Italy's outgoing Prime Minister Mario Monti talks during a news conference in Rome December 28, 2012.

ROME | Thu Jan 3, 2013 6:36am EST

ROME (Reuters) - Mario Monti, bidding for a second term as Italy's prime minister, said on Thursday that excluding "extreme" elements from mainstream politics would make it easier to push ahead with economic reforms.

The former European commissioner said last week he would lead a centrist bloc in parliamentary elections in February, shedding his neutral stance and criticizing factions he felt had hindered his government's progress over the past 13 months.

"I believe that cutting out the extreme wings would be a good thing," Monti told the Uno Mattina program on state television.

"It will be very important to be able to gather up reformists on the left and right who are available to contribute to the reform effort," he said.

Monti was appointed in November 2011 to lead an unelected right-left government of experts to save Italy from financial crisis after then-Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi quit. The 69-year-old is in a three-way race with the Democratic Party (PD) on the left and Berlusconi's People of Freedom (PDL) on the right.

A poll published on Wednesday said Monti's grouping would win 12 percent of the vote. One published last week said it could gain up to 16 percent, depriving rivals of a clear win, but not enough to govern.

The PD and its coalition ally, the Left, Ecology, Freedom party, are on track to win the elections, at least in the lower house.

Monti has blamed the left-wing CGIL trade union and a minority of PD supporters for blocking more radical labor reforms he had wanted to introduce. He also said pressure from the pharmacy sector and its backers on the right had watered down plans to deregulate that market.

Monti said on Thursday that the next government should aim to reduce taxes gradually alongside public spending controls, and continue to fight tax evasion.

To Italians who have borne the brunt of the austerity measures he passed in late 2011 to shore up public finances, he has pledged to cut labor taxes and redistribute wealth from the richest to the poorest if he wins.

But on Thursday he said he was not considering an annual tax levy on wealth, though he said it was not a "taboo" topic.

(Reporting By Catherine Hornby; Editing by Naomi O'Leary and Robin Pomeroy)

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A pedestrian walks across a bridge above a main road on a day with high air pollution in Beijing June 6, 2012.

OSLO | Fri Jul 27, 2012 10:23am EDT

OSLO (Reuters) - Scientists are finding evidence that man-made climate change has raised the risks of individual weather events, such as floods or heatwaves, marking a big step towards pinpointing local costs and ways to adapt to freak conditions.

"We're seeing a great deal of progress in attributing a human fingerprint to the probability of particular events or series of events," said Christopher Field, co-chairman of a U.N. report due in 2014 about the impacts of climate change.

Experts have long blamed a build-up of greenhouse gas emissions for raising worldwide temperatures and causing desertification, floods, droughts, heatwaves, more powerful storms and rising sea levels.

But until recently they have said that naturally very hot, wet, cold, dry or windy weather might explain any single extreme event, like the current drought in the United States or a rare melt of ice in Greenland in July.

But for some extremes, that is now changing.

A study this month, for instance, showed that greenhouse gas emissions had raised the chances of the severe heatwave in Texas in 2011 and unusual heat in Britain in late 2011. Other studies of extremes are under way.

Growing evidence that the dice are loaded towards ever more severe local weather may make it easier for experts to explain global warming to the public, pin down costs and guide investments in everything from roads to flood defenses.

"One of the ironies of climate change is that we have more papers published on the costs of climate change in 2100 than we have published on the costs today. I think that is ridiculous," said Myles Allen, head of climate research at Oxford University's Environmental Change Institute.

"We can't (work out current costs) without being able to make the link to extreme weather," he said. "And once you've worked out how much it costs that raises the question of who is going to pay."

Industrialized nations agree they should take the lead in cutting emissions since they have burnt fossil fuels, which release greenhouse gases, since the Industrial Revolution. But they oppose the idea of liability for damage.

Almost 200 nations have agreed to work out a new deal by the end of 2015 to combat climate change, after repeated setbacks. China, the United States and India are now the top national emitters of greenhouse gases.

Field, Professor of Biology and Environmental Earth System Science at the University of Stanford, said that the goal was to carry out studies of extreme weather events almost immediately after they happen, helping expose the risks.

"Everybody who needs to make decisions about the future - things like building codes, infrastructure planning, insurance - can take advantage of the fact that the risks are changing but we have a lot of influence over what those risks are."

FLOODS

Another report last year indicated that floods 12 years ago in Britain - among the countries most easily studied because of it has long records - were made more likely by warming. And climate shifts also reduced the risks of flooding in 2001.

Previously, the European heatwave of 2003 that killed perhaps 70,000 people was the only extreme where scientists had discerned a human fingerprint. In 2004, they said that global warming had at least doubled the risks of such unusual heat.

The new statistical reviews are difficult because they have to tease out the impact of greenhouse gases from natural variations, such as periodic El Nino warmings of the Pacific, sun-dimming volcanic dust or shifts in the sun's output.

So far, extreme heat is the easiest to link to global warming after a research initiative led by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the British Meteorological Office.

"Heatwaves are easier to attribute than heavy rainfall, and drought is very difficult given evidence for large droughts in the past," said Gabriele Hegerl of the University of Edinburgh.

Scientists often liken climate change to loading dice to get more sixes, or a baseball player on steroids who hits more home runs. That is now going to the local from the global scale.

Field said climate science would always include doubt since weather is chaotic. It is not as certain as physics, where scientists could this month express 99.999 percent certainty they had detected the Higgs boson elementary particle.

"This new attribution science is showing the power of our understanding, but it also illustrates where the limits are," he said.

A report by Field's U.N. group last year showed that more weather extremes that can be linked to greenhouse warming, such as the number of high temperature extremes and the fact that the rising fraction of rainfall falls in downpours.

But scientists warn against going too far in blaming climate change for extreme events.

Unprecedented floods in Thailand last year, for instance, that caused $45 billion in damage according to a World Bank estimate, were caused by people hemming in rivers and raising water levels rather than by climate change, a study showed.

"We have to be a bit cautious about blaming it all on climate change," Peter Stott, head of climate monitoring and attribution at the Met Office's Hadley Centre, said of extremes in 2012.

Taken together, many extremes are a sign of overall change.

"If you look all over the world, we have a great disastrous drought in North America ... you have the same situation in the Mediterranean... If you look at all the extremes together you can say that these are indicators of global warming," said Friedrich-Wilhelm Gerstengabe, a professor at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.

(Additional reporting by Sara Ledwith in London; Editing by Louise Ireland)

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