This scenario is based on a new study mapping global warming trends that occurred across the Earth at the end of the last ice age some 20,000 years ago.

Australian National University palaeoclimatologist Timothy Barrows said,

''The evidence suggests we can expect the changes here in Canberra to be greater than average as a result of global warming.

''We don't know exactly how much warmer it will get, but judging from past warming trends, Canberra will become significantly warmer and drier than previous projections have estimated.''

These ''greater than average'' temperature and rainfall changes would also affect the Snowy Mountains, the Murray-Darling Basin food bowl and four of Australia's biggest cities Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth. The trends also suggested Tasmania would become warmer.

The study's findings, published online today in the journal Nature Geoscience, are the result of several years of research involving scientists from 11 countries.

Using more than a million counts of fossil plankton from about 700 deep-sea sediment cores, the research team has reconstructed detailed climate maps of the Earth's surface during the height of the last ice age.

During the warming period that occurred at the end of the last ice age, temperatures rose by as much as 6 to 10 degrees across Australia.

''We expect the same pattern of change will be repeated for future global warming, with temperate latitudes changing the most and the tropics changing the least. It should be wetter in the tropics and drier in the south as climate belts shift,'' Dr Barrows said.

He contributed Australian climate data and maps to the project, spending the past 12 years working in his free time and largely at his own expense collating and interpreting data from the sediment core and fossils.

Dr Barrows' research showed the mid-latitudes of the southern hemisphere extending from south of Brisbane to ''just beyond Tasmania'' and across to Perth would bear the brunt of global warming while the tropical latitudes were likely to be less affected.

He said climate data showed Australia's tropical areas, north of Brisbane, changed very little, ''mostly less than 2 degrees'' during post-ice age warming.

''Recently, we've found that right at the end of the last ice age, temperatures were actually warmer than they are now in the south-west Pacific Ocean. We still don't know the reason for this. We can see where it changed plant and animal communities, but we can't explain all the changes that occurred as being caused by rising carbon dioxide levels,'' he said.

Dr Barrows said the study emphasised the importance of researching past climate change to understand how future patterns of global warming would play out.