"Birds are the quintessential 'canaries in the coal mine' and are already responding to current levels of climate change," said the report, launched at a United Nations conference in Kenya on ways to slow warming.

"Birds now indicate that global warming has set in motion a powerful chain of effects in ecosystems worldwide," WWF said.

"Robust evidence demonstrates that climate change is affecting birds' behavior -- with some migratory birds even failing to migrate at all."

In the future, it said, unchecked warming could put large numbers of species at risk, with estimates of extinction rates as high as 72 per cent, "depending on the region, climate scenario and potential for birds to shift to new habitats."

It said the "more extreme scenarios" of extinctions could be prevented if tough climate protection targets were enforced and greenhouse gas emissions cut to keep global warming increases to less than 2 degrees C (1.6 F) above pre-industrial levels.

Already in decline in Europe and the United States, many migratory birds were now missing out on vital food stocks that are appearing earlier and earlier due to global warming, widely blamed by scientists on emissions from burning fossil fuels.

In Canada's northern Hudson Bay, the report said, mosquitoes were hatching and reaching peak numbers earlier in the spring, but seabirds breeding there had not adjusted their behavior.

In the Netherlands, it added, a similar mismatch had led to the decline of up to 90 per cent in some populations of pied flycatchers over the last two decades.

"NOWHERE TO GO"

Predicted rising temperatures could see Europe's Mediterranean coastal wetlands -- critical habitats for migratory birds -- completely destroyed by the 2080s, it said.

Rising temperatures were also seen having disastrous impacts on non-migratory species, as their habitat ranges shifted.

"Many centres of species richness for birds are currently located in protected areas, from which birds may be forced by climatic changes into unprotected zones," the report said.

"Island and mountain birds may simply have nowhere to go."

In the U.S., unabated warming was seen cutting bird species by nearly a third in the eastern Midwest and Great Lakes, while almost three-quarters of rainforest birds in Australia's northeastern Wet Tropics were at risk of being wiped out.

"In Europe, the endangered Spanish imperial eagle, currently found mainly in natural reserves and parks, is expected to lose its entire current range," WWF's report said.

Also at high risk were eight species of brightly colored Hawaiian honeycreeper,Galapagos Islands penguins and the Scottish capercaillie -- the world's biggest grouse -- which WWF said could lose 99 per cent of its habitat due to warming.

Kenyan emergency workers were meanwhile struggling with the effect of torrential, unharvested rains and floodwaters on an impoverished population.

"We have floods across the country and, since it is still raining, we fear the situation will deteroriate," said Abdi Ahmed, the acting disaster response chief at the Kenya Red Cross Society (KRCS).

In addition, the Kenyan health ministry issued an alert for possible outbreaks of water-borne diseases, notably cholera, in the affected regions.

At the weekend, at least six people, including a schoolgirl, were swept away and drowned by raging waters around the Indian Ocean port of Mombasa and the northeastern town of Garissa, officials said. Two others are missing.

The fatalities brought Kenya's flood death toll to 21 since October 25, when the first damaging effects of the unusually heavy October-to-December "short rains" season were reported by authorities.

Since then, at least 60,000 Kenyans -- 50,000 on the coast and 10,000 in the northeast -- have been forced from their homes by flood waters that have washed away crop fields, bridges and roads and destroyed numerous buildings.

"All these people are directly affected or completely cut off and we cannot access them," Ahmed told AFP.

On Saturday, the main road linking Mombasa, about 500 kilometers (300 miles) southeast of Nairobi, to Tanzania was cut off with four bridges washed away, a local official said.

"Delivering food to the 50,000 people who are in need of urgent supplies is the main problem," said Moffat Kangi, the commissioner of Kwale district just south of Mombasa.

"We are looking for water, shelter and medicine for the affected people, but in the long run we will be required to assist up to 200,000 people here," he told AFP. "Any help we can get will be appreciated."

In the capital, municipal officials said flood waters had blocked the city's drainage system, causing floods in some residential districts.

But the recent floods are not limited to Kenya, which is being hit as it hosts 6,000 international delegates to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) that ends this week.

The onset of rains has compounded problems across the Horn of Africa region already brought by a recent killer drought, since parched soil inundating the worst-affected areas is unable to absorb the water, officials said.

In neighboring Somalia, floods have killed at least 42 and displaced 10,000 people over the past two weeks, compounding the misery affecting millions in the lawless Horn of Africa nation.

In neighboring Ethiopia, flooding from late October rains that burst the banks of several river has killed at least 68 people and affected some 280,000 people, according to officials there.

Volunteers from the charity Acorn began the two-day process of gutting one such house belonging to Gwen Brown in New Orleans East suburb in late October, removing damaged goods and stripping the house to its walls, floorboards and ceilings.

They wore white full-body protective suits and put on gas masks, goggles and thick gloves because the spores infested every corner of the house.

"There's nothing like a maggot-filled refrigerator," said Daryl Durham, the team leader, as he hauled one into the street to join a growing pile of possessions. The stench from the fridge filled the road.

