Study: global warming will spur disasters

WASHINGTON -- Global warming is leading to such severe storms, droughts and heat waves that nations should prepare for an unprecedented onslaught of deadly and costly weather disasters, an international panel of climate scientists said yesterday.

The greatest threat from extreme weather is to highly populated, poor regions of the world, their report warns, but no corner of the globe, from Mumbai to Miami, is immune. The document by a Nobel Prize-winning panel of climate scientists forecasts stronger tropical cyclones and more frequent heat waves, deluges and droughts. The 594-page report blames the scale of recent and future disasters on a combination of man-made climate change, population shifts and poverty.

In the past, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, founded in 1988 by the United Nations, had focused on the slow inexorable rise of temperatures and oceans as part of global warming. This is its first to look at the less common but far more noticeable extreme weather changes, which have been costing $80 billion a year in damage.

"There are lots of places that are already marginal for one reason or another. But it's not just poor areas: There is disaster risk almost everywhere," said one of the report's top editors, Chris Field, an ecologist with the Carnegie Institution of Washington. -- AP