Global temperatures to soar

Temperatures could rise by up to 4C in a global warming phenomenon driven by almost exclusively human influence, scientists claim.

Each of the last three decades has been successively warmer at the Earth’s surface than any preceding decade since 1850, and in the northern hemisphere 1983 to 2012 is likely to have been the warmest 30-year period in the last 1,400 years.

Even if emissions of carbon dioxide were to stop, the result of past and present emissions means the world is locked into some level of climate change, with effects that will persist for many centuries, the experts warned.