"It was warm and there were bushes and there were trees," he told some 850 delegates in the Tasmanian capital Hobart, the national AAP news agency reported.

The delegates are attending the combined meetings of the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research and the Council of Managers of National Antarctic Programs.

Dunbar said climate experts were predicting a doubling of the levels of carbon dioxide by 2100, "but it actually looks like it's going to come sooner unfortunately."

Scientists blame greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, produced mainly by the burning of fossil fuels such as coal and oil, for causing rising temperatures worldwide.

A minor eruption of the 4 275m Galeras volcano at 6pm prompted authorities to declare a state of maximum alert as they waited to see if further explosions would occur, said Eduardo Gonzalez, head of the government's disaster prevention office.

About 2 000 of the people affected in three nearby alpine hamlets were already evacuated, and the rest were expected to be taken to disaster shelters in the coming hours, Gonzalez said.

The volcano, 520km south-west of Bogota, near the border with Ecuador, has a long history of activity.

President Michelle Bachelet declared a state of emergency in the area, about 300 miles south of Santiago, because of massive flooding triggered by rain-swollen rivers, the Interior Ministry's National Emergency Office said.

Seven of the deaths occurred in a landslide in Chiguayante, where a family of four was buried along with three firefighters, the emergency office said.

A police officer remained missing after he and another officer were swept away by the Teno River on Tuesday night. The second officer was found clinging to branches 18 miles down river Wednesday.

Chilean power generators opened floodgates at major reservoirs because of the heavy rain that also washed out roads and cut electricity in isolated rural areas.

Michael Wyllie, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service, said tornadoes were reported to have touched down in Westchester County and possibly Fairfield County in southern Connecticut. But confirmation of them would not come until the weather service could assess the damage, he added.

The National Weather Service reported winds of nearly 60 mph (96.5 kmh). Airports in the New York metropolitan area reported delays of up to 90 minutes as heavy rain and winds buffeted the area.

Amid the heavy winds, one building collapsed in Hawthorne, New York, about 30 miles north of New York City, but no serious injuries were reported.

"It's burning vigorously in specific areas," said Capt. Marc DeRosier of the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. Eight air tankers and 13 helicopters attacked from above. Containment was just 16 percent.

The fire, ignited during the weekend by lightning, destroyed 42 houses, 55 other buildings and 91 vehicles, authorities told reporters Wednesday night. They had previously pegged the number of structures destroyed at about 30 but revised that after conducting a detailed count Wednesday.

The fire was moving southwest as winds gusted to 40 mph, DeRosier said, and 800 to 1,000 people remained evacuated from Pioneertown, Burns Canyon, Rimrock, Gamma Gulch, Flamingo Heights and Little Morongo Canyon.

Officials worried that if the blaze continued to move toward the San Bernardino National Forest, it could grow rapidly, threatening the resort community of Big Bear Lake.

A bark beetle infestation has killed many trees in the area in recent years, which could provide the wildfire with substantial fuel.

"If it starts in there, it will be almost impossible to stop," said forestry department spokeswoman Karen Guillemin.

Smoke darkened the sky over the Mojave Desert north of the town of Yucca Valley.

Firefighters used picks and shovels against hotspots in the Pioneertown area, where the fire raged Tuesday. There was no damage to the historic area, which dates to the 1940s when Hollywood cowboys such as Roy Rogers and Russ "Lucky" Haden began establishing it as a filming site.

In Morongo Valley - where large ranch homes are surrounded by highly combustible greasewood, Joshua trees, pinion pines and fine brush - residents watched nervously.

"I want to see how bad it is and see if I need to pack up my pictures," said Tammy Taylor, who drove the family Jeep to the top of the canyon from their nearby home.

An evacuation center was set up at Yucca Valley High School, and horses and other livestock were taken to the town of Landers.

Elsewhere in the West, several new wildfires in southern Montana spread quickly - one to an estimated 10,000 acres - because of windy weather.

At least one house on the Crow Indian Reservation was reported destroyed by a blaze estimated at 4,500 acres, said Jon Kohn, an information officer for the Crow Agency Bureau of Indian Affairs' Forestry division.

There also was a 3,150-acre wildfire west of Columbus, and another burning north of Pompeys Pillar that was estimated at 10,000 acres, said Mary Apple, a spokeswoman with the
Bureau of Land Management.

Pam Soule, emergency management director for LaGrange County in Indiana, said a weather observer in Olive Lake reported 9 inches of rain. Floodwaters damaged at least seven homes in Topeka and two homes in Clearspring Township. Topeka firefighters were filling sandbags to protect other homes, but she said conditions were improving.

"Most of the water that was up over the roads has receded to the point they've taken down the high water signs," she said.

Dianna Snyder, 40, was visiting a public garden in Mansfield, Ohio with her 9-year-old daughter when the girl slipped and was swept through 460 feet of drainage pipe, police Lt. Dave Nirode said. The girl was able to pull herself out on the other side.

Snyder jumped in to rescue her daughter, Nirode said. Her body was found downstream.

