The recent trend of record-setting weather is more than a mere coincidence, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist said last Wednesday night.

Addressing more than 30 people at the Cambridge Friends Meeting House, Ross Gelbspan said weather changes are part of a larger phenomenon of environmental havoc resulting from air pollutants.

Gelbspan said the problem has become too severe to be ignored any longer because it may now have a potentially serious impact on global economic and political systems.

According to Gelbspan, the half-degree increase in the overall world temperature since 1992 indicates an overarching problem of global climate change reaching drastic proportions.

Gelbspan, the author of a forthcoming book on global warming, said the problem has public health implications that have been largely ignored by the media.

Global warming has produced a number of unforeseen epidemics, including outbreaks of malaria resulting from burgeoning mosquito populations in areas previously too cold to support them, he said.

Such changes, he said, are destabilizing not only to the environment but also to international economies and politics.

"Long before the systems of the planet collapse," Gelbspan said, "the systems of democracy will collapse."

He singled out unrest that resulted from the displacement of "environmental refugees" who lacked food because of damage to land resulting from climate changes as an example of an environmentally-induced problem.

Gelbspan, who has previously worked as a journalist at the Boston Globe and the Washington Post, also stressed the enormous role of developing nations like China, Brazil, Mexico, and India in contributing to the release of greenhouse gases.

"We're in it," he said of the drastic environmental crisis as he described its manifestations. "This is the ultimate bad trip."

Gelbspan also responded to claims by a group of U.S. scientists who say that considerable uncertaintly as to the validity of the phenomena still exists.

He said the United States is the only place where debate concerning the authenticity of global warming as a result of greenhouse gases occurs.

Gelbspan called American scientists who question the validity of global warming "pawns of the massive oil and coal industries" because they accept research grants from large oil and coal companies.

Among the 45 scientists whom Gelbspan has consulted for his research are Harvard faculty members James J. McCarthy, professor of biological oceanography; Michael B. McElroy, Rotch professor of atmospheric science; and Paul R. Epstein, an instructor in medicine.