The call matches an appeal made by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan in the wake of the tsunami which was triggered by a massive earthquake in the Indian Ocean on December 26, 2004 and claimed 217,000 lives.

Fifteen months on, the tsunami was the main talking point at the Third International Conference on Early Warning and the UN promised here that Indian Ocean rim countries will have an alert system by July to warn them of future sea surges.

The region had no alert system when the tsunami struck.

This contributed massively to the death toll and to devastation that meant 50,000 people were still living in tents, former US president Bill Clinton, the UN's special envoy for tsunami recovery, told the meeting.

It heard repeated concerns that countries where tens of thousands died had still not done enough to ensure the scientific information coming from ocean censors will reach people on their coastlines and prompt them to safer ground.

"One of the most burning issues now is to go the last mile, to ensure that the information gets to the local level," the chairwoman of the German Committee for Disaster Reduction, Irmgard Schwaetzer, told the closing session.

Briceno said a lack of communication and political commitment meant lives would again be at risk in countries like Indonesia, which recorded the most deaths, if another tsunami were to hit the Indian Ocean in the near future.

Clinton met here with government officials from the 11 countries affected in 2004 and told them to act faster to implement ways of warning their people to reach safe ground, UN sources said.

The conference saw calls for more funding for a global alert system, and a warning that natural disasters would occur more often as a result of global warming.

"The mega-events of the past 18 months have underlined that we need to think of the unthinkable. They will take place more frequently because of global weather changes and growing urbanisation," Schwaetzer said.

"Within the next 20 years, 80 percent of the world's population will live in urban settlements."

Experts who attended the meeting are due to draw up a checklist for countries to test how ready they are to react to warnings of impending disasters and limit death and damage.

They said improved science meant that tsunamis and earthquakes could be foretold to the minute, while droughts and locust plagues afflicting Africa in particular could be predicted increasingly accurately.

But the moderator of the meeting, British television reporter Sir Trevor McDonald, warned that governments needed to pay as much attention to psychology as to science to ensure that people listen to predictions.

"We have to understand how and why people respond or don't respond," he told some 800 delegates.

"Nobody will leave this conference without a doubt that we have a long way to go."

Though tsunami survivors in Indonesia have taken advice to resettle on safer ground, the same has not proven true in Mozambique which was swept by floods in 2000.

Eunice Mucache, Red Cross programme director for the southern African country, said one of her volunteers had even returned to the exact spot from which he was rescued by boat in raging floodwaters to rebuild his house and replant his crops.

"He said there will not be another flood like that for 100 years and then he will no longer be around."

Author of a three-part New Yorker series on climate change last year, Kolbert has collected her work in one slim volume. Published this month, Field Notes From a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change is already being compared favorably to landmark environmental tome Silent Spring.

Kolbert's reporting took her from the glaciers of Greenland to the Monteverde cloud forest of Costa Rica -- and into the labs and offices of climatologists, oceanographers and others studying the effects of billions of tons of human-generated carbon that now hangs overhead.

Wired News: Many people seem to think that climate change is an issue involving a few scientists, not society as a whole. But your book makes it clear that climate change is more than just a science story.

Elizabeth Kolbert: I really tried to impress upon people ... how we cannot wait. Even now, as global warming is starting to be made manifest in the world, we have determined the climate now for the next half-century. We will not see the full effects of what we have done for decades. (NASA climate scientist) James Hansen said, if we continue on this path, then by the end of this century, we will have committed ourselves to a world that is so warm as to be practically a different planet.

WN: Isn't part of the problem that people associate "warm" with comfortable?

Kolbert: People think, "I won't have to go to Florida anymore. Florida will come to me." People should realize that warmth doesn't mean Florida. It means New York is underwater. It may be that certain places like Siberia are more comfy, but it also means that they have no water. If people say, "Why should I be worried about global warming?" I think the answer is, "Do you like to eat?"