Nearby, flooded-out campers had to flee to emergency shelters.

In Ohio's Ashtabula County, firefighters, sheriff's divers and a Coast Guard helicopter crew searched for a 21-year-old man reported missing from a group swimming in a creek, said Petty Officer Matt Schofield with the Coast Guard in Cleveland.

Meanwhile, a tornado in Mount Pleasant, N.Y., threw a truck onto gasoline pumps, partly collapsed a commercial building and ripped off a hotel's roof, said Susan Tolchin, chief adviser to Westchester County Executive Andrew Spano.

There were no reported injuries, officials said, but power was knocked out to more than 4,000 residents.

In North Dakota, parts of which reported temperatures in the 100s on Wednesday, a storm damaged more than two dozen buildings in the McLean County town of Coleharbor, blew grain bins through town and destroyed an old brick schoolhouse, authorities said.

Two minor injuries were reported. Authorities were unsure Wednesday whether a tornado was responsible.

Officials crowed that the metropolitan area, home to roughly 6 million people, had seen the end of pollution emergencies and so-called pre-emergencies that force cars off the street and shut down industrial plants.

"The government promised way too much, they never should have said that," said Rainer Schmitz, a chemical engineer at the University of Chile who advises the city on air quality and says it needs stricter standards.

Chile's economy is booming due to robust exports of copper, salmon and forestry products. But economic good times have aggravated pollution. Brand new superhighways crisscross Santiago and sales of cars -- the main pollution source in the capital -- have surged.

A recent international audit strongly criticized government cuts in financing for Santiago's clean-air program, saying government complacency was to blame for rising concentrations of harmful ozone and carbon monoxide since 2002.

Official numbers also show that in the last two years, levels of fine particles known as PM2.5 -- dangerous because they travel deep into the lungs -- have risen in several districts of Santiago and are well above international safe air standards.

"The smog is worse all the time and kids with allergies have a really bad reaction. You have to take them to the hospital every two weeks with pneumonia, bronchitis, laryngitis," said 39-year-old Jenny Lamey, a mother of three, carrying her coughing baby in the emergency room at San Borja hospital in Santiago.

DEADLY AIR

Santiago's geography does not help matters. The city sits in a dusty, arid bowl up against the Andes, a wall of mountains that inhibit air circulation.

Low rainfall this year has aggravated air quality and since January Santiago officials have declared 14 alerts, when air pollution reaches the lower end of a potentially dangerous range, making 2006 the most polluted year since 2003.

The alerts force some older cars off the road to improve air quality, but even when the government's index shows air quality is good, concentrations of microparticles are high enough to cause premature deaths, said Andres Tchernitchin, a pathologist at the University of Chile.

Tchernitchin said studies show that mortality rates rise 10 percent even when the official air quality index is between 100-150, which is not high enough to set off an alert.

A 2001 study published in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives estimated Santiago could prevent some 4,000 premature deaths between 2000 and 2020 by reducing levels of fine particles by 10 percent.

Even though pollution levels are still better than they were 10 years ago, Santiago is firmly stuck among Latin America's most polluted cities, along with Mexico City and Sao Paulo.

Experts say it will be expensive and painful for Santiago to further clean its air, since it already took the obvious, easy and economical measures.

NO PAIN, NO GAIN

"The easy fruit has been plucked. If we want to reproduce the improvements in bringing down emissions that we had at the beginning of the '90s the measures are a lot more painful, a lot more costly and would radically change how we live," said Ricardo Katz, manager of an environmental consulting firm.

Katz said poor people would bear the brunt of new measures such as prohibiting wood fires, which would eliminate the cheapest cooking and heating fuel, and stricter emissions standards for buses, which could lead to higher bus fares.

Public pressure for tougher anti-smog measures has mounted this year as local media have reported the deterioration in air quality and as Santiago heads into another winter of hospital emergency rooms filled with coughing children.

On a recent Saturday, Luis Mariano Rendon, a lawyer and ecologist, led a group of 20 to 40 bicyclists wearing surgical masks in a 12-hour bike ride in circles around the government palace in the heart of Santiago, to push for cleaner air.

"We need a cultural change. Santiago is not going to get rid of pollution just changing the type of filter or gas in the car, we have to de-pollute our culture," Rendon said.

Rendon -- who got a traffic ticket for using car lanes during the bicycle protest -- said the government has stimulated car use with new highways.

PRAY FOR RAIN, TEAR DOWN MOUNTAINS

"The pollution level is unacceptable ... It's clear very little has been done ... it's clear that the (government's) only concrete measure is to pray for rain, and lots of it," said Gonzalo Uriarte, an opposition lawmaker.

Health officials and opposition politicians say the government is not spending enough to control pollution and center-left President Michelle Bachelet said she would earmark some of Chile's extraordinary income from high copper prices to finance the pollution battle.

At the hospital with her coughing child, Lamey recognized Santiago's geography is a major obstacle.

"I'm waiting for the country to do something, it seems like the only answer is to knock down the mountains," she said.