Panel Rebuffs Global Warming Activists : Environment: An international group sticks to its study plan. Several European governments had sought cuts in ‘greenhouse’ gases.

Several European nations tried Wednesday to nudge the rest of the industrialized world toward an early commitment to stabilize emissions of the chief pollutant believed to be contributing to global climate warming, but an international group studying the issue rebuffed the proposal.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change instead stuck doggedly to the methodical course it has set in preparing a massive scientific and technical report on global warming, a phenomenon linked to emission of gases that trap heat within the earth’s atmosphere.

The organization, which began deliberations in Washington on Monday, adjourned after issuing a progress report and rejecting efforts by environmentalists and European governments to obtain immediate commitments to reduce future pollution.

Delegations from Austria, Denmark, Finland, France, West Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden had introduced a statement Tuesday asking the international panel to endorse stabilization of carbon dioxide emissions by the year 2000.

The European delegates tried again Wednesday, but they were unable to get the United States, Great Britain, Japan and other world powers to agree to compromise language. As the 50-nation conference ended its work, the proposal was merely included in the meeting minutes.

It was the second time in four months that the European countries, which already are taking unilateral steps to limit production of so-called greenhouse gases, failed to persuade other nations to accept their target for stabilizing carbon dioxide production.

They were thwarted at a Dutch-sponsored meeting last December when the United States and Japan led a bloc of countries insisting that instead of targeting the year 2000, the goal should be to stabilize emissions “as soon as possible.”

The United Nations-sanctioned IPCC is due to have final reports from three major working groups completed by August.

Summarizing the state of scientific knowledge on global warming and its possible social and economic effects, and offering potential response strategies for world governments, the reports are to be submitted to a World Climate Conference in Geneva in November.

The panel’s report will set the stage for negotiations on an international treaty to limit greenhouse pollutants.

Assistant Secretary of State Fred Bernthal, who chairs the U.S. delegation to the IPCC, said the United States wants to see 1987 Montreal protocols limiting chlorofluorocarbons used as a model for negotiations on carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases.

Sources said some European governments favor establishment of a panel composed of environmental ministers to conduct the negotiations, while another group, including many developing countries, prefer to see the negotiations controlled by the United Nations General Assembly. The United States favors a negotiating body growing out of the IPCC.

Reporting for the science working group earlier this week, British meteorologist Geoffrey Jenkins said the panel’s work has largely confirmed projections that the continued production of greenhouse gases will lead to a global climate warming of 1.5 to 4.5 degrees centigrade by the middle of the next century.

A study by the United States and the Netherlands last year predicted that energy production would put 10.2 billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere by the year 2025, but the new study put the figure at 12.5 billion tons.

Bernthal urged all of the IPCC’s member countries to provide their own estimates and analysis of their production of all greenhouse gases.