have to turn the trend of global emissions in the next 10 to 15 years ... The political answer has to come now."

That 1997 pact required 36 industrial nations to reduce carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases. It set an average target of a 5 percent cut below 1990 levels by 2012 for emissions from power plants and other industrial, agricultural and transportation sources.

A new agreement must be concluded within two years to give countries time to ratify it and allow a smooth transition to a new regime when the Kyoto terms expire.

The European Union wants the next agreement to limit global temperature rises at 3.6 degrees F above the levels of the preindustrial era. The EU, Canada and Japan have endorsed a 50 percent emissions reduction by 2050 to meet that goal and avoid the worst affects of global warming.

The United States, which along with Australia refused to sign Kyoto, says it wants to launch negotiations but balked at mandatory emissions cuts. China and India, meanwhile, have said any measures impinging on their booming economies and efforts to lift their people from poverty were unacceptable.

Together, the United States, China and India will account for more than half the world's total carbon emissions by 2015, said Fatih Birol, chief economist at the International Energy Agency, stressing the importance of getting them all onboard.

On Wednesday, U.S. President George W. Bush sought to deflect criticism that Washington was not doing enough as he announced a final Energy Department report that showed U.S. emissions of carbon dioxide, a leading greenhouse gas, declined by 1.5 percent last year while the economy grew.

"Energy security and climate change are two of the important challenges of our time. The United States takes these challenges seriously," Bush said in a statement. "This puts us well ahead of the goal I set in 2002."

Still, the United States will find itself isolated at the conference, given that Australian Prime Minister-elect Kevin Rudd, whose party swept to power in general elections just one week ago, immediately put signing the Kyoto pact at the top of his international agenda.

Last month in Spain, a Nobel Prize-winning U.N. network of scientists issued a capstone report after six years of study saying that carbon and other heat-trapping "greenhouse gas" emissions must stabilize by 2015 and then decline.

Without action, they said, temperatures will rise, changing the world.

The Arctic ice cap melted this year by the greatest extent on record. Scientists say oceans are losing some ability to absorb atmospheric carbon dioxide, the chief industrial emission blamed for warming. And the world's power plants, cars and jetliners are spewing out carbon at an unprecedented rate.

At best, analysts believe, Bali could lead to a two-year negotiation in which the United States under a new administration, the Europeans and other industrial nations commit to deepening blanket emissions cuts. And they say major developing countries could agree to enshrine some national policies - China's auto emission standards, for example, or energy-efficiency targets for power plants - as international obligations.

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