Flood waters that surged into the famed city of jazz in August last year churned the house contents around like a whirlpool and then sat at a depth of 5 feet for weeks before receding. Since then the house, like thousands of others, has been left untouched.

Acorn says its volunteers have gutted around 1,600 homes at a rate of around 20 per month and around 2,000 homes remain on its list to be cleared out, though many other residents have signed up with other groups to have their houses dealt with.

"People ... just think it was a city that was demolished. If people realized that these were people's lives then more things would happen quicker," said Lauren Pembo, 19, a student volunteer and New Orleans native.

CITY PLAN

As part of the Good Neighbor Program, Mayor Ray Nagin proposed $15 million in his $419 million November budget to strip 5,000 homes and $5 million to demolish 10,000 more, said Anthony Faciane, chief of development in the mayor's office.

The program, which started a year after the storm, involves a three-step, 120-day process for homeowners who have not cleaned out or demolished damaged homes or applied to a volunteer agency to do the job.

Homeowners are first given notice that they are in violation of local laws, then after 30 days a notice is put on the property and on a Web site and 30 days after that authorities can seek permission to demolish or to gut and board up a property.

"It is crucial that most of our resources have to be given for making a high-quality of life for the pioneers, the people who came back and started to rebuild. We need to clean neighborhoods up," Faciane told Reuters.

Around 120,000 properties were damaged by flooding in New Orleans. Permits had been issued for around 100,000 to be gutted or repaired, leaving around 20,000 untouched. Of those, around 15,000 would have to be demolished, Faciane said.

Many homeowners, traumatized by their experience of losing so much, were reluctant to make a decision on whether to return and rebuild so the city was setting deadlines to help them decide, he said.

"What people don't realize is that this was the first time in history is that an entire American city was shut down," Faciane said.

CROWBARS, SENSITIVITY

Volunteers use crowbars to prize sheetrock from walls in damaged homes. But they have to be careful -- items that look worthless may be of intense personal value.

For many people, seeing the contents of their flooded houses piled up in the street is traumatic.

Brown, whose New Orleans East home yielded the maggot-infested fridge and who fled to Houston, Texas, just before the storm, maintained telephone contact with the team clearing her single-story home and the next day returned to see it.

"This was my first place. I was so happy here. I would sit on this patio after work," said Brown, 51, as she picked through old records, carpets, plastic flowers and other items.

A neighbor who failed to get out before the storm drowned in her back yard. The body was removed in the immediate aftermath of the storm, she said.

Almost every item she found triggered memories. A framed print of jazz singer Billie Holliday had survived as had a bottle stuffed with coins her daughter used as a piggy bank.

Insurance money she received went to pay off the mortgage and she planned, one day, to rebuild the house and move back.

But Brown was unsentimental about her ruined possessions and marveled how much "junk" she'd accumulated over the years.

"It's a closure because this part of our life is over," she said as she surveyed her stuff. "We loved this house but I can't get none of it back."

But environmental groups in the southern African country said yesterday that the development risked destroying the park and putting the status of the falls as a world heritage site at risk.

An official from the World Heritage Centre, the UN body responsible for choosing the sites, said that a team would visit the falls later this month to examine reports of "uncontrolled and unplanned urban developments" affecting the site.

Lazare Eloundou Assomo, the Africa specialist at the World Heritage Centre, said depending on the seriousness of the mission's findings, the UN organisation could place the Victoria Falls on the world heritage endangered sites list.

"There are reports that the issue of uncontrolled and unplanned urban development is affecting the integrity of the world heritage property. The site may be threatened," he said. The falls, which are known in Zambia as Mosi-oa-Tunya, the "smoke that thunders", are about a mile wide and 420 feet high, making them the largest falls in the world - far bigger than the Niagara falls in North America. Victoria Falls is along the Zambia/Zimbabwe border on the Zambezi river, one of Africa's longest.

As the economy in neighbouring Zimbabwe has collapsed, Zambia has attempted to capitalise by marketing itself as the true home of the Victoria Falls.

The government hopes to bring in one million tourists every year by 2010, generating more than $500m (£260m) - quite a large sum for a country where 68 per cent of the population live on less than $1 (52p) a day.

The latest development, by a firm called Legacy Holdings, would see the construction of two luxury hotels, a golf course and 450 chalets on the edge of the Zambezi river, close to Victoria Falls.

The company claims that the project would create a total of 2,000 new jobs, attract 150,000 additional tourists to the area and provide Zambia with $170m (£90m) more per year in foreign exchange.

But such development, environmentalists warn, could put the ecology of the park beside the Falls, which includes rare black rhinos, at risk. Peter Sinkamba, a local environmental campaigner, accused the Zambian government of failing to carry out a proper study into the potential for ecological damage. He claimed that Zambian law had not been followed. "The whole project has been done in reverse," he said.

