DeKALB | A British report published last week warned that worldwide disaster could be on the horizon.

Economist Sir Nicholas Stern, commissioned by the British government to study climate change, released a report saying global warming will cause a “calamity on the scale of the world wars and the Great Depression” if it is not dealt with swiftly.

Former vice president and presidential candidate Al Gore has become a leading advocate in attempts to change the world view of global warming. He will help Britain with plans to lower its output of greenhouse gases.

Using the results from formal economic models, the review estimates that if no action is taken, the overall costs and risks of climate change will be equivalent to losing at least five percent of global gross domestic product each year, indefinitely. The report also stipulates that if a wider range of risks and impacts is taken into account, the estimates of damage could rise to 20 percent of GDP or more.

Despite the findings, some skeptics argue the results.

“I think it is arrogant to think that we have enough information to determine that we are heading for climate chaos,” said NIU staff meteorologist Gilbert Sebenste. “We barely have 30 years of accurate weather records. We do have ice core samples from thousands of years ago, but the data is not exact and contains errors.”

China and India are both hot spots concerning carbon dioxide emissions because of their growing populations.

Projections show that if China and India were to live the same lifestyle as Americans, the changes to the climate may happen more quickly, said assistant geography professor David Goldblum.

In 1997, the U.S. Senate voted against Gore and then president Bill Clinton’s proposals to join the Kyoto Protocol, an international treaty to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. In 2001, President Bush withdrew the U.S. — by far, the largest emitter of carbon dioxide gases — from Kyoto talks, saying the Kyoto Protocol was too costly and describing it as “an unrealistic and ever-tightening straitjacket.”

The report hypothesizes that many of the effects of global warming may be irreversible.

“This is likely to be a global event,” Goldblum said. “It may cause depletion of drinking water and coastal flooding.”

Despite Goldblum’s certainty, Sebenste questioned whether a prediction so far in the future was credible.

“Forecasters have trouble forecasting weather three days in advance,” Sebenste said.