WASHINGTON: The harmful effects of global warming on daily life are already showing up, and within a couple of decades hundreds of millions of people will not have enough water, top scientists are likely to say next month at a meeting in Belgium.

At the same time, millions of others will be flooded out of their homes each year as the earth reels from rising temperatures and sea, according to a draft of an international scientific report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Tropical diseases like malaria will spread, the draft says. By 2050, polar bears will mostly be found in zoos, their habitats gone. Pests like ants will thrive.

For a time, food will be plentiful because of the longer growing season in northern regions. But by 2080, hundreds of millions of people could face starvation, according to the report, which is still being revised.

The draft document, the second of a series of four being issued this year, focuses on global warming's effects. Written and reviewed by more than 1,000 scientists from dozens of countries, it still must be edited by government officials.

But some scientists said the overall message is not likely to change when it is issued in early April in Brussels, where European Union leaders agreed Friday to work to cut greenhouse gas emissions substantially by 2020. Their plan will be presented to President Bush and other world leaders at a summit meeting in June.

The report offers hope if nations slow and then reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, but it says what has been happening has not been encouraging.

"Changes in climate are now affecting physical and biological systems on every continent," the report says, in marked contrast to a 2001 report by the same international group that said the effects of global warming were coming. But that report mentioned only scattered regional effects.

"Things are happening and happening faster than we expected," said Patricia Romero Lankao of the National Centre for Atmospheric Research one of the many co-authors of the report.

The draft says scientists are confident many current problems—change in species' habits and habitats and increases in allergy-inducing pollen—can be attributed to global warming.

* Source: Times of India, dated - Tuesday, March 13, 2007. *