Earth could 'flip' into environmental disaster

The Earth is in imminent peril and nothing short of a planetary rescue will save it from the environmental cataclysm of dangerous climate change, six leading scientists say .

Writing in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A, the American scientists believe civilisation itself is threatened by global warming.

They also implicitly criticise the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for under-estimating the scale of sea-level rises this century as a result of melting glaciers and polar ice sheets.

Instead of sea levels rising by about 40 centimetres, as the IPCC predicts in one of its computer forecasts, the scientists say the true rise may be as great as several metres by 2100, which is why Earth today is in "imminent peril".

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