A press release says funding the huge Tata Power project will help to expand electricity use across five states in western and northern India. This is in keeping with the “higher energy use” sought under “the development goals of the Bank Group and our client countries.”

While the release did say the bank group will try “to balance these energy needs with concerns about climate change,” it also cautioned that “fossil fuels are likely to remain a key contributor to the world’s electricity needs.”

Uh-oh!

A recent essay says the most pressing current scientific and political challenge is to avoid what is known as “dangerous” global warming – the point where world temperatures become irreversible.

As there’s a 25-to-30-year lag between greenhouse emissions and the full impact of their warming, current climate chaos is a result of carbon spewed in the late 1970s. The hit from more recent discharges – including China’s coal plants -- is but pain yet to come.

So we’re dangerously close already.

Weirdly, I thought of Beowulf when I read the latest about NASA's James Hansen, our most famous climate scientist, who used an unfortunate Holocaust-related analogy to discuss the impact of global warming on endangered species in recent testimony in his home state, Iowa.

It's not surprising that a quickly acknowledged and corrected discrepancy in temperature recording by NASA was pounced on by the denier camp to further the proof that global warming is a hoax! Unsurprisingly, the reports have been biased and have omitted certain key facts, not the least of which is that the GLOBAL temperature record (it is after all, global warming) remains largely unaffected by the corrected data.

New Republic has published an excellent review of the facts using - wait for it - scientific data!

Those are not the words of eco-warriors but the considered opinion of a group of eminent scientists writing in a peer-reviewed scientific journal.