Report prepared for the World Bank examines the risks of a 4 degree hotter world in 2100

Posted by Craig Clarke

on Nov 19, 2012

WASHINGTON, November 18, 2012 – "The world is barreling down a path to heat up by 4 degrees at the end of the century if the global community fails to act on climate change, triggering a cascade of cataclysmic changes that include extreme heat-waves, declining global food stocks and a sea-level rise affecting hundreds of millions of people, according to a new scientific report released today that was commissioned by the World Bank.

All regions of the world would suffer – some more than others – but the report finds that the poor will suffer the most.

Turn Down the Heat, a snapshot of the latest climate science prepared for the World Bank by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) and Climate Analytics, says that the world is on a path to a 4 degree Celsius warmer world by end of this century and current greenhouse gas emissions pledges will not reduce this by much.."

The global mean temperature has continued to increase and is now about 0.8°C above pre-industrial levels. While a global warming of 0.8°C may not seem large, the report notes that many climate change impacts have already started to emerge, and the shift from 0.8°C to 2.0°C warming or beyond will pose much larger challenges. But a global mean temperature increase of 4°C approaches the known historic level of change for the planet, which harks back to the last ice age when much of central Europe and the northern United States were covered with kilometers of ice and global mean temperatures were about 4.5°C to 7°C lower. And this contemporary human-induced climate change, the report notes, is occurring over a century, not millennia.

Click here to go to press release on the world bank website.