Environmental groups have threatened to ask the courts to block the project if the government allows it to proceed. Mr Assomo added: "World heritage sites have a value that must be protected. If the values are threatened by urban development it could be placed on the endangered list."

A spokesman for the Zambian government was unavailable for comment yesterday.

The evidence comes from a 2500 metre ice core, drilled by European scientists at Dronning Maud Land, on the part of Antarctica that faces the South Atlantic.

With its compacted layers of ice and telltale concentrations of methane in trapped air bubbles, the core yields a picture of snowfall and atmospheric temperatures going back 150,000 years.

Even better than that, it can be matched with cores of similar amplitude drilled in the Greenland icesheet.

Put together, the cores provide the first solid evidence to back a theory that millennial scale climate changes that have unfolded in the far north and south of the Atlantic are not isolated, local events, but linked.

The glacial climate in the Northern Atlantic can swing extraordinarily rapidly, with temperatures rising by 8-16°C within the space of a few decades at the end of each Ice Age and falling back, albeit more slowly, when the next Ice Age beckons.

Antarctica, though, has far smaller temperature shifts, of between 1-3°C, and these unfold over millennia.

But the two sets of ice cores point to what the European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctica scientists describe as a bipolar seesaw

In short, what happens at one end of the Atlantic has a huge effect on the other, although at different time scales and in different ways.

The cause appears to be a conveyor-belt system of ocean flows.

On the conveyor belt

Relative heat from the Southern Ocean around Antarctica is picked up by a complex system called the meridional overturning circulation (MOC), of which the Gulf Stream is the best-known component.

The MOC channels warm surface water up to the North Atlantic, coincidentally enabling countries in northwestern Europe to have a balmy climate despite their northerly latitude.

When this warm water reaches the far north, it cools and sinks, and the MOC sends it back south, back down towards Antarctica, at depths far below the ocean's surface.

"Our data shows that the degree of warming in the south is linearly related to the duration of cold periods in the North Atlantic," says lead author Dr Hubertus Fischer of Germany's Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Bremerhaven.

Understanding this link also sheds light on what the researchers say is a troubling aspect about human-induced climate change: the fate of Antarctica, where the world's biggest store of frozen water is held.

"Today, Antarctica is still a reservoir of cold. We don't see any contribution to global sea-level change because of Antarctica, it's not melting yet. In fact there has been more precipitation and some models suggest that Antarctica actually will grow a little," Fischer says.

That reassuring scenario could change if, as some studies are now tentatively suggesting, the MOC is beginning to falter, says Fischer.

The causes for this slowing of the Atlantic conveyor belt could be a run-off of cold water from melting Siberian permafrost or the Greenland icesheet, triggered by rising atmospheric temperatures.

But any disruption would lead to a build-up of warmer water off Antarctica, according to the conveyor-belt theory.

"If the thermohaline [ocean convection] circulation in the Atlantic slows down just a little, it would cause a warming in the Southern Ocean," Fischer says.

"And if you have warming around Antarctica, at a certain point, the fringes of Antarctica will even warm over the melting point. Then we could start to see melting at the borders and run-off and that would contribute to sea-level rise."

The x-ray flare is the first-ever detected beyond our own Sun that bears a striking resemblance to the much smaller 'x-class' flares generated occasionally by our own Sun.

"It's a hundred thousand times more powerful than the largest solar flares ever recorded," says astronomer Dr Steven Drake of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.

Despite being far more powerful, it looks like it was created in the same way, he says.

It starts with a tangle of magnetic field lines on the surface of a star that short-circuits. When that happens, atomic particles are accelerated to speeds only seen on Earth in high-tech particle accelerators.

The accelerated particles can emit gamma rays, which is what caught the Swift satellite's attention in the first place.

When the satellite turned to face II Pegasi, it took aim with its x-ray detector and caught the hour-long eruption of x-rays.

Violent eruption

The x-rays were created as material violently erupted from the star and then arched back down and slammed back onto its surface.

By comparison, x-ray flares on the Sun last only second or minutes, at most.

"It's certainly one of the biggest ever seen," says Drake about the II Pegasi flare. It's the hands-down winner in terms of those seen in 'soft' x-rays, which are the rays just beyond the wavelength of extreme ultraviolet light.

Drake is a co-author on a paper on the flare that is being presented by the University of Maryland's Dr Rachel Osten at a meeting in Pasadena this week.

Flaming star

What's less surprising about the flare, however, is that it originated from II Pegasi, says Pennsylvania State University astrophysicist Professor Eric Feigelson.

"It's known to be one of the most flaring stars," says Feigelson. If he had been asked to guess which nearby stars were capable of belting out such a flare, II Pegasi would have been among his top 10, he says.

Despite being a middle-aged star that ought to be past this sort of wild and violent behaviour, II Pegasi is part of a tightly-bound two-star system in which the stars are roaring around each other, generating powerful tidal forces that keep II Pegasi riled up.

Fortunately our own Sun is relatively quiet and stable, with x-ray flares that are unable to penetrate Earth's atmosphere.