The climate is heating up far faster than scientists had predicted, spurred by sharp increases in greenhouse gas emissions from developing countries like China and India, a top climate scientist has warned.

Chris Field, a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, said recent studies suggested the continued warming of the planet from greenhouse gas emissions could touch off large, destructive wildfires in tropical rain forests and melt permafrost in the Arctic tundra, releasing billions of tons of greenhouse gases that could raise global temperatures even more.

“The consequence of that is we are basically looking now at a future climate that is beyond anything that we’ve considered seriously,” Mr Field told the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Chicago.

“There is a real risk that human-caused climate change will accelerate the release of carbon dioxide from forest and tundra ecosystems, which have been storing a lot of carbon for thousands of years.”

He said that "the actual trajectory" of climate change was more serious than any of the predictions in the IPCC’s fourth assessment report called “Climate Change 2007, which had underestimated the potential severity of global warming over the next 100 years.

“We now have data showing that from 2000 to 2007, greenhouse gas emissions increased far more rapidly than we expected, primarily because developing countries, like China and India, saw a huge surge in electric power generation, almost all of it based on coal,” Mr Field said.

He said that trend was likely to continue if more countries turned to coal and other carbon-intensive fuels to meet their energy needs. If so, he said the impact of climate change would be“more serious and diverse” than the IPCC’s most recent predictions.

Research presented at the AAAS yesterday suggested that the frozen soil of the tundra stored far more greenhouse gas that previously thought, with about 1,000 billion (one trillion) tonnes of carbon now believed to be frozen in permafrost soils.

By comparison, the amount of CO2 that has been released through the burning of fossil fuels since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution is around 350 billion tonnes.

The greenhouse gases in the tundra, which also includes methane, come from the decayed remains of vegetation that died long ago.

Meanwhile, new research on the Southern Ocean surrounded Antarctica suggest that the sea, a vital “carbon sink,” is sucking up less CO2 than before.

Nicolas Metzl, a researcher at the French National Research Institute, said fierce winds, aggravated by climate change and gaps in the ozone layer, were churning the sea, which brought CO2 to the surface and released it into the air.

This adds to previous research that points to the sea’s drooping effectiveness as a carbon sponge, he said.

“Today, human activity injects about 10 billion tonnes of CO2 per year into the atmosphere, compared to around six billion in the early 1990s,” said Mr Metzl.

“Before we had an ocean that captured some two billion tonnes - about a third. Today we are below two billion tonnes,” less than a fifth of the total, he added.

Times Recommends

• A vicar’s wife: ‘There is no one to fight for us’
• Every little helps at the supermarket
• Ugg or Fitflop? The battle of the boots