World Bank paints grim picture, warns against a 4°C warmer world

Since the 2009 UNFCCC conference, the global climate talks have accepted the scientific view that the increase in global temperature should be kept within a 2°C radius of pre-industrial times, towards which “deep cuts in global emissions are required”. But so far from deep have these cuts been that a new World Bank report, 'Turn Down the Heat', warns that even if current mitigation commitments and pledges are fully implemented, there is a roughly 20% likelihood of the world warming by more than 4°C by 2100, with a 10% chance of 4°C being exceeded as early as the 2060s.

The world is now about 0.8°C above pre-industrial levels. The report underlines, “A global mean temperature increase of 4°C approaches the difference between temperatures today and those of the last ice age, when much of central Europe and the northern US were covered with kilometres of ice and global mean temperatures were about 4.5°C to 7°C lower. And this magnitude of climate change·human induced·is occurring over a century, not millennia.”

Jim Yong Kim, the first scientist to head the World Bank, explained, “Lack of action on climate change threatens to make the world our children inherit a completely different world than we are living in today.”

The present CO2 concentration is already higher than at any time in the last 15 million years. The global oceans have been absorbing most of this excess heat energy; so, they have

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