The half-meter rise in sea levels, caused by a 3 to 5 degree increase in average global temperature, will lead to the loss of a few small island nations and severe impacts for places like Hong Kong. More intense and longer heat waves will lead to larger death counts than those seen in Europe during the summer in the past few years, Harte predicted. Polar bears will likely die off as their habitat vanishes.

"By 2020, the snows of Kilimanjaro could be no more," he added.

And that's the good news, he pointed out. A broad consensus of scientists also believe the world will experience increased intensity of hurricanes, reduced crop yields and a rash of major fires. More data is needed on these projections, however.

Under more dire projections, tropical diseases like malaria could spread to more developed parts of the globe as temperatures climb, he added. Mass extinction of species on par with what happened prehistorically could occur as animals fail to keep pace with climate change.

Solar power and biofuels could help curb greenhouse gases and temperature increases, but some change is likely unavoidable. Carbon dioxide doesn't leave the atmosphere quickly, and swapping out current industrial technology will take time, noted Inez Fung, a researcher at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, a lab operated by the University of California for the U.S. Department of Energy.

The ecological chain reaction is also difficult to reverse. The melting of glaciers means darker earth, which absorbs more sunlight, which in turn accelerates the melting of the glaciers. Similarly, warming leads to less rainfall in certain regions. This can lead to forest fires and more warming carbon dioxide.

Today, carbon dioxide exists in a concentration of about 380 parts per million in the atmosphere, Fung said. The Earth's atmosphere had a carbon dioxide level of 275 parts per million prior to the industrial revolution.

If carbon dioxide levels remained constant for the century, a near impossible best case scenario, the temperature will rise about 2 degrees Celsius, said Fung. If normal consumption trends continue and substantial changes aren't made with regard to fossil fuel use, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will rise to 580 parts per million, she said. That in turn would lead to a rise in global temperatures of about 3 to 5 degrees Celsius.

Quadrupling emissions would raise temperatures in the U.S. by 6 to 10 degrees Celsius on average and create dire problems, said Steve Chu, director of the Lawrence Berkeley lab.

"Six to 10 degrees is the difference between the temperature today and the temperature of the deepest ice age," Chu said.

Even though solar energy is gaining momentum, and policy leaders even in China have begun to create programs to curb pollution, fossil fuels aren't going away. Several companies have already committed to building new coal plants over the next 25 years. If technology to sequester the carbon dioxide that comes out of these plants underground isn't developed, these new plants will spew 145 billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere.

That's as much as humanity put into the air through coal between 1750 and 2000, said David Hawkins of the Natural Resources Defense Council.

"We can do it if we store the carbon in geologic formations," he said. "Conventional coal plants cannot effectively capture it."

While much of the global warming debate has taken place among scientists, businesses are already looking at ways to calculate the risks of rising warming, added Gary Guzy, senior vice president at Marsh USA, which advises insurers on the future risks.

"If you are about to build a hydroelectric dam, you want to think about the long-term impact on the snow pack," Guzy said.

If the sea levels rise 6 meters, possible under some models, everything south of Ft. Meyers in Florida along with the Orlando-Daytona corridor will be underwater, Guzy added.

U.S. Forest Service officials said the company could be held responsible for some of the cost of fighting the blaze.

Thirty homes out of about 200 in the Pine Valley subdivision near the Village of Oak Creek were evacuated because of the fire, which quickly grew from 40 acres. Some homeowners were allowed to return midmorning Friday.

"It could have been much worse," said Sedona Fire District Chief Matt Shobert. "Once it hit the forest, it took off."

Two homes, a small shed and an outbuilding burned before the fire moved into the wilderness Thursday night, Shobert said.

An investigation is continuing into the responsibilities of politicians in the alleged cover-up, including the role of Jacques Chirac, who was the prime minister. But for the time being, anti-nuclear campaigners and a group of 500 thyroid cancer sufferers are celebrating a first victory in a marathon legal campaign.

Professor Pellerin, now 82, has been placed under formal investigation for "aggravated deception", but a potentially more serious accusation of causing "involuntary bodily harm" was dropped on Wednesday.

At the time of the explosion at the Chernobyl reactor on 26 April 1986, the professor was head of the agency, attached to the Health Ministry, which reported on risks to health. As the "cloud" of contamination passed over France between 30 April and 5 May that year, Professor Pellerin issued a series of reassuring statements. He published low average findings of radiation across whole regions. Campaigners have long protested that this deliberately concealed the fact that there were pockets of contamination which suffered high rainfall as the Chernobyl cloud moved westwards.

