fficials controlling some of the nation's largest pension funds announced plans yesterday to press regulators, public companies and Wall Street to pay more heed to the potential financial upheaval from climate change. They said that their effort would be coordinated through a new group, the Investor Network on Climate Risk.

"In global warming, we are facing an enormous risk to the U.S. economy and to retirement funds that Wall Street has so far chosen to ignore," said Philip Angelides, the treasurer of California.

In addition to Mr. Angelides, the founders of the network include the New York State comptroller, Alan Hevesi; the New York City comptroller, William Thompson; and Denise Nappier, the treasurer of Connecticut. They were joined by counterparts from New Mexico, Oregon, Maine and Vermont as well as officials overseeing two major union pension funds.

Their plans, which they termed a "call to action," were announced in conjunction with a meeting at the United Nations that brought together fund managers representing more than $1 trillion in assets and representatives from numerous Wall Street banks and investment advisers.

The meeting was the most elaborate effort yet by a growing group of fund managers, shareholder advocates and environmentalists to persuade businesses to move more aggressively to identify and address problems they might face from global warming, increasingly frequent extreme weather and other climate changes that have been linked to the rapid buildup in the atmosphere of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases.

The meeting was addressed by both Kofi Annan, the secretary general of the United Nations, and the former vice president, Al Gore, who said, "This is not business as usual - the relationship between the human species and the planet on which we live has been utterly transformed."

Investment managers who attended the meeting said they had no trouble agreeing that the challenge was a daunting one. But many fund managers were uncertain how the climate change projections reviewed at the start of the meeting could translate into investment strategy. One recounted his experience setting up a fund at the request of two clients in 1990 to invest in companies that were developing environmentally beneficial products or doing business in a more environmentally sound way than their peers. The clients asked him to shut the fund down just more than two years later when it failed to do as well as the rest of the stock market.

Abby Joseph Cohen, managing director at Goldman Sachs, noted the public was not yet rewarding sensitivity to climate issues in the marketplace or at the polls. "Someone's obviously buying and driving those S.U.V.'s, and they are voting," she said.

But others like Mr. Angelides argued that responsible pension fund managers had a legal responsibility to take a longer view. He said managers had to prod businesses to study the issue more and report more, invest in companies positioned to profit from climate change, put some of their money into funds that screen businesses for socially responsible behavior, and, if they own real estate, look to reduce the environmental impact of their buildings.

The Investor Network founders said that one of their first moves would be to press the Securities and Exchange Commission to require more disclosure in corporate filings of climate risks and to give investors more leeway in forcing companies to allow shareholder resolutions on the subject at annual meetings.

None of the activists said that they planned to divest themselves of the stocks of companies they viewed as lagging on climate concerns. Mr. Hevesi called divestment the last resort.

OSCOW, Dec. 2 — A senior Kremlin official said today that Russia would not ratify the international treaty requiring cuts in emissions of gases linked to global warming, delivering what could be the fatal blow to years of diplomatic efforts to address the problem.

With the Bush administration having previously rejected the treaty, known as the Kyoto Protocol, Russia essentially held a veto over its enactment, since the agreement could only take effect when adopted by enough countries to account for 55 percent of emissions by industrialized countries. Some 120 countries have done so, but without Russia or the United States, that 55 percent threshold cannot be met.

President Vladimir V. Putin announced Russia's rejection of the treaty during a meeting at the Kremlin with European businessmen, the senior official, Andrei N. Illarionov, said in public remarks and in an interview.

The Russian statements reverberated powerfully today in Milan, where hundreds of delegates from around the world are in the second day of a two-week meeting on the proposed protocol and an underlying climate treaty that contains no binding provisions.

Some participants saw Russia's apparent retreat as accelerating a wave of doubt about the practicality of a pact requiring prompt cuts in emissions of carbon dioxide, a gas that remains a fundamental byproduct of burning the fossil fuels underpinning modern economies.

But United Nations officials and others, noting that Mr. Putin himself did not comment publicly on the treaty, expressed hope that Mr. Illarionov's remarks did not reflect Russia's official position.

"This gentleman has said in the past that he was not convinced about the protocol, and Mr. Putin has not said anything different from what he said so far," said Michael Williams, a spokesman for the United Nations officials administering the treaties. "So there is no reason for us to interpret this as anything other than comments from one of his advisers."

But Mr. Illarionov asserted in a telephone interview that Russia's decision not to adopt the treaty was unequivocal. "We shall not ratify," he said.

That decision, ending more than a year of speculation about Russia's position, brushed aside impassioned appeals from the United Nations and from individual countries, especially in Europe, that have embraced the protocol as the best way to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases that many scientists have linked to a potentially dangerous rise in global temperatures.

