Floods, fires, melting ice, and feverish heat - from smoke-choked Moscow to water-soaked Iowa and the High Arctic, the planet seems to be having a midsummer breakdown. It is not just a portent of things to come, scientists say, but a sign of troubling climate change already under way. The weather-related cataclysms of July and August fit patterns predicted by climate scientists, the Geneva-based World Meteorological Organization says, although those scientists always shy from tying individual disasters directly to global warming. The specialists see an urgent need for better ways to forecast extreme events like Russia's heat wave and wildfires and the record deluge devastating Pakistan. There is no time to waste,'' because societies must be equipped to deal with global warming, says British government climatologist Peter Stott. The UN's network of climate scientists, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has long predicted that rising global temperatures would produce more frequent and intense heat waves and more intense rainfalls. In its latest assessment, in 2007, the Nobel Prize-winning panel went beyond that. It said these trends "have already been observed,'' in an increase in heat waves since 1950, for example. The World Meteorological Organization pointed out that this summer's events fit the international scientists' projections of "more frequent and more intense extreme weather events due to global warming.''