NEW YORK – 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’s 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 experts now see an urgent need for better ways to forecast extreme events like Russia’s heat wave and wildfires and the record deluge devastating Pakistan. They’ll discuss such tools in meetings this month and next in Europe and America.

“There is no time to waste,” because societies must be equipped to deal with global warming, British government climatologist Peter Stott says.

The 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.”

In fact, in key cases they’re a perfect fit:

Russia

It’s been the hottest summer ever recorded in Russia, with Moscow temperatures topping 100 degrees for the first time. Russia’s drought has sparked hundreds of wildfires in forests and dried peat bogs, blanketing Moscow with a toxic smog that finally lifted Thursday after six days. The Russian capital’s death rate doubled to 700 people a day at one point. The drought reduced the wheat harvest by more than one-third.

A 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report predicted a doubling of disastrous droughts in Russia this century and cited studies foreseeing catastrophic fires during dry years.

Pakistan

The heaviest monsoon rains on record – 12 inches in one 36-hour period – have sent rivers rampaging over huge swaths of countryside, flooding thousands of villages. It has left 14 million Pakistanis homeless or otherwise affected, and killed 1,500.

A warmer atmosphere can hold – and discharge – more water. The 2007 climate change report said rains have grown heavier for 40 years over north Pakistan and predicted greater flooding this century in south Asia’s monsoon region.

China

China is witnessing its worst floods in decades, the meteorological group says, particularly in the northwest province of Gansu. There, floods and landslides last weekend killed at least 1,100 people and left more than 600 missing, feared swept away or buried beneath mud and debris.

The climate change group reported in 2007 that floods nationwide had increased sevenfold since the 1950s.

United States

In Iowa, soaked by its wettest 36-month period in 127 years of record-keeping, floodwaters from three nights of rain this week forced hundreds from their homes and killed a 16-year-old girl.

The international climate panel projected increased U.S. precipitation this century – except for the Southwest – and more extreme rain events causing flooding.

Arctic

Researchers last week spotted a 100-square-mile chunk of ice cleaved off from the great Petermann Glacier in Greenland. It was the most massive ice island to break away in the Arctic in a half-century of observation.

The huge iceberg appeared just five months after an international scientific team published a report saying ice loss from the Greenland ice sheet is expanding up its northwest coast from the south.

Changes in the ice sheet “are happening fast, and we are definitely losing more ice mass than we had anticipated,” said one of the scientists, NASA’s Isabella Velicogna.

In the Arctic Ocean itself, the summer melt of the vast ice cap has reached unprecedented proportions in recent years. Satellite data show the ocean area covered by ice last month was the second-lowest ever recorded for July.

The melting of land ice into the oceans is causing about 60 percent of the accelerating rise in sea levels worldwide, with thermal expansion from warming waters causing the rest. The meteorological group’s World Climate Research Program says seas are rising by 1.34 inches per decade, about twice last century’s average.

Meanwhile, this January-June was Earth’s hottest first half of a year on record. Meteorologists say 17 nations have recorded all-time-high temperatures in 2010, more than in any other year.