Global warming effects worsening, targeting the poor

Global warming effects are worsening, according to a United Nations scientific panel, and the poor are going to be hit the hardest.

The Nobel Prize-winning scientists note in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, released Monday local Japan time, that wildfires in the United States, droughts in Australia and flooding in Mozambique, Pakistan and Thailand are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to deadly, unpredictable weather - all the result of climate change, they say.

"We're all sitting ducks," Michael Oppenheimer of Princeton University, one of the main authors of the 32-volume report, said according to Al Jazeera and The Associated Press.

Global warming is triggered by carbon dioxide and other gases that linger in the air and trap heat within the atmosphere. If these greenhouse gases continue to increase, the Earth will warm by 6 or 7 degrees Fahrenheit (3.5 or 4 degrees Celsius) by 2100, a past U.N. report stated. The international goal is to prevent temperatures from rising more than 2 degrees Fahrenheit.

No one can hide from Mother Nature, the panel says, as the risks associated with global warming are going to impact both rural areas and cities, and will affect the price and availability of food as well as the prevalence of certain diseases. But none will be more at risk than the poor, according to researchers.

Report co-author Maarten van Aalst said the gap between the rich and the poor will widen, creating "pockets of poverty" and "hotspots of hunger," even in richer countries.

"We are going to see more and more impacts, faster and sooner than we had anticipated," co-author Saleemul Huq warned.

Climate change will also exacerbate pre-existing societal problems, such as poverty, sickness, violence and the number of refugees, according to the report, and will negatively impact economic growth and crop production.

"Read this report and you can't deny the reality: unless we act dramatically and quickly, science tells us our climate and our way of life are literally in jeopardy. Denial of science is malpractice," U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said Monday in a press release.

"We have a closing window of opportunity," study co-author Patricia Romero-Lankao of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado said. "We do have choices. We need to act now."