"Existing measures will not be sufficient for the EU to reach its Kyoto target," the report issued by the European Environment Agency (EAA) said bluntly.

Under the Kyoto Protocol, the 15 EU members are required to cut combined emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) and five other heat-trapping gases by eight percent overall in the years 2008-2012 as compared to their 1990 levels.

But the projections run by the Copenhagen-based EU agency show that, on the basis of existing measures, the 15 are on track for a total cut of only 4.7 percent.

Most of that cut is attributable to Britain, Germany and Sweden, which have made far deeper reductions than they are honoured to make under a "burden-sharing" agreement whereby the EU members assigned individual targets among themselves.

They made the reductions because of the closure of inefficient, coal-burning plants and power stations in the former East Germany and the conversion in Britain of coal-fired power stations to gas, which releases far less CO2 for the same output.

"If these three countries merely met their burden-sharing targets instead of 'over-complying', the overall EU emissions decrease by 2010 would be minimal, at only 0.6 percent," the EAA said.

The worst offenders are Austria, Belgium, Denmark and Spain, which in 2010 will exceed their individual Kyoto targets according to calculations based on pollution-curbing measures they have implemented so far.

Kyoto's pollution-cutting targets apply to industrialised but not developing countries, and they have an array of mechanisms to attain the goals, such as trading in pollution quotas -- a so-called carbon market being pioneered in London.

The pact was agreed in the Japanese city of Kyoto in 1997 as a means of combatting global warming, the term used to describe a progressive rising in global temperatures caused by the trapping of solar heat from CO2 and other gases burned by fossil fuels.

President George W. Bush walked away from the agreement in March 2001 in one of his first foreign-policy acts since taking office that January.

He argued it would be too costly to implement for the United States, which by itself accounts for a quarter of this pollution, and questioned the scientific evidence that there was in fact a problem.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the top UN scientific panel on global warming, says there is incontrovertible evidence that Man has caused the Earth's atmosphere to warm, but is cautious about whether this has already started to take effect on the climate.

The IPCC predicts the Earth's mean surface temperature will rise by between 1.4 and 5.8 C (2.5 to 10.4 F) by 2100 from 1990 levels, causing sea levels to surge from eight to 88 centimetres (3.6 to 35 inches).

In an interview with AFP in Paris late Thursday, the IPCC's chairman, Rajendra Pachauri, made a fresh appeal for cutting greenhouse-gas pollution.

"There is already an urgent need for bringing about very rapid reductions. We've already passed the stage when reductions in emissions should have begun on a significant scale. So we're running out of time, actually," he said.

Evidence was growing, he added, that the rising number of extreme weather events in recent years could be linked to a warmer climate.

"Even though you cannot draw a scientific link between the two, at least in terms of the observations of these extreme weather events, you have compelling evidence which you can't ignore," he said.

"And the WMO [World Meteorological Organisation], which has data on extreme weather events, has estimated that in the last 10 years the extreme weather events have doubled in number, so there is obviously something that is (already) happening over there."

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SPACE.WIRE