Turn down the heat: World Bank warns for disaster

The warnings come as nations meet in Doha, Qatar from November 26 for the next major round of international climate change negotiations.

It is the first time a Gulf state has hosted global climate negotiations

Kim, a physician and former president of Dartmouth College who was tapped for the World Bank by US President Barack Obama, said that 97 percent of scientists agreed that human activity was causing climate change.

“A 4°C world is likely to be one in which communities, cities and countries would experience severe disruptions, damage, and dislocation,” the bank report said. “There is no certainty that adaptation to a 4°C world is possible.”

The report noted that a drop in average temperature of around 4.5 degrees Celsius — more than 7 degrees Fahrenheit — triggered the last ice age, and it predicted that a temperature increase of that magnitude would similarly reshape the planet.

 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.

"A 4 degree warmer world can, and must be, avoided -- we need to hold warming below 2 degrees," World Bank Group president Jim Yong Kim said.

 "Lack of action on climate change threatens to make the world our children inherit a completely different world than we are living in today. Climate change is one of the single biggest challenges facing development, and we need to assume the moral responsibility to take action on behalf of future generations, especially the poorest," he said.

 The report says the 4°C scenarios are potentially devastating: the inundation of coastal cities; increasing risks for food production potentially leading to higher under and malnutrition rates; many dry regions becoming dryer, wet regions wetter; unprecedented heat waves in many regions, especially in the tropics; substantially exacerbated water scarcity in many regions; increased intensity of tropical cyclones; and irreversible loss of biodiversity, including coral reef systems.

It said extreme heat waves, that without global warming would be expected to occur once in several hundred years, will be experienced during almost all summer months in many regions.

The effects would not be evenly distributed.

From the Bonn Climate Change Talks, which were held June 2nd-13th 2008,

According to a new report from the Institute of Policy Studies in Washington DC, the Bank’s role in carbon markets is "dangerously counterproductive." The World Bank is "playing both sides of the climate crisis," concludes Janet Redman, main author of the report. "It is making money off of causing the climate crisis and then turning around and claiming to solve it," she says. Instead of encouraging clean energy investors, the Bank is lending much of its financial support to the fossil fuel industry.

"We’re not at the moment seeing the leadership from industrialized countries which I think is essential," warned de Boer, midway through the Bonn meeting. As the talks ended, he described the task of reaching agreement by the end of 2009 as "daunting." "It could well be said that we have been beating around the bush," said Chandrashekhar Dasgupta, India’s representative. The United States, Canada and Australia, in particular, were accused by environmentalists of limiting progress.