New York,

Painting a grim picture, a new study shows that even if greenhouse gas emissions are fixed at 2005 levels, irreversible warming will lead to biodiversity loss and substantial glacial melt.

The earth will warm about 2.4 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels even under extremely conservative greenhouse-gas emission scenarios and under the assumption that efforts to clean up particulate pollution continue to be successful, an new analysis by a pair of researchers at Scripps Institution of Oceanog raphy show.