The treaty, completed in the Japanese city of Kyoto in 1997 after two years of intense diplomatic wrangling, called on major industrialized countries to reduce emissions before 2012 by 5.2 percent from 1990 levels. Barring a 11th-hour reversal of position by Russia, the treaty now appears dead, leaving uncertain the future of international cooperation on the question of global warming.

As recently as last year, President Putin indicated Russia's willingness to sign the accord, but since then he and other officials have wavered, raising questions about whether the country stood to benefit from ratification, especially without the participation of the United States and without mandatory limits on developing countries like China.

That exemption to China, as well as to India and other big developing nations, also figured prominently in President Bush's stated rationale for opposing the accord, as did concern over the costs of complying with it.

At a climate conference in Moscow in September, Mr. Putin said Russia remained committed to addressing climate change, but he also shocked many conferees with an impromptu quip suggesting that global warming could benefit a country hardened by winter cold. "We shall save on fur coats and other warm things," he said.

Mr. Illarionov said the treaty's supporters had failed to answer questions about the treaty's scientific rationale, its fairness and the potential harm to Russia's economy, which Mr. Putin has pledged to double over the next decade.

"A number of questions have been raised about the link between carbon dioxide and climate change, which do not appear convincing," Mr. Illarionov said. "And clearly it sets very serious brakes on economic growth which do not look justified."

In a telephone interview from the Milan treaty talks, the climate policy director for the World Wildlife Fund, Jennifer Morgan, echoed the hopeful sentiments of the United Nations officials, saying she saw nothing in the statements from Mr. Illarionov as representing official government policy. She said Mr. Putin himself, while repeatedly noting this fall that Russia had to take time to weigh the treaty's merits against potential economic costs, had never explicitly rejected it.

As for the statements by Mr. Illarionov, Mr. Putin's adviser, Ms. Morgan said: "This is not really a surprise. This has been his line all along."

A statement issued by the wildlife fund further dismissed his remarks as "nothing more than pre-election bluster" tied to parliamentary elections in Russia on Sunday.

The statement quoted the fund's chief representative in Russia, Alexey Kokorin, as minimizing Mr. Illarionov's stature. "Illarionov does not speak for the president or the Russian government," Mr. Kokorin said. "This is just the latest statement in a long line of predictions by Illarionov which have failed to eventuate. He opposed the Russian energy strategy, which was then adopted in May 2003, and he poured cold water on the economic plan for G.D.P. growth, which was also later adopted."

Since the collapse of Soviet-era industry, Russia's emission of gases has fallen by an estimated 30 percent, meaning it could easily have met its required reductions. Under the treaty's complex formulas, it stood to gain financially from selling credits that would allow other countries to exceed the treaty's limits. Some major Russian industries lobbied for the protocol, seeing it as a way to use the credits to modernize aging plants.

Without the United States, however, many officials here concluded that the potential economic gains would not be as lucrative as first thought. And with the Russian economy increasingly reliant on oil and gas production and exports, the officials concluded that the treaty's limits could become a drag on economic growth in the future.

Aleksei V. Yablokov, a former environmental official under President Boris N. Yeltsin and now president of the Center for Ecological Policy in Moscow, said he believed the American decision weighed heavily on the Kremlin. He added that Russian industries also feared having to make a full disclosure of their emissions, suggesting actual levels had been underreported.

"All of this is a political game," he said. "It has nothing to do with the environment. It has nothing to do with economics."

The protocol is an outgrowth of the first international climate treaty, the 1992 Framework Convention on Climate Change, which committed the world's industrialized nations to work voluntarily to avoid "dangerous" human interference with the climate system, but never defined "dangerous."

After signatories in 1995 recognized that emissions were continuing to grow, negotiations began toward a binding addendum, culminating in 1997 with the current protocol. The targets for individual countries ranged widely depending on their contribution to the problem and intensive bargaining aimed at being sure no country was getting too great a competitive advantage.

It has become clear in the last two years that even the countries with the easiest targets are unlikely to achieve them, given the continuing growth in the global economy and — inevitably — in emissions of the warming gases.

Even as the statements from Russia rocked the treaty talks, the European Commission issued a report warning that the European Union over all, and 13 of its 15 member states, would fail to meet their targets under the Kyoto Protocol unless new measures to curb greenhouse emissions were enacted.

The European Union had generally been perceived as having a relatively easy time of it under the treaty, because of longstanding existing economic trends, like Britain's shift from coal to North Sea natural gas, which produces far fewer greenhouse gases when burned.

Mr. Illarionov said that Russia remained receptive to an international effort to reduce harmful emissions. But he insisted that Russia would not ratify a treaty that did not include the United States, China and other nations that, he said, produced more gases than Russia and had greater financial resources to cope with the economic consequences of reductions.

