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At a scientific conference on climate change held this week in Copenhagen, four environmental experts announced that sea levels appear to be rising almost twice as rapidly as had been forecast by the United Nations just two years ago. The warning is aimed at politicians who will meet in the same city in December to discuss the same subject and, perhaps, to thrash out an international agreement to counter it.

At the moment, global emissions are thought to be rising at nearly 3 per cent a year - so turning that into a 3 per cent annual cut would be a gigantic slashing of what the earth's factories and motor vehicles are pumping into the atmosphere. There is as yet nothing remotely like that on the table for potential agreement in Copenhagen, and if a deal of this ambition were to be done, it would be regarded as a triumph. Yet even with that, the Hadley Centre research suggests, the chances of keeping the rise down to about 2C by 2100 would be only 50-50. Furthermore, the simulations suggest that there is a worst-case scenario - about a 10 per cent chance - of the rise by the end of the current century reaching, even with these drastic cuts, a level of 2.8C above the pre-industrial, which is well into disaster territory.

The concluding message from the seminar is that climatic change will place unprecedented pressures on agriculture. New crop varieties are needed to maintain the level of food production under the climate changes predicted for the 21st century in all IPCC scenarios, irrespective of any action taken today. Plant breeders are dependent on genetic diversity from many countries to adapt crops to changing climatic conditions. This biological diversity is under continuous threat. All countries should recognize their responsibility for food production and the need for international collaboration in this regard. At the Copenhagen Climate Conference in December 2009 the need to conserve and make available crop diversity as the bedrock of all plant breeding efforts must be recognised as a fundamental component of climate change adaption.

Despite the political rhetoric, the scientific warnings, the media headlines and the corporate promises, he would say, carbon emissions were soaring way out of control - far above even the bleak scenarios considered by last year's report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the Stern review. The battle against dangerous climate change had been lost, and the world needed to prepare for things to get very, very bad.