Top investment funds warn on dangers of climate change A World Bank report on Monday said that all nations will suffer the effects of a warmer world, but it is the world's poorest countries that will be hit hardest by food shortages, rising sea levels, cyclones and drought. The report, called Turn Down the Heat, highlights the devastating impact of a world hotter by 4 degrees Celsius (7.2 Fahrenheit) by the end of the century, a likely scenario under current policies, according to the report. Climate change is already having an effect: Arctic sea ice reached a record minimum in September, and extreme heatwaves and drought in the last decade have hit places like the United States and Russia more often than would be expected from historical records, the report said. Such extreme weather is likely to become the "new normal" if the temperature rises by 4 degrees, according to the World Bank report. This is likely to happen if not all countries comply with pledges they have made to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Even assuming full compliance, the world will warm by more than 3 degrees by 2100. In this hotter climate, the level of the sea would rise by up to 3 feet, flooding cities in places like Vietnam and Bangladesh. Water scarcity and falling crop yields would exacerbate hunger and poverty. Extreme heatwaves would devastate broad swathes of the earth's land, from the Middle East to the United States, the report says. The warmest July in the Mediterranean could be 9 degrees hotter than it is today - akin to temperatures seen in the Libyan Desert. The combined effect of all these changes could be even worse, with unpredictable effects that people may not be able to adapt to, said John Schellnhuber, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, which along with Climate Analytics prepared the report for the World Bank. "If you look at all these things together, like organs co-operating in a human body, you can think about acceleration of this dilemma," said Mr Schellnhuber, who studied chaos theory as a physicist. The picture reads that this is not where we want the world to go.