A new treaty that "would be truly global," he said, "could be a new basis in which we could start discussions."

Steven Lee Myers contributed reporting from Moscow and Andrew C. Revkin reported from New York.

ince it was negotiated in Japan in 1997, the Kyoto Protocol, the first treaty that would require countries to curb emissions linked to global warming, has lingered in an indeterminate state, between enactment and outright rejection.

On Tuesday its prospects were dealt what may have been a fatal blow when a top Russian official said his country would not ratify it. But some experts on climate and diplomacy say that the fate of the Kyoto treaty itself is rapidly becoming less important than the longer-term processes it set in motion.

Even without approval by the United States and Russia — first and fourth on lists of the world's largest emitters of heat-trapping "greenhouse" gases — the treaty has already changed the world in small but significant ways that will be hard to reverse, these experts say.

From Europe to Japan and the United States, just the prospect of the treaty has resulted in legislation and new government and industry policies curbing emissions.

The treaty's future impact is limited by deep flaws, many experts say, including its lack of any emissions limits on China and other big developing countries and its short time frame, with terms extending only to 2012. As a result, they add, new approaches must be developed now if atmospheric levels of the gases are to be stabilized.

The protocol has been approved by 120 countries but was rejected by President Bush in 2001. Without the United States, the only way to reach the threshold for enactment under the treaty's terms was with Russian participation. If enacted, it would give industrialized countries until 2012 to reduce their combined emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases more than 5 percent below 1990 levels.

The possibility remains that the statement on Tuesday by the Russian official, Andrei N. Illarionov, the top economic adviser to President Vladimir V. Putin, was just a negotiating ploy, aimed at extracting as many concessions as possible from the European Union and Japan, the treaty's main supporters.

On Wednesday a lower-level official, Mukhamed M. Tsikanov, a deputy economics minister, sounded a note of hope for the treaty, declaring, "There are no decisions about ratification apart from the fact that we are moving toward ratification." Mr. Putin, meanwhile, remained silent.

Regardless of which way Russia steps, the process of moving the world toward limiting releases of the gases after more than a century of relentless increases has clearly begun, said David B. Sandalow, a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution and an assistant secretary of state during the Clinton administration who worked on the treaty.

"The standard of success isn't whether the first treaty out of the box sails through," he said. "The standard is whether this puts the world on a path to solving a long-term problem. Other multilateral regimes dealing with huge complex problems, like the World Trade Organization, have taken 45 or 50 years to get established."

Mr. Sandalow and other experts noted that the European Union had already passed a law requiring a cap and credit-trading system for the gases starting in 2005. It will follow the pattern laid out in Kyoto no matter what happens to the treaty.

Even in the United States, where Mr. Bush and the Republican-controlled Congress strongly oppose the treaty, legislation that would require milder restrictions on emissions than those in the Kyoto treaty has gained some momentum.

Opponents of the treaty acknowledge that it has already made a difference, though they say it is a harmful one.

"Kyoto is dead and has been dead, but that doesn't mean that it hasn't done some real damage and won't continue to do some real damage," said Myron Ebell, a climate policy analyst for the Competitive Enterprise Institute, an industry-backed group that opposes regulatory solutions to environmental problems.

"If global warming turns out to be a problem, which I doubt, it won't be solved by making ourselves poorer through energy rationing," he said. "It will be solved through building resiliency and capability into society and through long-term technological innovation and transformation."

Critics of that view say the one feature of the Kyoto treaty that cannot be jettisoned is a ceiling on emissions. Without limits, they say, there will be no incentive for industry to innovate and find the cheapest, most effective ways to limit the human impact on the atmosphere, said David D. Doniger, the climate policy director of the Natural Resources Defense Council, a private environmental group.

"If the United States had invented the catalytic converter but not passed clean air laws," he said, "it would still be sitting on a shelf and we'd still be choking in smog."

everal times at the talks now going on in Milan over a global warming treaty, Bush administration officials have portrayed states' actions to curb heat-trapping gases as evidence of American resolve.

But in this country, officials in many of those same states are strongly criticizing the administration's statements, saying their efforts are no substitute for federal action.

The focus of the criticism is a speech in Milan last Thursday by Dr. Harlan L. Watson, the administration's chief climate negotiator. Listing a variety of initiatives begun by states and communities, he said they were like ``laboratories where new and creative ideas and methods can be applied and shared with others and inform federal policy - a truly bottom-up approach to addressing global climate change.''

But in Washington State, Gov. Gary Locke, a Democrat, said the administration was using state initiatives as cover for its own inaction.

