Weather forecasters are predicting increasing tropical downpours, yet ironically more drought in parts of southeast Asia and the south Pacific as the effects of global warming begin to grip.

Pacific climatologists at a four-day meeting in Auckland, New Zealand this week, said warming was already producing more pronounced extremes in these areas.

Climate change is particularly critical as many volcanic island atolls are totally dependant on rainfall for their water supplies. Global warming is predicted to produce heavier, more extreme rainfalls but often over narrower smaller regions.

Therefore we have the apparent contradictory prospect of more heavy rain and yet more drought.

Furthermore, as the temperature rises and the rainfall patterns change, the impact on agriculture, water-borne and insect-borne diseases in these regions look like being profound.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change believes the Earth's average surface temperature increased by about 0.6 Celsius during the 20th century. Of this rise two-thirds has occurred since 1975.

It projects a further rise of between 1.4 and 5.8 Celsius from 1990-2100, with the variation depending on how much action is taken to curb greenhouse-gas emissions.

If, as some scientists predict, the global temperature increases by 2 to 3 Celsius, several hundred million more people a year will be exposed to malaria, with a massive hike in the occurrence of potentially fatal illnesses such as diarrhoea.

There are also other, currently unquantifiable risks to health. These include deaths from heatwaves, of the kind that ravaged Western Europe in the summer of 2003, the region's hottest on record.

Perhaps such extremes need to hit closer to North America before global warming is taken more seriously by the nation that can do most to halt it.

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