U.N. to issue 'much stronger' climate report -

NAIROBI, Kenya - A long-awaited report by a U.N. scientific network will offer “much stronger” evidence of how man is changing Earth’s climate, and should prompt reluctant governments into action against global warming, the group’s chief scientist said Monday.
The upcoming, multi-volume U.N. assessment — on melting ice caps, rising seas and authoritative new data on how the world has warmed — may provide “just the right impetus to get the negotiations going in a more purposeful way,” Rajendra K. Pachauri told The Associated Press midway through the annual two-week U.N. climate conference.
The Indian climatologist is chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a global network of some 2,000 scientists that regularly assesses research into how carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases produced by industry and other human activities are affecting climate.

In its pivotal Third Assessment in 2001, the panel concluded that most global warming — temperatures rose an average 1 degree in the past century — was likely the result of such manmade greenhouse gases.
In its Fourth Assessment, to be issued in installments beginning in February, “there’s much stronger evidence now of human actions on the change in climate that’s taken place,” Pachauri said.
The 1997 Kyoto Protocol requires 35 industrialized nations to reduce their greenhouse emissions by 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2012. The United States and Australia are the only major industrial nations to reject Kyoto. President Bush contends such emissions cuts would harm the U.S. economy.