Global warming will threaten millions say climate scientists

A farmer walks on a dried-up pond in China this year. Extreme drought will affect nearly a third of the planet, according to climate scientists. Picture / Reuters

Drought threatening the lives of millions will spread across half the land surface of the earth in the coming century because of global warming, according to new predictions from Britain's leading climate scientists.

Extreme drought, in which agriculture is effectively impossible, will affect nearly a third of the planet, according to the study from the Met Office's Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research.

It is one of the direst forecasts so far of the potential effects of rising temperatures around the world - yet it may be an underestimate, the scientists involved said yesterday.

The findings, released at the Climate Clinic at the Conservative party conference in Bournemouth, drew astonished and dismayed reactions from aid agencies and development specialists, who fear that the poor of developing countries will be worst hit.

"This is genuinely terrifying," said Andrew Pendleton of Christian Aid. "It is a death sentence for many millions of people. It will mean huge migration off the land at levels we have not seen before, and at levels poor countries cannot cope with.

It will mean huge conflict."

One of Britain's leading expert on the effects of climate change on the developing countries, Andrew Simms from the New Economics Foundation, said last night: "There's almost no aspect of life in the developing countries that these predictions don't undermine - the ability to grow food, the ability to have a safe sanitation system, the availability of water. I think that for hundreds of millions of people for whom getting through the day is already a struggle, this is going to push them over the precipice."

The findings represent the first time that the threat of increased drought from climate change, long feared, has actually been quantified with a modern supercomputer climate model such as the one operated by the Hadley Centre.

Their impact will be all the greater from the fact they may well be an underestimate, as the study did not include potential effects on drought from global-warming-induced changes to the earth's carbon cycle, such as forests dying back in a warming world.

In one unpublished Met Office study, when the carbon cycle effects are included, future drought is even worse.

The current results are regarded as most valid at the global level and so far there is less confidence in them giving a regional picture, but the clear implication is that the parts of the world already stricken by drought, such as Africa, will be the places where the projected increase will have the severest effects.