World Bank Warns of ‘4 Degree’ Threshold

World Bank Warns of ‘4 Degree’ Threshold

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The World Bank is urging stepped-up efforts to meet world carbon reduction goals after looking at what it says would be the catastrophic consequences if average world temperatures rise more than 4 degrees Celsius (7.2 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of the century. In what World Bank President Jim Yong Kim acknowledged was a “doomsday scenario,” a new bank study cited the 4 degree increase as a threshold that would likely trigger widespread crop failures and malnutrition and dislocate large numbers of people from land inundated by rising seas.

World climate goals aim to hold the mean temperature increase to under 2 degrees Celsius, by curbing emissions of greenhouse gases that trap heat — a phenomenon already felt to have boosted average temperatures nearly 1 degree from levels present before the start of the industrial age, Kim said in a recent briefing. That goal is unlikely to be met, he said, with an increase of 3 or 3.5 degrees Celsius now considered probable.