Sydney's iconic beaches, coastal houses, commercial property and roads will be threatened by rising sea levels by 2050, while the city's temperature is expected to rise by at least 2 degrees, a new scientific study, launched by the Premier, Nathan Rees, reveals.

    "Today, the science is in for Sydney," Mr Rees said yesterday as he proclaimed the influence of the climate sceptic and former treasurer Michael Costa at an end in NSW.

    "The Costa era of ambiguity around this issue is over. Along with the rest of the NSW public, I recognise that climate change is a reality and that the NSW Government needs to prepare for it," the Premier said. "There is no longer a climate-change sceptic at the centre of government decision-making in this state".

    The study commissioned by the NSW Department of Climate Change, and adopted by the Government, was carried out by the University of NSW and uses research from the United Nations' peak scientific body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

    It examines the effect of climate change on the greater Sydney metropolitan region from the Central Coast to Wollongong, along with other regions in rural NSW. The full state study is expected to be released in January.

    "We've used world's best science to understand what will happen in different parts of this state so we can start planning now for the future," Mr Rees said. "We will all have to change the way we live to some degree."

    When a 1991 cholera outbreak that killed thousands in Peru was traced to plankton blooms fueled by warmer-than-usual coastal waters, linking disease outbreaks to epidemics was a new idea.

    Now, scientists say, it is a near-certainty that global warming will drive significant increases in waterborne diseases around the world.

    Rainfalls will be heavier, triggering sewage overflows, contaminating drinking water and endangering beachgoers. Higher lake and ocean temperatures will cause bacteria, parasites and algal blooms to flourish. Warmer weather and heavier rains also will mean more mosquitoes, which can carry the West Nile virus, malaria and dengue fever. Fresh produce and shellfish are more likely to become contaminated.

    Heavier rainfalls are one of the most agreed-upon effects of climate change. The frequency of intense rainfalls has increased notably in the Midwest, the Northeast and Alaska, and the trend will accelerate, said the 2007 report of the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

    The consequences will be particularly severe in the 950 U.S. cities and towns - including New York, the District, Milwaukee and Philadelphia - that have "combined sewer systems," archaic designs that carry storm water and sewage in the same pipes. During heavy rains, the systems often cannot handle the volume, and raw sewage spills into lakes or waterways, including drinking-water supplies.

    On Sept. 13, during an unrelenting downpour, Chicago chose to prevent urban flooding by opening and releasing runoff containing raw sewage into Lake Michigan. About a month later, a University of Wisconsin study published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine predicted an increase of 50 to 120 percent in such releases into the lake by the end of the century.

    The financial crisis at least affords us an opportunity to rethink our catastrophic ecological trajectory.

    This is nothing. Well, nothing by comparison to what's coming. The financial crisis for which we must now pay so heavily prefigures the real collapse, when humanity bumps against its ecological limits.

    As we goggle at the fluttering financial figures, a different set of numbers passes us by. On Friday, Pavan Sukhdev, the Deutsche Bank economist leading a European study on ecosystems, reported that we are losing natural capital worth between $2 trillion and $5 trillion every year as a result of deforestation alone. The losses incurred so far by the financial sector amount to between $1 trillion and $1.5 trillion. Sukhdev arrived at his figure by estimating the value of the services - such as locking up carbon and providing fresh water - that forests perform, and calculating the cost of either replacing them or living without them. The credit crunch is petty when compared to the nature crunch.

    The two crises have the same cause. In both cases, those who exploit the resource have demanded impossible rates of return and invoked debts that can never be repaid. In both cases we denied the likely consequences. I used to believe that collective denial was peculiar to climate change. Now I know that it's the first response to every impending dislocation.

    Gordon Brown, for instance, was as much in denial about financial realities as any toxic debt trader. In June last year, during his Mansion House speech, he boasted that 40% of the world's foreign equities are now traded here. The financial sector's success had come about, he said, partly because the government had taken "a risk-based regulatory approach". In the same hall three years before, he pledged that "in budget after budget I want us to do even more to encourage the risk takers". Can anyone, surveying this mess, now doubt the value of the precautionary principle?

    Washington - If the United States focused on curbing climate change as soon as a new president took office - or sooner - it could help pull the world from the financial brink, environmental policy experts told Reuters.

    "Skyrocketing energy prices and the financial crisis have been a wake-up call that something's got to change," said Cathy Zoi, chief executive officer of the Alliance for Climate Protection, which is chaired by former Vice President Al Gore.

    "My very strong belief is that we need to reorient our investments toward this transition to a clean energy economy, and it will be the engine of growth for getting us out of the doldrums that we've gotten in right now," Zoi told the Reuters Global Environment Summit this week.

    The reorientation must include U.S. limits on emissions of climate-warming carbon in the United States, she said: "Unless we take action at home, we're not going to be able to have much influence in the international arena about what gets done."

    The Bush administration accepts that human-spurred climate change is a reality but rejects mandatory across-the-board caps on carbon as a disadvantage when competing with fast-growing, big-emitting countries like China and India.

    The United States is alone among the major developed countries in staying out of the carbon-capping Kyoto Protocol, but is part of international discussions on new targets to fight climate change by the end of 2009 at a meeting in Copenhagen.

    Both major U.S. presidential candidates - Democrat Barack Obama and Republican John McCain - favor requiring reductions in greenhouse emissions, and environmental activists have said whoever won the White House in the November 4 elections would be an improvement over President George W. Bush.

    Barcelona, Spain - Evidence is mounting day by day that mankind is to blame for climate change, and the financial crisis is a temporary setback in the hunt for solutions, the head of the U.N. Climate Panel said on Tuesday.

    Rajendra Pachauri, whose panel shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with former U.S. vice president Al Gore, said the downturn could dominate for 2-3 months before politicians return to focus on fixing long-term problems like global warming.

    "The evidence... is getting stronger by the day. We have much more evidence available of what the human role is in climate change," he told Reuters by phone from India. "One has every reason to take action on what's already been said."

    Pachauri's panel, which draws on the work of 2,500 scientists, said last year that it was at least 90 percent sure that mankind was to blame for warming and forecast more droughts, heatwaves, floods and rising sea levels.

    He said at the moment everything seemed to be "on the back burner" because of worries about the financial system. "I'm absolutely sure that climate change will be the last thing people will think about at this point in time."

    "But it's not going to go away," he said. "Sooner or later, they will come back to it." Arctic sea ice, for instance, shrank to its smallest ever recorded area in September 2007, and came close to breaking the record last month.