Italy's Nobel-winning physicist Carlo Rubbia has issued one of the most alarming warnings yet about climate change, saying that if humanity fails to change its ways it will pay the price within a decade or so.
Rubbia urged the world's governments to plough funds into scientific and technological research which would help drastically reduce pollution and hopefully halt global warming.
"We are facing an emergency. We have ten to 15 years to change the world, otherwise the world will change us. And it will change us in terrible ways," said Prof. Rubbia.
The physicist, who headed the Italian Institute for New technologies, Energy and Environment until 2005, said reports claiming Venice could soon be under water and that ice would disappear from the Alps were no exaggeration.
Earlier this month the world's top climate experts issued a bleak report on the impact of global warming, predicting effects ranging from widespread hunger in Africa to a fast thaw in the Himalayas.
The report by the UN's climate panel, which includes experts from 100 countries, increased pressure on governments to act quickly.
It said warming, widely blamed on human emissions of greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels, would cause desertification, droughts and rising seas and would hit hard in the tropics, from sub-Saharan Africa to Pacific islands.
"In the short time we have available we must develop the means to face the situation. We must concentrate on science and technology," Rubbia said in an interview with Italy's Sky TG24 channel.
He argued that economic or political measures, such as incentives to use less oil derivatives, would never produce results fast enough.
"The only solution is technology. The only way forward is research, research and more research," he said.
Rubbia has won international acclaim not only for his work in the field of particle physics but also in driving forward the development of renewable energy resources.
He is currently professor at the University of Pavia, Italy and has recently worked at a project on solar thermal energy plants in Spain.
