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CORVALLIS - A group of about 50 researchers from around the world are joining forces under the auspices of the United Nations to consider global climate change at the next level - not just what the experts already know or can prove - but what they speculate, worry about and actually think.

These scenario building exercises, which are to take place over the next two years, will attempt to evaluate the possible health and economic damages from climate changes and associated events that have already been estimated to cost $40 billion a year, and have been projected as high as $150 billion by 2010. Under consideration are everything from rising sea levels to more frequent hurricanes, heat waves, degraded ecosystems and expansion of infectious disease.

Two scientists from Oregon State University and the Corvallis laboratory of the Environmental Protection Agency are among the participants in this exercise, which was launched at U.N. headquarters in New York City in September by the United Nations Development Programme, Harvard Medical School's Center for Health and the Global Environment, and the Swiss Re Company.

"This will definitely be an exercise to think outside the box," said Philippe Rossignol, a professor of medical entomology in the Department of Fisheries and Wildlife at OSU and international expert on the spread of insect-borne infectious disease.

"This work will essentially be a collection of 'what if' scenarios, in which experts from diverse fields will develop informed theories about what types of changes we may face in our future due to global changes that are not totally predictable," Rossignol said. "We don't know exactly what will happen, but that doesn't mean we can't think about it. These are very serious issues. People should be worried."

Rossignol will work with a focus group on changing patterns in infectious disease, along with Jennifer Orme-Zavaleta, an expert on risk assessment and associate director for science at the Western Ecology Division of EPA's National Health and Environmental Effects Research Laboratory.

"A lot of good quality work has already been done that outlines the current state of knowledge about global warming and other global changes, by such groups as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change," Orme-Zavaleta said. "We don't want to repeat that, because many good scientists have already explained in some detail what we know. Our group will focus more on what we think."

Such theorizing, the scientists said, is actually already being done by many businesses, especially the insurance industry, and is critically important to the development of any long range plans that may be affected by global changes.

By the time it is totally clear what the impacts of climate change are, researchers say, it may be too late to take some steps that could have reduced their social and economic impacts.

Experts from the United Nations say that such issues are of special interest to developing nations, which often bear the brunt of economic collapse and natural disasters - about 96 percent of disaster-related deaths occur in the developing world. Overall, this new initiative will consider future impacts from heat waves and air pollution; changing patterns of infectious disease; volatile or extreme weather events; and the impact on biodiversity from degraded ecosystems.

The Corvallis researchers will focus their work on infectious disease, a field in which subtle changes can cause major, long-lasting impacts.

"No doubt some of the issues we'll explore will be the expansion of such diseases as malaria, where a couple of degrees of climatic warming could significantly expand the spread of subtropical malaria," Rossignol said. "There may be similar trends with dengue fever, hanta virus, or some of the diseases such as cholera that are linked to water quality.

"And some threats are more immediate," he added. "Thousands of people died in France last summer because they were not accustomed to dealing with a heat wave."

Basic global warming, the researchers say, is just one of the changes that must be considered. There are also possible implications of sea level rise, milder winters that fail to keep insects under control, more El Nino events, changes in ocean salinity or circulation which could have huge impacts on the climate of such areas as Europe, and new variations in wind patterns or precipitation.

"These changes are not easy to anticipate, which is all the more reason we begin to consider them now," Orme-Zavaleta said. "People are making decisions they will have to live with decades or centuries into the future. How close to the coast should we allow housing to be built if we're concerned about more serious storms or rising sea levels? How should our forests and other natural resources be managed if the climate is warming or precipitation patterns may change? These questions have to be answered now."

The researchers cited the story of Lyme disease as an unpredictable story of human-caused changes and the interactions they bring. The major outbreaks of Lyme disease in the eastern U.S. during the late 1900s actually had their beginnings a century earlier. The growth of railroads brought western competition to agriculture earlier this century, which ultimately caused the demise of many Eastern farms and a surge in deer populations that thrived in deserted or abandoned farming areas. Along with that came the Lyme disease carried by deer ticks, which until then had been lying in forgotten natural reservoirs in a few islands off the East Coast. The long-forgotten disease returned with a vengeance.

It's reasonably clear that new diseases are already emerging or expanding, the Corvallis scientists say, and trying to figure out the current changes and anticipate future ones will be challenging. For no clear reason, West Nile Virus left its home in North Africa in recent years and sprinted across the U.S.

The new initiative anticipates two years of study before reports and scenarios of possible futures are outlined and made public, the scientists said.