A renowned expert in the field, Chu has increasingly sounded the alarm on the dire need to address climate change before it is too late.

The planet is threatened with "sudden, unpredictable, and irreversible disaster," the 60-year-old Chinese-American scientist warned in an Internet interview last month.

His nomination turns the page on the eight-year administration of President George W. Bush, who has only belatedly acknowleged that human activity may indeed have played a role in heating up the Earth.

Chu has warned cities such as New York, London, Tokyo, Bombay or Buenos Aires need to think about erecting huge walls to protect their populations from the rising oceans, as ice caps melt.

The world can expect "disasters in orders of magnitude different from anything we've experienced thus far," said Chu, a member of the Copenhagen Climate Council, a collaboration between international business and scientists, working to facilitate a new global treaty to replace Koyto due to be signed in Copenhagn in late 2009.

For Chu, the latest report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which predicted in 2007 that by the end of the century temperatures will have risen between 1.8 to 4 degrees Celsius, underestimates the problem.

The current level of greenhouse gases "puts us on track for temperature increases of more than 6.1 degrees celsius by the end of the century," he said in the interview published by the Copenhagen Climate Council.

And he scolded governments for failing to address the scale of the problem, saying they were acting like a home-owner who discovers he has faulty wiring and needs to make costly repairs.

"What we are doing is the equivalent of dealing with the problem by ... investing in a set of fire extinguishers that can help us fight the fire, but won't prevent it happening in the first place," he said.

"We face the same choice now: to go on living as we are ... or to address the risks in the house we live in, and make the repairs we can, to make the house safe for ourselves and our descendents."

Chu was awarded the Nobel prize for Physics in 1997 along with countryman William Phillips and Frenchman Claude Cohen-Tannoudji for his work on "the development of methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light."

Since 2004, he has been the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California where he has pushed staff to develop new technologies to combat climate change such as biofuels and solar energy.

The institute, which counts some 4,000 staff, won some 500 milllion dollars in investment from the British oil group BP for its research in this area.

Its website said Chu has sought to make the center "the world leader in alternative and renewable energy research, particularly the development of carbon-neutral sources of energy."

It describes him as "an early advocate for finding scientific solutions to climate change."

Born February 28, 1948 in St Louis, Missouri, Chu is a second-generation Chinese American, and the son of a chemist father and an economist mother.

He was awarded his doctorate from the University of California at Berkeley in 1976, and in 1990 was named professor to chair humanities and sciences at Stanford University.

He is the second Chinese-American to take a cabinet position after Elaine Chao, who was labor secretary under Bush.

A member of the National Academy of Sciences, as well as the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Academia Sinica of Taiwan, Chu says he never learned to speak Chinese as his parents never taught him.

However, he supposedly learned to play tennis by studying a book on the subject.

All rights reserved. copyright 2018 Agence France-Presse. Sections of the information displayed on this page (dispatches, photographs, logos) are protected by intellectual property rights owned by Agence France-Presse. As a consequence, you may not copy, reproduce, modify, transmit, publish, display or in any way commercially exploit any of the content of this section without the prior written consent of Agence France-Presse.