In a four-hour interrogation by a judge on Wednesday, Professor Pellerin said that he had issued accurate and balanced information to the public. The investigation is likely to continue for several years and the case may never come to trial.

The faithful crammed into mosques or lined up in the scorching sun for weekly prayers across the area where more than 6,200 people were killed, and many said they believed the catastrophe was a warning from God.

"We want to make peace inside by praying and being closer to God," said local merchant Iskak, 40, at a mosque in the village of Giwangan on the southern outskirts of Yogyakarta, the main city in the quake zone.

"The earthquake is because God would like to give a warning to people, that it is the fault of humankind."

In Jati-Wonokromo in hard-hit Bantul district south of the city, others prayed under makeshift canopies because their mosques had been razed in the disaster.

"I feel that my life is more valuable because my life has been given to me by God. I feel much closer to God and I can face the situation in a more peaceful way," said Sukasdi, a 51-year-old police officer.

As the call to prayer sounded across Central Java, hospitals remained overwhelmed and some survivors spent a seventh day awaiting badly needed food and medicines.

The United Nations said aid was moving more freely but that the emergency response was far from over.

"The height of the emergency phase will continue, I would expect, for another week to two weeks, and at the most be completed in a month," Charlie Higgins, the UN's area humanitarian coordinator in Java, told reporters.

The UN plan was "to continue relief in one form or another for up to six months," Higgins said.

"By the end of that six months, you could consider that we would be into the recovery process. Certainly this transition (to the recovery phase) will occur fairly quickly in this emergency."

Saturday's 6.3-magnitude quake killed at least 6,234 people, injured some 46,000 and damaged or destroyed more than 139,000 homes across large swathes of Central Java and Yogyakarta provinces.

As area hospitals spilled over with patients, Georg Petersen, the World Health Organization (WHO) country representative in Indonesia, warned that the threat of infection and disease was growing.

"The risk of infectious diseases has increased and there needs to be a surveillance system in place and a reporting system," he said.

Aid efforts were being hindered by looters, a disaster relief official said.

The official from the government's National Coordinating Board for Disaster Management said increasingly impatient Indonesians were resorting to "stupid acts" in the wake of the disaster.

"If there are trucks with only civilians guarding them, then they will stop and extort bags of rice and boxes of noodles," the official told AFP on condition of anonymity.

"Right now it's the people who are living near the roads who are getting all the goods. Once you go inside the villages, inside the small roads, there are places that have nothing," he said.

A semblance of normality resumed in some parts of the quake zone as shops reopened and traumatised students went back to classes.

But authorities said more than 1,200 schools had been too badly damaged to hold lessons.

"Whatever the disaster is like, education should never stop. So we're trying our best in this emergency situation to keep the schools running," said Sugito, who heads the education office for Yogyakarta province.

"The most urgent thing we have to do is deal with the trauma among teachers as well as students," he told AFP in an interview.

"We're all sad. We can't study any more," said 16-year-old Ari Katoni, one of an estimated 250,000 students without a school.

"We were supposed to have started yesterday, but it was delayed."

As nearby Mount Merapi volcano spewed lava and heat clouds for a seventh consecutive day since the quake, aid workers said authorities were ready to help villagers living on the slopes if it erupted.

"The government has most certainly not lost sight of this. It's not been forgotten at all," said the UN's Higgins.

Lightning killed three people while three others died overnight after gusting winds wrecked homes at Allahabad, in northern Uttar Pradesh, police spokesman Manish Awasthi told AFP in the state capital Lucknow.

Thirty-two of the deaths have been reported from Uttar Pradesh since May 18 when the monsoon hit India's Andaman archipelago and then swirled up the west coast states of Kerala, Maharashtra and Gujarat.

In Gujarat's Narmada, Dahod and Sabarkanta districts, six people were killed and four sustained burns in lightning strikes while two teenagers died in Ahmedabad as the first monsoon rains lashed the state Thursday, police said.

Gujarat alerted disaster management units to possible floods as the local meteorological department warned of heavy rains in coming days.

The Press Trust of India (PTI) reported three rain-related deaths in the southern Indian state of Kerala, where the monsoon arrived a week earlier than usual but has already left a trail of destruction.

The Kerala coastguard was searching for the second straight day Friday for two missing boats with 22 fishermen aboard, PTI said.

In Mumbai, the early monsoon caused travel chaos this week and brought back memories of last year's devastating floods that left 400 dead.

Municipal workers fanned out across the city to clear clogged drains and gutters blamed for the flooding.