According to a new study, environmental changes suggests that our future may be a whole lot warmer - 4 degrees C warmer to be exact. That will give our planet until the year 2100 before the shit hits the fan.

Over at the Guardian, Damian Carrington notes that the 4 C rise is "twice what the world's governments deem dangerous" and is a higher estimate than what we've seen before from climate experts.
The research indicates that fewer clouds form as the planet warms, meaning less sunlight is reflected back into space, driving temperatures up further still. The way clouds affect global warming has been the biggest mystery surrounding future climate change.

Professor Steven Sherwood, at the University of New South Wales, in Australia, who led the new work, said: "This study breaks new ground twice: first by identifying what is controlling the cloud changes and second by strongly discounting the lowest estimates of future global warming in favour of the higher and more damaging estimates."

"4C would likely be catastrophic rather than simply dangerous," Sherwood told the Guardian. "For example, it would make life difficult, if not impossible, in much of the tropics, and would guarantee the eventual melting of the Greenland ice sheet and some of the Antarctic ice sheet", with sea levels rising by many metres as a result.
What will this mean for countries like Kiribati for example? Read the full story at the Guardian