Winter of Worries

More research reports calculating the expected rise in global temperatures. Tragically, nothing is expected to come out of the United Nations Climate Change Conference currently underway in Cancun, Mexico.

The World: Four Degrees Warmer : Discovery News: "Since the late 1990s, many researchers and policy makers have held a two-degree Celsius (3.6-degree Fahrenheit) global temperature increase relative to pre-industrial times as a benchmark limit for global warming, saying that keeping warming below this threshold increases the likelihood that catastrophic changes can be avoided.

But we are hardly on track to meet that target, researchers say, and an average global warming of four degrees Celsius (7.2 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of this century is more likely than two.

In a collection of papers published today in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A, researchers paint a picture of what a four-degree warmer world might look like, including changes in agriculture and water supply, ecosystems, sea level rise and the displacement of populations."