Scientists fear worst on global warming

• Poll admission that official targets are unrealistic• Public doesn't realise 'how serious climate change is'Politicians insist that urgent and widespread action can yet prevent the worst of global warming but the cracks in that argument have been showing for some time.Officially, UK efforts on climate change are in line with a global ambition to limit the temperature rise above pre-industrial levels to below 2C - a threshold the EU has defined as dangerous. But in 2006 David King, then the government's chief scientist, said a 3C rise was likely. Last summer, Bob Watson, the chief scientist to the environment department (Defra), told the Guardian the world needed to prepare for the possibility of a 4C rise. This autumn, Oxford University will hold a conference to discuss life in a 4C warmer world.Hit with a double whammy of spiralling carbon emissions from the coal-fired boom in developing countries such as...

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