The cruelty of global warming over the next century will be much inferior than formerly supposed, a foremost climate scientist has warned.

Professor Chris Field, an author of a 2007 landmark report on climate change, said future temperatures “will be beyond anything” predicted.
Prof Field said the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report had underestimated the rate of change.

He said warming is expected to cause more ecological harm than anticipate.

Speaking at the American Science conference in Chicago, Prof Field said fresh data showed greenhouse gas emissions between 2000 and 2007 amplified far more quickly than anticipated.

“We are basically looking now at a future climate that is beyond anything that we’ve considered seriously in climate policy,” he said.
Prof Field said the 2007 report, which predicted temperature rises between 1.1C and 6.4C over the next century, critically underestimated the scale of the crisis.

He said the increases in carbon dioxide have been caused, mainly, by the blazing of coal for electric power in India and China.

Prof Field said the impact on temperatures is as yet indefinite, but warming is expected to speed up at a much faster pace and cause further environmental harm than had been predicted.

He says that a warming planet will dry out forests in tropical areas building them much more likely to undergo from wildfires.

The increasing temperatures could also speed up the melting of the permafrost, greatly mounting the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, Prof Field warns.

“Without effective action, climate change is going to be larger and more difficult to deal with than we thought,” he said.