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Hello, and happy new year to a new time

Last year the weather gave our planet a terrible beating at least 16,000 people lost their lives as a result of storms

15 million were left homeless and about 10,000 died when the world's worst cyclone swept across Eastern India

Hurricane Floyd hit the United States Typhoon Bartlett Japan Typhoon York hit Hong Kong and Macau even Western Europe was

Hurricane a few weeks ago

The climate it can remain to seem is on the rampage

So are the effects of global warming that we've heard about already upon us and if so, how can we really help to stop them?

With me to discuss what could be called a new climate of fear at the beginning of a new century is Sir John Horton

Coacher of the United Nations Global Warming Science Committee the International Governmental Panel on Climate Change and

The environmentalist George Monbio Guardian journalist and visiting professor at the Department of Philosophy at Bristol University

George Monbio, can you give us a can you give us an overview of what you see happening with the climate in this next hundred years or so?

This could be the most serious problem which civilisation which life on earth faces over the next century

We're seeing two potential sets of effects

So first would be progressive and largely predictable change with for instance the drier

parts of the world becoming drier still some of the wetter parts of the world becoming wetter still with potentially devastating

consequences for the agriculture of those regions and for the the settled parts of those regions

We could see many more of the sorts of events you've just been talking about

The second level of effects is the unpredictable the big bang effects which could come about through what's called non-linear change

And these could be potentially as far reaching as a disruption of the Gulf Stream which keeps Western Europe warm and we could end up

End up paradoxically with a significantly colder climate in Western Europe if some of the effects which have been predicted do cut in

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