India, Feb. 6 -- Is catastrophic warming of the planet now an inevitability? A new study in the journal Environment: Science and Policy for Sustainable Development suggests so. Former Nasa climate scientist and now Columbia University professor James Hansen, who is widely credited with pushing the term "global warming" from academic literature into the US and thereby global political lexicon, is among the authors. Hansen and his co-authors say that the Earth is more sensitive to warming from the emission of greenhouse gases (GHGs) than earlier believed and that the "2 degrees Celsius goal is dead". This goal refers to scientific consensus on the threshold for warming above pre-industrial temperatures beyond which the worst of the climate ...