BANGKOK, Sept 28 (AlertNet) - As climate negotiators prepared to sit down in Bangkok to one of the last major negotiating rounds before Copenhagen, they got a brutal reminder of why the talks matter: Typhoon Ketsana tore into the Philippines, submerging part of Manila and bringing a 40-year record in rainfall.

The resultant floods, brought about by 410mm of rainfall within 24 hours - twice the amount that drenched the United States during Hurricane Katrina in 2005 - have already killed over 140 people and affected 450,000.

Experts say climate change is bringing more unpredictable and severe weather. According to Oxfam, the number of people affected by climate crises is projected to rise to 54 per cent to 375 million over the next six years.

However talks aimed at helping nations find ways to stem climate change and adapt to it remain bogged down in painstaking negotiations over text, threatening chances of an effective deal at Copenhagen in December to replace the now-expiring Kyoto Protocol.

"What happened last Saturday... is happening right under the negotiators' noses," Dinah Fuentesfina from Global Campaign for Climate Action, told reporters on Monday as the Bangkok climate change negotiations get under way.

"These negotiations should remember that it is people's lives and livelihoods that are at stake. People are dying everyday out of natural disasters... out of climate change."

Dinah's organization is part of Climate Action Network, an alliance of 450 non-governmental organizations (NGOs), who are frustrated and impatient by what they see as slow progress in reaching an efficient and binding agreement.

Coffee, sweat and commitment The Bangkok talks opened with a flurry of optimistic and rallying statements from the United Nations and politicians but the NGOs say speeches by world leaders need to be followed by concrete action.

The main task of the delegates in Bangkok is to reduce an unwieldy text of around 180 pages into a shortened and consolidated pact that would replace Kyoto protocol.

In the past three months, the negotiators have managed to cut down only 18 pages, said Greenpeace's Tove Ryding.

"If that is the speed, it's going to take us about two years to get down to those 30 pages that we might actually call an agreement," Ryding told reporters. "That's not fast enough."

Funding, or more accurately, the lack of funding, is another sticking point.

According to the NGOs, at the podium at the U.N. conference centre this morning was a piggy bank in the shape of an elephant, filled with money contributed from communities in Thailand to solve climate change.

"The problem we have is that this money is the only money on the table. That's a shadow hanging over these negotiations," Ryding said.

Tasmeen Essop, WWF's International Climate Policy Advocate, agreed.

"Pittsburgh was in fact, in our opinion, a real dismal failure when it came to the issue of climate finance," she said, referring to the most recent G20 meeting.

Essop, who said developing countries are already acting on climate change measures without financial support from the international world, added, "The ball is firmly in the court of developed nations."

Still, they are confident a deal in Copenhagen is possible. Ryding said, "It's not the options, it's not the elements. We have everything on the table that we need to get a deal. It's the political will that's missing."

And Ryding has a tip to find out whether or not the negotiations are hard at work to hammer out a text for Copenhagen.

"What we need to see is late nights and fights. We need to see them sit there - that's what these people do for a living - and they need to smell like sweat and coffee. If they don't do that, they're not actually at work."

Reuters AlertNet is not responsible for the content of external websites.