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If emissions of greenhouse gases were not curbed, the planet would heat up by a minimum of 4C by 2100, says a new scientific study.

However, the problem won’t stop here. As the plant warns, fewer cloud would form resulting into less sunlight reflecting back into space. This, subsequently would drive temperatures up further even more. However, the way clouds affected global warming is still not explainable phenomenon.

“This study breaks new ground twice: first by identifying what is controlling the cloud changes and second by strongly discounting the lowest estimates of future global warming in favour of the higher and more damaging estimates,” said Professor Steven Sherwood, at the University of New South Wales, in Australia, who led the new work, according to The Guardian.

“4C would likely be catastrophic rather than simply dangerous,” Sherwood added. “For example, it would make life difficult, if not impossible, in much of the tropics, and would guarantee the eventual melting of the Greenland ice sheet and some of the Antarctic ice sheet.”

For measuring the sensitivity of the Earth’s climate to greenhouse gases, researchers estimated the temperature that would be caused by a doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere compared with pre-industrial level, reported The Guardian.

For the next twenty years, those estimates have run from 1.5C to 5C which is definitely a wide range.

“Climate sceptics like to criticise climate models for getting things wrong, and we are the first to admit they are not perfect,” said Sherwood to The Guardian. “But what we are finding is that the mistakes are being made by the models which predict less warming, not those that predict more.”

The study is published in the journal Nature.