PARIS, Jan 29: Nearly 20 environmentalists scaled the Eiffel Tower on Monday to hang protest banners about the threat of global warming as the world’s top climate scientists gathered nearby to issue a key report.

Greenpeace activists climbed to the top platform of the 324-meter (1,025-feet) tower and unfurled three huge banners, one showing a thermometer topping out at 2 C (3.6 F).

The European Union (EU) has set the target of limiting Earth's global temperature rise to 2 C or less by the end of the century compared to pre-industrial levels.

Another of the banners was inscribed with the slogan “It's not too late”, in an appeal to policymakers and governments to take action on climate change.

Global warming is driven in large measure by man-made sources of greenhouse gases that trap solar heat.

Some 500 experts in the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will on Friday release a much-anticipated report — it’s first since 2001 -- on the state of scientific knowledge on global warming.

The report will be the fourth since the IPCC was launched in 1988.

With a mountain of data in front of them and demands for action coming from behind, the world’s top climate experts launched a massive review of the evidence for global warming.

“Concerns about climate change and public awareness of the subject are at an all-time high,” noted Rajendra Pachauri, the IPCC's chairman.

“At no time in the past has there been a greater global appetite for knowledge on any subject than there is today on the scientific facts underlying the reality of global climate change.”

Christian Brodhag, representing the French hosts, said “the fight against climate change” had become cemented into national and European policy.

Brodhag said that the 2003 heatwave in France, which killed an estimated 15,000 people, mainly the elderly, had awoken his country to the danger.—AFP