By Deborah Zabarenko, Environment Correspondent

WASHINGTON, April 2 (Reuters) - The U.N. climate change panel seriously underestimated the need for new technology in its reports on what it will take to stabilize greenhouse gas emissions that spur global warming, ecology and economy experts said on Wednesday.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change based its global warming predictions issued last year on the assumption that technology would automatically improve, giving the world even greater energy efficiency, which would help lower climate-warming emissions over the coming decades.

But this automatic technology improvement has not happened so far this century, according to the authors of a commentary in the current issue of the journal Nature.

"We argue that the size of this technology challenge has been seriously underestimated ... diverting attention from policies that could directly stimulate technological innovation," they wrote.

While energy efficiency has continued to improve in the richest countries, including the United States and Europe, it has declined in fast-developing countries like China as demand increases there, lead author Roger Pielke Jr. said in a telephone interview.

SURGING DEMAND FOR ENERGY

"There are more than 2 billion people worldwide with no access to electricity," said Pielke, who is based at the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research at the University of Colorado in Boulder. "And as they demand, rightly, access to energy, their carbon emissions have nowhere to go but up."

Carbon dioxide is emitted by coal-fired power plants, petroleum-fueled vehicles and some factories as well as by natural sources including human respiration. It is one of several so-called greenhouse gases that exacerbate global climate change by trapping heat near the Earth's surface.

Pielke likens the U.N. panel's technology assumptions to the assumption that any individual will automatically get a raise in pay every year.

If you figure you will always get an annual raise, you will spend more based on that assumption, and have to rethink things if the expected raise does not materialize, Pielke said.

He acknowledged a decades-long trend toward greater energy efficiency but said the last decade or so has deviated from that trend.

"It may be that 100 years from now ... we will look back and see that this was a temporary excursion from that trend," Pielke said. "The point would be that the amount of carbon dioxide emitted during this excursion from the trend could be quite significant and a lot larger than is accounted for in the range of scenarios used by the (U.N. climate panel)."

Nothing less than a technology revolution is required, Pielke said, with investments in research and development comparable to the U.S. military's investments during the Cold War. (Editing by Bill Trott)

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