"If advances in technology can be deployed more widely, then it will really help all the world," Zhou told Reuters at the end of a week-long meeting of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in Bangkok.

The IPCC's latest report -- the third in a series on global warming -- said humans needed to cut greenhouse gas emissions by at least 50 percent in the next 50 years to limit the rise in temperatures to just 2 degrees Celsius.

However, it added that the cost of doing so would only be 0.12 percent of annual global output if governments started to act now by encouraging their businesses and people to produce and use energy more efficiently.

If this was to work, rich countries must not keep new technology ranging from state-of-the-art power stations to solar cells to long-life light bulbs to themselves -- as is now the case, Zhou said.

"There are a lot of barriers to technology transfer," he said.

Zhou said the leadership in China, which could outstrip the United States as the biggest greenhouse gas producer this year, was serious about climate change and would be likely to heed the message in the latest IPCC report.

However, the challenge for the world's most populous nation, which obtains around 70 percent of its energy from coal, would be to find viable alternative sources of energy for its rapidly expanding economy, he said.

Changes would not happen overnight, he said.

"If you want China to use less coal, you have to find alternatives they can use. If the alternative is oil, there will be another 1 billion barrels," Zhou said. "Is the international market prepared for that?"

He also denied suggestions from other delegates during the IPCC conference, which ran into an unscheduled fifth day of negotiations on Friday, that Chinese officials had set out to water down the final report.

"If there's no discussion, it means no one cares. But if there's a lot of discussion, it means they really want to understand," he said.