posted 12-10- 09:14 PM            

MILAN, Italy - Negotiators crafted new rules Wednesday to counter the effects of greenhouse gases on the environment as U.N. officials, citing disasters like last summer's deadly European heat wave, pressed for more vigorous efforts to fight global warming .

The progress came on the 10th day of a U.N. conference on climate change, which ends Friday.

Organizers hoped the conference would ended with the ratification needed to enact the 1997 Kyoto Protocol on greenhouse gases. But Russia, whose support is vital since the United States rejected it two years ago, has declined to support the accord.

During the conference's opening days, Moscow said that establishing set targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions would be too expensive.

Despite the setback, negotiators worked out an accord on how Kyoto countries and their companies can earn credits toward required emission cutback levels through forest preservation and reforestation projects in developing countries.

The U.N. Nations Environment Program reported that costs of natural disasters, most of which were weather-related, rose to $60 billion this year from some $55 billion a year earlier.

Europe's heat wave, blamed for thousands of deaths and the devastation of crops and livestock, cost more than $10 billion.

"So here in Milan, we need to engage with ever greater vigor in this marathon race against climate change," said Klaus Toepfer, executive director of the U.N. program. "We need political will, technological innovation and economic creativity."

Scientists are divided over how much human activities, including greenhouse gas emissions, are linked to global warming and natural disasters such as flooding and heat waves.

Politicians continued to show their split over the Kyoto Protocol, including some U.S. lawmakers at the conference.

"Kyoto and its policies are inconsistent with freedom, prosperity and environmental policy progress," said Sen. James Inhofe, a R-Okla., the chairman of the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works.

"I'm becoming more and more convinced, as time goes by and we look at the research, that global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people and the world."

From Washington, Sen. Joe Lieberman , D-Conn., blasted the U.S. policy on greenhouse gases.

"The United States cannot afford to be on the sidelines in international effort to tackle the threat of global warming through mandatory cuts in greenhouse gases," Lieberman, a candidate for president, said in a statement.
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Associated Press reporter Emily Backus contributed to this report.