"I am heartened to see corporate leadership in this area," said Amjad Abdulla of the Maldives, chief negotiator for the alliance in Bonn.
Bob Ward, policy and communications director at London's Grantham Research Institute, said the news that warming had been greater than previously thought should cause governments currently meeting in Bonn to act with renewed urgency and lay foundations for a strong agreement at the pivotal climate conference in Paris this December.
Many Soviet leaders responsible for the "miracle of 1990" – like the former Soviet ambassador to Bonn, Valentin Falin – have complained bitterly that Mikhail Gorbachev naively trusted the west and gave away so much for so little.
Further work is needed to ratchet up commitments, said a report of the Climate Action Tracker (CAT) initiative, issued on the sidelines of the Bonn talks.
There again, roundthings happily announces: "There's no particular 'initiative' in Bonn … it seems to me that Bonn is a more pleasant place to live exactly where the changes are most remote".
A total of 21 countries provide representatives to Unesco's World Heritage committee, and the group is set to gather in the German city of Bonn in June to decide, among other things, whether the reef should be put on the endangered list.
The hour-long grilling from developing nations such as China and Brazil came at a meeting in Bonn which is as part of a mutual assessment process ahead of a conference in Paris in December where countries hope to sign a global agreement on climate action.
Senior officials from almost 200 nations are meeting in the German city of Bonn this week to prepare for a summit in Paris in late 2015 at which governments aim to agree a deal to slow global warming.
United Nations member states are gathered in Bonn until Friday to sculpt a world climate pact they have agreed to ink at the global conference in Paris.
The challenge for the negotiators at Bonn will be to come up with some sort of agreement that keeps the Kyoto process alive.
At that time, Jan Pronk, the Dutch environment minister (who was chairman of the previous failed talks in The Hague last November, and who will be the chairman of the final round of the "Kyoto process", due to be held in Bonn in July) has promised to unveil a new proposal for compromise.
