More stunningly stupid stuff from an IPCC co-chair

Tropical forests may dry out and become vulnerable to devastating wildfires as global warming accelerates, a senior scientist said yesterday.

Soaring greenhouse gas emissions, driven by a surge in coal use in countries such as China and India, threaten temperature rises that will turn damp and humid forests into tinderboxes, said Chris Field, co-chair of the UN's Nobel prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Higher temperatures could see wildfires raging through the tropics and a large scale melting of the Arctic tundra, releasing billions of tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere that will accelerate warming even further, he claimed.

Field, director of global ecology at the Carnegie Institute, told the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Chicago that the panel's report on climate change in 2007 had underestimated the severity of global warming this century...