(Agencies)
Updated: 2007-11-17 19:25

VALENCIA- The Earth is hurtling toward a warmer age at a quickening pace because of human activity, a Nobel-winning UN scientific panel said in a landmark report Saturday, offering blueprints for action to avert the worst catastrophes.

The report, agreed on after six days of sometimes tense talks, will be the first point of reference for political negotiators meeting next month to begin talks on a successor to the Kyoto Protocol, the only common action plan for controlling greenhouse gas emissions.

The 23-page report, and a longer version also released Saturday, distills thousands of pages of data and computer models resulting from six years of research compiled by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

It declares that climate systems unquestionably have already begun to change. The evidence is in the measured warming of air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting snow and ice and rising sea levels.

The report says recent research has heightened concern that the poor and the elderly will suffer most from climate change; hunger and disease will be more common; droughts, floods and heat waves will afflict the world's poorest regions and more animal and plant species will vanish.