Grim outlook for poor countries in climate report

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The Arctic is again highlighted as being among areas most at risk. Photograph: Corbis

The effects of climate change will be felt sooner than scientists realised and the world must learn to live with the effects, experts said today.

Professor Martin Parry, a climate scientist with the Met Office, said destructive changes in temperature, rainfall and agriculture were now forecast to occur several decades earlier than thought.

He said vulnerable people such as the old and poor would be the worst affected, and that world leaders had not yet accepted their countries would have to adapt to the likely consequences.

The professor was speaking in London at a meeting to launch the full report on the impacts of global warming by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The report – which had its executive summary released earlier this year – says hundreds of millions of people in developing nations will face natural disasters, water shortages and hunger due to the effects of climate change.

Today Professor Parry, co-chair of the IPCC working group that wrote the report, said: "We are all used to talking about these impacts coming in the lifetimes of our children and grandchildren. Now we know that it's us."

More at link: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2007/sep/18/climatechange.internationalnews?gusrc=rss&feed=networkfront