UNITED NATIONS — World leaders gathered here for a global summit meeting on climate change made modest proposals on Tuesday for combating the problem, underscoring the way domestic political battles still trump what United Nations officials had hoped would be a sense of global urgency.

The negotiations for a new international agreement to curb emissions of greenhouse gases have stalled, making an agreement in Copenhagen by December difficult. In calling the conference, Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations secretary general, asked heads of state and government both in public and in private to set aside national concerns and become “global leaders.”

In speech after speech, presidents and prime ministers of countries large and small spoke with soaring promises about the importance of confronting the problem for future generations. But when it came down to the nuts-and-bolts promises of what they were prepared to do in the next decade, experts and analysts were disappointed that there were no bold new proposals, particularly from the United States.

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