WN: You talk about David Rind's work -- predicting rampant drought conditions afflicting much of the continental United States within 50 years if greenhouse gas emissions continue at business-as-usual levels.

Kolbert: (In the book) he says that, "I wouldn't be surprised if by 2100 most things are destroyed." But he's certainly a very cool guy, not a hysterical person. He's a scientist, and he's just looking at the evidence.

WN: On the other hand, sometimes societal change can happen very quickly. Hit a social tipping point, and suddenly everything's different. And that could be a very good thing.

Kolbert: I think you do see out there in the world ... an increasing awareness. We here in the Northeast just barely had a winter. I think that anyone who has lived through the past winters certainly has been given pause. So we're starting to see the argument that "there's nothing going on" dissipating.

Then you get to the second question, and that's what are we going to do about it? If you want to be really brutally honest, this is not a problem that can be solved. The warming that we've seen so far is estimated to be only half of what (the CO2 already in the atmosphere will cause). It's a problem that you can only say, "In order to prevent this from becoming absolutely catastrophic, perhaps we can do this." But that (is) going to take a monumental effort.

WN: In Lester Brown's words, the world needs an "environmental Churchill."



Kolbert: George Bush could be that person if he had come out in his State of the Union (speech) and said we really need to address this issue -- as opposed to just throwing a bone to it. But you need a leader who people will follow. And you need really bold ideas and a sense of common purpose, and that's so much what we're lacking right now. We've got one planet, only one. You screw up, and that's it.

WN: Any other world leaders who you see showing promise?

Kolbert: The Europeans are way ahead of us, certainly in terms of rhetoric. If you read Tony Blair's speeches, he's very eloquent on the subject. But I don't see anyone on the world stage who has been able to galvanize people around this issue.

WN: In the United States, realistically, the solutions are probably going to be market-driven. What are the things that can be done to make the market sensitive to ecological factors?

Kolbert: Many economists have looked at this issue, and most have ... come to the same place. You have to shift the costs of carbon. Now we're all bearing the cost of carbon emissions in a non-monetary way. And you have to somehow convert that.

WN: So you're talking about a carbon tax.

Kolbert: Yes. Or a carbon emissions trading system.

WN: In other words, some kind of mechanism needs to be in place to monetize the notion of carbon emissions. Playing fantasy baseball, then, what would be a realistic and effective carbon tax in the United States?

Kolbert: People have given me the figure of $100 per ton. If you just run the numbers, people will tell you that's the level you need to make other things competitive and to incentivize the behavior that you're trying to achieve.

WN: And that works out to about $15 a month on a typical home utility bill?

Kolbert: Right.

WN: You also promote Robert Socolow's idea of "stabilization wedges."

Kolbert: What he said (is), you basically need to start stabilizing global emissions now. If we don't do anything, by the middle of the century, we will be at 14 billion tons of carbon per year. We're now at seven. So we basically take the difference between 14 and 7. That's a triangle. You take that triangle. Those are what we need to not emit over the next 50 years. Divide that into wedges: a billion tons per year per wedge at the end, by the time you're at 2050.

How do you get rid of a billion tons per year? He and his colleague came up with 15 ways that are practical. You choose seven of those, and you can achieve that goal. One wedge is a car wedge: Every car has to get twice as good mileage by 2050.... Another wedge he gets out of wind. He gets a wedge out of solar.... He gets a wedge out of nuclear. He gets a wedge out of heating and lighting, doing that more efficiently.

WN: You quote a Nature study predicting that 15 percent to 37 percent of the species on this planet will be extinct or committed to extinction in 50 years. That's an astonishing figure.

Kolbert: People much more expert than I will tell you that we are in the middle of what is probably a mass extinction. People will say that the evolution of large vertebrates, of which we are one, that's just over.

WN: Is there anything, then, that gives you hope for mitigating against catastrophic climate change?