``The states are taking action for one simple reason - because the federal government is not,'' Mr. Locke said. ``For the White House to say it is looking for leadership from the states is just an excuse to delay and procrastinate. We are limited in what the states can do. We need a national policy to address global warming.''

Administration officials and some industry groups say that Mr. Watson had it just right - that having the states take the lead is in the best federalist tradition.

Still, even some groups often critical of environmental regulations said the speech would cause trouble for the administration at home.

``It's not surprising that the administration, when it goes in front of an international body like this, is going to brag about all the initiatives undertaken on global warming at the state level,'' said Jerry Taylor, director of natural resources studies for the libertarian Cato Institute. ``What's the alternative? To go and say we're taking no significant steps and don't intend to in the near future?''

The text of the speech is online at www.state.gov/g/oes/rls/rm/2003/26894.htm.

Some Republican governors are distancing themselves from the administration's Milan position without directly criticizing it.

``They have not yet taken climate change on as a real issue and developed policies,'' a senior aide to one such governor, George E. Pataki of New York, said, speaking on the condition of anonymity. ``We are going to keep pushing them.''

Mr. Pataki has led an effort to institute a 2005 regional cap for heat-trapping emissions for states from Maryland to Maine, and is pursuing New York legislation similar to California's new law requiring curbs in such emissions from cars. Mr. Pataki also supports a federal limit on emissions of carbon dioxide, the dominant heat-trapping gas, from power plants as part of a broader cleanup of the plants.

The Bush administration opposes mandatory limits on the gases and state efforts to curtail such emissions from cars. None of Mr. Pataki's proposals involving mandatory curbs were among the projects described by Dr. Watson, who focused on voluntary plans like inventories of the gases.

Erin M. Crotty, Mr. Pataki's environment commissioner, declined yesterday to discuss the Bush administration's position. ``I'll just say from our perspective New York will continue to be a leader,'' she said.

The Milan meeting, which ends Friday, is intended to gauge countries' progress under the 1992 Framework Convention on Climate Change, and to hash out details of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, an amendment to the original pact requiring cuts in gas emissions by industrialized countries.

The 1992 treaty calls for voluntary action to avoid ``dangerous'' human interference with the climate. President Bush has said he intends to adhere to that treaty, but has rejected the Kyoto pact because it does not apply to China and other developing countries and because he says it could hurt the nation's economy. Last week, Russia also indicated that it would reject the treaty.

The American delegation in Milan has faced withering criticism throughout the meeting. for its position on the Kyoto treaty, and American officials said that Dr. Watson's comments were intended to illustrate that the country was doing things now to deal with warming.

``We're continually getting criticized that we're not doing anything practically at any level except pie-in-the-sky far-out research stuff which won't have any near-term impact,'' an American representative at the meeting said.

In a telephone interview, Dr. Watson said his statement was meant to reflect that ``there is a broad effort going on in the United States on many levels to address global climate change.''

Dr. Watson, a physicist, heads a National Security Council committee on climate policy and has participated in international climate talks for more than a decade.

Among domestic climate initiatives described by Mr. Watson in Milan were programs in 13 states requiring utilities to produce increasing amounts of power using nonpolluting sources like the wind and sun. President Bush signed one such program into law as governor of Texas.

But yesterday, environmental groups pointed out that the administration had successfully sought to exclude similar federal standards from its energy bill, which fell short of passage last month.

Many officials and private groups working on climate policy argue that scattered state and local actions are not an effective way to deal with gases, like carbon dioxide, that flow every time a fossil fuel is burned, stay aloft for up to a century, and drift throughout the atmosphere. A dozen states and three cities recently filed suit against the administration in an effort to compel it to regulate greenhouse gases.

``Nobody wants a situation where there are 50 different states dealing with climate on their own,'' said Joel Levin, the vice president for business development of the California Climate Action Registry. This nonprofit group, created under state legislation, enlists companies to tally and register their emissions of greenhouse gases, a prelude to cutting emissions and getting credit for the change.

ENEVA, Dec. 16 (AP) — The year 2003, marked by a sweltering summer and drought across large swaths of the planet, was the third hottest in nearly 150 years, the United Nations weather agency said Tuesday.

The World Meteorological Organization estimated the average surface temperature for the year to be 0.81 degrees Fahrenheit higher than the normal 25.2 degrees — a number skewed toward the low side because it includes polar regions.

The agency said warmer weather could not be attributed to any single cause but was part of a trend that global warming was likely to prolong.

The agency, which collects data worldwide, said the three hottest years since accurate records began to be kept in 1861 had all been in the last six years.

The hottest was 1998, when the average temperature was up 0.99 degrees.

"The rhythm of temperature increases is accelerating," said the agency's deputy secretary general, Michel Jarraud.