Six scientists from some of the leading scientific institutions in the United States have issued a stark warning that the threat of global warming is much greater - and nearer - than the UN’s recent IPCC report has estimated (as if the IPCC report wasn’t bad enough).

In the UK, attention was drawn to the story by Tuesday’s front page lead article in the Independent newspaper. The scientists’ paper, “Climate Change and Trace Gases” was originally published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.

Some of the more important points raised by the report are that:

* Sea levels rises may be as high as several metres by the end of this century.

* We have only around 10 years in which to implement draconian measures to curb CO2 emissions before we reach the dreaded “tipping point”, beyond which events will be beyond our control.

 * The additional heat from global warming may trigger an “albedo flip” - when the sunlight which is normally reflected by white ice is subsequently absorbed by the dark surface of the open ocean, once the ice has melted.

The researchers, from Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, the University of California, Santa Barbera, and the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University in New York, were led by James Hansen, the director of the Goddard Institute, who was the first scientist to warn the US Congress about global warming.

This isn’t some trumped up media story, written by a bunch of loony environmentalists with their own agenda. It’s a densely referenced paper from a group of respected scientists who have a real understanding of how we are ruining this planet. And it’s bloody scary.