Kolbert: The only thing that gives me hope is that we've survived this long. But I think people should appreciate that this (is) likely to be on the level of any catastrophe we've weathered before. Potentially worse. I'm sorry I can't be more upbeat. I don't want to say I despair, but I also don't want to say, "Not to worry."

Onslow, a fishing town of more than 800 people in the remote Pilbara region, was expected to feel the worst of Cyclone Glenda, meteorologists said.

Australia's north-east is still recovering from Cyclone Larry, which hit the area two weeks ago.

That storm, which made landfall in the state of Queensland, caused no fatalities but left a damage bill which is expected to top A$1bn ($707m).

The Pilbara region, which has been put on red alert, is home to more than 12,000 people. Hundreds of residents have left the area or are sheltering in local rescue centres.

"It's not a nice thing to go through but people seem to grin and bear it, get it together in these times," local resident Colin Walker said.

"Once it's all over we'll go back in and assess the situation and if everything is safe we'll go back to work."

Evacuee John Lugg said: "I hate to think - look at the wind, look at the rain, look at the gutters just pouring now, it's going to be horrendous."

Tides and floods

The storm made landfall at about 1600 (0800 GMT) and the Bureau of Meteorology warned of the potential for a dangerous storm tide as the centre of the cyclone crosses the coast.

"Tides are likely to rise significantly above the normal high tide mark with very dangerous flooding and damaging waves," bureau manager Grahame Reader told AP.

In February 1995, seven fishermen died when two trawlers sunk off Onslow as a cyclone of similar strength passed close by.

Emergency workers feared Cyclone Glenda could be as dangerous as Larry, or Hurricane Katrina, which devastated the US city of New Orleans in August.

"This does have the potential to do what happened in the eastern states and what happened in America," State Emergency Services official Steve Cable told Australian television.

Global mining giant Rio Tinto halted its huge iron ore shipping operation in the region ahead of Glenda's arrival.

Oil firms have also moved their floating rigs out of the path of the cyclone.

The quake occurred at 7.28 pm (1028 GMT) in the northern prefectures of Miyagi and Fukushima, 300 kilometers north of Tokyo, the meteorological agency said.

There were no immediate reports of damage or casualties, police said. There was also no risk of tsunami waves, the meteorological agency said.

Meanwhile I trudged off to the Louis Armstrong International Airport, sitting in the boarding lounge eating leftover muffaletas and reading the Times Picayune. Seven months after Katrina, the newspaper's top headlines still dealt with the aftermath of that storm.

"Drainage improvement and upgrades in blocking [future storm surges] -- such as hurricane gates at the mouths of drainage canals in Orleans Parish -- are part of the [new floodplain plan]...."

Ha!

I sat next to a floodplain expert on my flight home. He said, "It will be another ten years before the Mississippi floodplain will be under control. Sure, people can build on it but for the NEXT TEN YEARS, they will be taking a risk." That's dangerous.

George Bush just spent over 400 billion dollars on reducing a mythological danger to America alledgedly coming from Iraq. On the other hand, this levee catastrophe is a real danger that effects the safety of MILLIONS of Americans. We shoulda spent our $400,000,000,000 on that!

Then the person sitting on the other side of me on my flight home jumped into the conversation. "Speaking of flood gates, they had flood gates for Katrina."

"Really? I didn't know that."

"Yeah. When the water started rising, they blew a hole in the levee so it would flood the Ninth Ward instead of somewhere else." Ah. An improvised flood gate. I'd heard that people had heard explosions before the levee failed but I hadn't realized that that was the reason they blew it. I wonder who got to decide who was to live and who was to die?

Then the guy in the seat behind us chimed in. "Mississippi got hit even harder than New Orleans. I just got done doing some roofing in Waveland."

If Abraham Lincoln or George Washington were our President today, they wouldn't be out adventuring in some hell-hole half-way across the world. They'd be down on the bayous, trying to get the roofs fixed.