Nobody I know in the climate research community saw this coming five years - or even a couple of years - ago, or at least those who did buried it in denial. Even the supposed worst-case scenario in the IPCC reports is almost certainly a low-ball joke. The freight train is on the tracks and the throttle is stuck on full. What the well-paid global warming deniers have been calling a hysterical worst-case scenario for a couple of decades is becoming in fact the exact Panglossian opposite.
"According to the current best estimate, by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), if humans carry on with a “business as usual” approach using large amounts of fossil fuels, the Earth’s average temperature will rise by between 2.6 and 4.8 degrees above pre-industrial levels by 2100.
However new research by an international team of experts who looked into how the Earth’s climate has reacted over nearly 800,000 years warns this could be a major under-estimate.
Because, they believe, the climate is more sensitive to greenhouse gases when it is warmer.
In a paper in the journal Science Advances, they said the actual range could be between 4.78C to 7.36C by 2100, based on one set of calculations."
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/climate-change-game-over-global-warming-climate-sensitivity-seven-degrees-a7407881.html
http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/2/11/e1501923
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