By Robin Pomeroy

THE HAGUE (Reuters) - The United States and European Union faced international outrage on Sunday after triggering the collapse of U.N. climate talks and leaving the fight against global warming in disarray.

Activists and poor nations poured scorn on the failure of the gas-guzzling richest countries to stop squabbling over the cost of cleaning the planet and unite to tackle climate change.

"The failure of these talks is a disaster. No words can truly express our anger," said the Friends of the Earth group, describing the chaotic breakdown of the talks on Saturday as a fiasco.

Experts said failure to cut emissions of greenhouse gases would bring more storms and floods of the kind that ravaged parts of Asia and Australia last week and southern Africa and Venezuela one year ago.

"Time is not running out. It has run out," said Tommy Remengesau, president-elect of Palau, one of the Pacific islands most vulnerable to rising sea levels.

"We now need concrete technical support," Remengesau said. "We are all citizens of this earth and we share a common responsibility to care for it," said Teleke Lauti of Tuvalu.

The talks tried to agree on steps to implement a pact reached in Kyoto, Japan, in 1997 calling for a five percent average cut in developed nations' 1990 levels of emissions by 2010.

COMPROMISE DITCHED AT 11TH HOUR

But delegates said a compromise deal on steps to implement Kyoto hatched by some EU countries and Washington had been rejected at the 11th hour by the broad membership of the 15-nation EU.

The Sierra Club campaigning group said the United States bore the greatest responsibility for solving the global warming problem because it was the world's top polluter.

"The U.S. emits almost a quarter of global warming pollution despite having only four percent of the world's population. While other countries are not blameless, the U.S. deserves special recognition as the world's only superpower and biggest polluter."

French Environment Minister Dominique Voynet said that if negotiators had had a day more, or even just half a day, they might have sealed an agreement.

She denied the Kyoto process was dead or a failure and delegates said talks would probably resume in May in Bonn.

Environmentalists replied that a combination of U.S. intransigence and cumbersome EU procedures had exposed poorer nations to the risk of more disease, hunger, homelessness and dispossession from increasingly erratic weather.

"I am very disappointed. We have not lived up to the expectations of the outside world," said conference chairman Jan Pronk.

Many delegates urged a resumption in coming weeks, but U.S. officials said Washington stood ready to resume negotiations only at some point in the coming year, a possible reflection of disarray at home over the unresolved U.S. presidential election.

The EU-U.S. dispute was mainly over a U.S. plan to allow developed nations to count carbon dioxide soaked up by forests, so-called carbon sinks, against emissions reduction targets.

Washington, backed by Australia, Canada and Japan, says it could not reach its targets without such methods. Opponents say the plan might actually lead to an increase in global emissions.