GENEVA, Mar 19 1994 (IPS) - An international treaty to slow global warming, signed by 150 governments at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in June 1992, becomes international law Monday, but critics wonder if it will make any real difference.

Only next century will we really be able to answer if the two years of negotiations that led to the treaty made some difference but many environmentalists say that they can already tell -- and their answer is an emphatic 'no'.

Global warming is a result of the massive increase in emissions like carbon dioxide and methane.

These gases create a thin blanket around the planet that act like the glass walls of a greenhouse trapping solar radiation which will warm the planet up slowly.

Despite the fact that many businesses whose factories spew out huge quantities of this every year say that this is still a theory, it is not. All climate change scientists agree that this is a fact.

What is debatable if the speed of the warming and the precise effect because of complex ''feedback'' mechanisms by which the problem could suddenly accelerate.

In 1990, an international panel of scientists commissioned by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published its report on climate change.

They warned that if the level of carbon dioxide was to be stabilised, carbon emissions would have to be cut by a massive 60 percent.

At the Earth Summit itself, the governments could only agree to try to cut back their emissions to 1990 levels, forget about the further 60 percent that the scientists had asked for.

By December last year, 50 countries had ratified the treaty through their national parliaments, the minimum needed to make it international law.

Yet the treaty was so weak that in fact the many signatories of the convention are today planning to do precisely the opposite of what they signed -- that is to massively increase the amount of greenhouse gas emissions.

Take for example two proposals that were put forward in the last two years -- one by the government of India and the other by the European Commission, both of whom have signed the treaty.

Last June the World Bank's board of directors approved the first of a series of new loans to India to build up coal fired electricity generating capacity.

The loans are intended to finance a doubling of India's burning of coal for energy production.

Taken together environmental activists estimate that the new projects will add the single biggest new source of greenhouse gas emissions on the entire planet.

The United States based Environmental Defence Fund estimates that it will add 2.5 percent to the global carbon emissions total.(END/IPS/EN/PC/MF/94)

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