Nobel laureates offer ideas on battling climate change

If you put the world's cleverest people in one room and asked them to solve the problem of global warming, would they be able to do it?

The symposium series is the brainchild of Professor Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, founding director of the Potsdam Institute, a long-standing member of the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and an expert on climatological tipping points.

"The aim of the symposium series is to raise the most authoritative voices of science - that is the eminent experts and the Nobel laureates - about the big issues of global sustainability," says Schellnhuber. The symposium's subtitle is "4C - Changing Climate, Changing Cities".

The "4C" refers to the four degrees Celsius rise in temperature that we will experience by the end of the century if we don't take steps to combat climate change.

At the opening session, Schellnhuber, Jim Yong Kim (president of the World Bank) and Rajendra Pachauri (head of the IPCC) will present aspects of their work that paint a picture - not a pretty one - of a world four degrees warmer. Sea levels will have risen dramatically, low-lying land and island nations will have been subsumed by the waves, extreme weather events will have become the norm, agricultural yields will have fallen with a concomitant increase in food prices, there will be frequent droughts and killer heatwaves, and nasty tropical diseases will have expanded their territory away from the equator.