Top scientists, in their most authoritative report yet, have sounded the alarm about certain unstoppable ramifications of climate gone wild, such as rising seas with potentially catastrophic consequences.

That stern warning from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change coincides with the final weeks of the 2007 Atlantic hurricane season, when those who live in and around the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico typically begin to relax. For many people here, it is as much a reason to celebrate as official holidays.

But the usual expectations for hurricanes – along with other weather and climate issues – are quickly becoming a feature of the past. In the coming period, we are told, tropical storms will howl with greater frequency and ferocity.

Florida residents who shuddered in the face of the new weather of mass destruction in 2004 are not eager to repeat the experience. The four hurricanes that hit the state within a month – including three in the area where I live – left us reeling with physical injuries, damaged property, fallen trees, blocked roads, power outages, flooding, phone disruptions, water cutoffs and overall supply shortages. About the only service that worked was newspaper delivery.

That the storms blew through during one of the hottest parts of the year – I recall many days with nighttime, indoor temperatures in the 90s – only added to the misery. It was small comfort that the fury of 2004 was supposedly a 200-year phenomenon. In this uncertain day and age, what does that mean?

Therefore, I applaud U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who in recent days has stressed the urgency of dealing with the climate-change problem in a collective manner. “We are all in this together. We must work together,” he said.

Although it may be too late to address some aspects of climate change, the longer we dawdle, the worse the problem will become.

Whenever I write about this topic, naysayers rush to dismiss my concerns as exaggerated or unproven. Well, with evidence mounting to the contrary, I hope that they will finally release their grip on ignorance. We have a global responsibility to deal with climate change proactively and to focus on two broad dangers.

The first should be fairly obvious. Unless we reduce the human contributions to climate change, we face a future filled with woes such as coastal flooding, devastating storms, droughts, mass starvation, unprecedented migration and plagues.

The second danger requires a bit more thought but is just as ominous. Michael Klare, writing in the November 2007 issue of Current History (which happens to be devoted to climate change; see www.currenthistory.com), encapsulates it well: “Just as likely, however, is an increase in more familiar security threats – war, insurgency, ethnic conflict, state collapse and civil violence.”

During the long term, those second-danger threats could deliver the biggest, most expensive and challenging blows to humankind.

For that reason, the United Nations – and specifically the Security Council – should be as involved in dealing with security aspects of climate change as it is with environmental questions.

Climate change is not and never has been merely an environmental worry. It affects our entire existence. If we stubbornly move ahead with development as usual, the nightmare results outlined by the U.N. panel will multiply. If, instead, we demonstrate some foresight, creativity and self-restraint, we could ease the global pain of climate gone wild.