Robert May, president of the country's leading scientific body, the Royal Society, issued the warning as a 12-day conference was set to get underway Monday in Montreal to decide the fate of the Kyoto Protocol, the United Nations' troubled treaty for curbing greenhouse gases.

"The impacts of global warming are many and serious: sea-level rise ... changes in availability of fresh water ... and the increasing incidence of extreme events -- floods, droughts, and hurricanes -- the serious consequences of which are rising to levels which invite comparison with weapons of mass destruction," May said in an advance copy of a speech released Monday to coincide with the start of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change on the same day.

The Montreal meeting is the first by the convention since the UN's pollution-cutting Kyoto Protocol, signed by 156 countries, took effect on January 16.

But a notable non-signatory of the pact committing industrialised nations to reducing or offsetting emissions of carbon dioxide and five other greenhouse gases is the planet's heaviest polluter: the United States.

Observers are gloomy about the prospects of the Montreal round coming up with a post-2012 deal that satisfies the European Union, green groups, business and US President George W. Bush, who argues Kyoto penalises the oil-dependent US economy.

But May said the convention attended by up to 10,000 delegates from 180 countries could help by agreeing to a pollution analysis calculating the potential costs of corrective action -- and the fallout if nothing was done.

"The Montreal meeting could be constructive if there at least emerged agreement to initiate a study of target levels for atmospheric concentrations, as a basis for discussing appropriate plans of action," he said.

"We need countries to initiate a study into the consequences of stabilizing greenhouse gas concentrations at, below, or above twice pre-industrial levels, so that the international community can assess the potential costs of their actions or lack of them.

"Such an analysis could focus the minds of political leaders, currently worried more about the costs to them of acting now than they are by the consequences for the planet of acting too little, too late," May said.

The scientist pointed to Hurricane Katrina, which devastated the US jazz capital of New Orleans in August, as an example of what could happen more often if politicians failed to tackle global warming.

Studies undertaken before the storm suggested rising sea temperatures would mean more severe hurricanes, May said.

"The estimated damage inflicted by Katrina is equivalent to 1.7 percent of US GDP this year, and it is conceivable that the Gulf Coast of the US could be effectively uninhabitable by the end of the century," he said.

May is set to deliver his last address of his five-year term as the head of the Royal Society on Wednesday.

All rights reserved. � 2005 Agence France-Presse. Sections of the information displayed on this page (dispatches, photographs, logos) are protected by intellectual property rights owned by Agence France-Presse. As a consequence, you may not copy, reproduce, modify, transmit, publish, display or in any way commercially exploit any of the content of this section without the prior written consent of Agence France-Presse.

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