UNITED NATIONS — Trust Britain, a country that has elevated weather-related small talk to an art form, to turn a debate on climate issues into a stormy clash of international sensibilities.

As it tends to do, the U.N. Security Council produced a lot of hot air yesterday as it held, for the first time in its history, a “debate on energy, climate, and security.” Contrary to some forecasts, however, not all of the 15 council members and 31 nonmembers who participated in the speech marathon were happy that it took place.

The British foreign secretary, Margaret Beckett, who traveled to the United Nations to preside over yesterday’s meeting, was adamant that the council, where Britain is serving as rotating president this month, must deal with climate change.

Secretary-General Ban gave the council several “alarming, though not alarmist” scenarios under which climate change would “have implications for peace and security.” But China, Russia, and a voting bloc of poorer countries known as the Group of 77 raised objections to the council holding debates on climate issues. “We are lukewarm because of where it is discussed,” the Russian ambassador to the United Nations, Vitaly Churkin, said.

The council’s “primary responsibility is the maintenance of international peace and security,” a Pakistani ambassador to the United Nations representing the G–77, Farukh Amil, said in a speech. By appropriating the hot issue of climate change from other U.N. organs, the council “infringes on their authority and compromises the rights of the general membership of the United Nations,” he said.

“Climate change is transforming the way we think about security,” Ms. Beckett responded. Recent scientific evidence, she added, “has given us a picture of the physical impacts on our world that we can expect as our climate changes. And those impacts go far beyond the environmental. Their consequences reach to the very heart of the security agenda.”

Flooding leads to disease and famine, and then to migration, Ms. Beckett said. Drought leads to “intensified competition for food, water, and energy.” And the predicted economic disruption is on a scale “not seen since the end of World War II.”

Ms. Beckett then quoted President Museveni of Uganda, who she said “has called climate change an act of aggression by the rich against the poor.” Even American “admirals and generals said in a report published just yesterday climate change is a ‘threat multiplier for instability,'” she added.

An American ambassador to the United Nations, Alejandro Wolff, said in his council speech: “Well-governed countries grow and prosper. Economic growth provides the resources, in both developed and developing countries, to address energy and environmental challenges, including challenges associated with climate change.”

But when asked whether the weather belongs on the Security Council agenda, Mr. Wolff said, “The notion of the linkage between climate and energy, security, and other issues, we are interested in hearing about.”

The most passionate speeches yesterday came from nine ambassadors of small island nations, which are predicted to suffer most in the short run as sea levels rise. But as the British say, many complained about the weather yesterday, but no one offered suggestions for what to do about it.