If global warming rates continue to explode, sea level rise by the end of the century may be as much as 25 metres.

Forecasting models developed by the IPCC, the International Panel on Climate Change, the UK Independent reports, "may be woefully misleading."

NASA scientist Jim Hansen points out an inconvenient truth from ice and earth sampling-that when global temperatures increased 2 to 3 degrees above today's weather some 3.5 million years ago, sea levels rose by 25 metres, not the 59 cm being predicted by IPCC.

"Feedback" mechanisms-such as highly reflective white ice melting into highly absorbent dark oceans-means an ever accelerating rate of global warming.

Last month, Gary Shaffer of the Niels Bohr Institute in Denmark warned that global warming could create vast "dead zones" across oceans.

Even though there will be more ocean, warmer water circulates more slowly.

The BBC quotes Shaffer as saying there now had to be a "question mark" placed over future generations considering the oceans as a major food source. 

These dead zones could last between 1500 and 2000 years, adds Jens Olaf Pepke Pedersen, a physicist at the Technical University of Denmark.

These are just three of a series of high profile warnings that global warming timeframes are imploding, starting two years ago with statements from organisations like Greenpeace and WWF.

Fast forward to January 2009, and the reports keep coming. In what it described as a "pioneering" study, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration warned of similarly long-lasting disasters on land.

"It has long been known that some of the carbon dioxide emitted by human activities stay in the atmosphere for thousands of years," NOAA senior scientist Susan Solomon said. "

But the new study advances the understanding of how this affects the climate system.

Solomon's study predicts that warming will have the effect of reproducing the "dust bowls" of 1930s America-but for 1000 instead of 20 years.

Similar predictions are made for Australia, raising serious doubt about its ability to keep its own people alive, much less support an influx of climate refugees.

Congratulating Barack Obama, Hansen warned the new US president he had "four years to save the world".

Globally, IPCC reports carry more weight than lone scientists, but world consumption is already polluting faster than the worst case scenario presented by the UN agency, says UK Environment Agency chairman, Lord Chris Smith.

"The current decade will determine our ability to prevent dangerous climate change," he told Public Service, an online state news site.

How dangerous?

"Ice declines are currently 30 years ahead of the IPCC projected models," says John Coleman, S.J., a globalisation researcher.

Sea level rise, however, is not the more immediate concern. In 2005, researchers from the US National Center for Atmospheric Research released a review of cyclone stats from 1970 to 2004.

"What we found was rather astonishing," said Peter Webster from Georgia Tech.

"In the 1970s, there was an average of about 10 Category 4 and 5 hurricanes per year globally. Since 1990, the number of Category 4 and 5 hurricanes has almost doubled, averaging 18 per year globally."

A similar rate of increase would see nearly 40 cyclones worldwide, possibly more as feedback mechanisms kick in, such as melting "perma" frost releasing a tsunami of global warming gases from millennia of years of rotting vegetation.

Julienne Stroeve, from the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre (NSIDC), says: "Simply put, it's a case of we hate to say we told you so, but we did."

An NSIDC review points to arctic ice already being beyond the "tipping point" towards ice-free summers, reports the UK Independent.

Global warming doubters and deniers, once in the scientific minority, continue to fight against what they dismiss as climate change "alarmism". Most deniers are funded by oil companies and free market fundamentalists, but an even smaller minority of genuine doubters protest that the earth is one long history of ice ages.They describe it as "arrogance" that man can have any impact on natural cycles.

Maybe so, but, if so, SPREP supporters and critics alike see that as an even more reason to get high level movement across sovereign states-as well as partner territories.