WASHINGTON, March 28: Global warming is leading to such severe storms, droughts and heat waves that nations should prepare for an unprecedented onslaught of deadly and costly weather disasters, an international panel of climate scientists says in a report issued Wednesday. The greatest danger from extreme weather is in highly populated, poor regions of the world, the report warns, but no corner of the globe — from Mumbai to Miami — is immune.

The document by a Nobel Prize-winning panel of climate scientists forecasts stronger tropical cyclones and more frequent heat waves, deluges and droughts.

The 594-page report blames the scale of recent and future disasters on a combination of man-made climate change, population shifts and poverty. In the past, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, founded in 1988 by the United Nations, has focused on the slow inexorable rise of temperatures and oceans as part of global warming.

This report by the panel is the first to look at the less common but far more noticeable extreme weather changes, which recently have been costing on average about $80 billion a year in damage.'” We mostly experience weather and climate through the extreme,” said one of the report's top editors, Chris Field, an ecologist with the Carnegie Institution of Washington. “That's where we have the losses. That's where we have the insurance payments. That's where things have the potential to fall apart.

The report specifically points to New Orleans during 2005's Hurricane Katrina, noting that “developed countries also suffer severe disasters because of social vulnerability and inadequate disaster protection.'' “There are lots of places that are already marginal for one reason or another,” Field said. But it's not just poor areas: “There is disaster risk almost everywhere.''

The scientists say that some places, particularly parts of Mumbai in India, could become uninhabitable from floods, storms and rising seas. In 2005, over 24 hours nearly 3 feet (1 meter) of rain fell on the city, killing more than 1,000 people and causing massive damage. Roughly 2.7 million people live in areas at risk of flooding.

Other cities at lesser risk include Miami, Shanghai, Bangkok, China's Guangzhou, Vietnam's Ho Chi Minh City, Myanmar's Yangon and India's Kolkata. The people of small island nations, such as the Maldives, may also need to abandon their homes because of rising seas and fierce storms.

''The decision about whether or not to move is achingly difficult and I think it's one that the world community will have to face with increasing frequency in the future,” Field said in a telephone news conference Wednesday.

Field pointed to storm-and-flood-prone Bangladesh, an impoverished country that has learned from its past disasters. In 1970, a Category 3 tropical cyclone named Bhola killed more than 300,000 people. In 2007, a stronger cyclone killed only 4,200 people. Despite the loss of life, the country is considered a success story because it was better prepared and invested in warning and disaster prevention, Field said. A country that was not as prepared, Myanmar, was hit with a similar sized storm in 2008, which killed 138,000 people.—AP