The world's top greenhouse gas emitters meet in Paris this week to work out ways to slow global warming with uncertainty about whether the U.S.-backed talks will help or hinder plans for a new U.N. climate treaty. Washington says the April 17-18 meeting, with a workshop on sectoral industrial greenhouse targets on Wednesday, is a step towards agreement by the end of 2008 on curbs by countries that emit 80 percent of the world's greenhouse gases. But many nations are skeptical about President George W. Bush's late conversion to a need for more climate action since the United States is isolated among rich nations in opposing caps on emissions under the U.N.'s existing Kyoto Protocol. "I still think it's helpful," said Yvo de Boer, the head of the U.N. Climate Change Secretariat, of the U.S. track. Paris will be the third meeting since Bush sought talks in 2007 among major emitters such as China, India and the European Union. But there are risks of overlaps between the U.S.-led talks and separate U.N. negotiations among all countries meant to end in 2009 with a new global warming treaty to avert ever more droughts, floods, heatwaves and rising sea levels. De Boer said he sensed that some nations were "a little concerned ... that this (U.S.-led) process doesn't prejudge the outcome" of the wider U.N. negotiations.

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