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The Manchester Guardian (April 23,2007) reviewed the Book, Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet, by Mark Lynas. The book notes how various potential futures (based on the number of degrees the planetary climate warms) will impact human existence. From one to six degrees, which is the range envisioned by the recent IPCC report, the impacts grow almost exponential severe.
Here is an excerpt from this book review.:

"Two degrees may not sound like much, but it is enough to make every European summer as hot as 2003, when 30,000 people died from heatstroke. That means extreme summers will be much hotter still. As Middle East-style temperatures sweep across Europe, the death toll may reach into the hundreds of thousands. The Mediterranean area can expect six more weeks of heatwave conditions, with wildfire risk also growing. Water worries will be aggravated as the southern Med loses a fifth of its rainfall, and the tourism industry could collapse as people move north outside the zones of extreme heat.

Two degrees is also enough to cause the eventual complete melting of the Greenland ice sheet, which would raise global sea levels by seven metres. Much of the ice-cap disappeared 125,000 years ago, when global temperatures were 1-2C higher than now. Because of the sheer size of the ice sheet, no one expects this full seven metres to come before the end of the century, but a top Nasa climate scientist, James Hansen, is warning that the mainstream projections of sea level rise (of 50cm or so by 2100) could be dangerously conservative. As if to underline Hansen's warning, the rate of ice loss from Greenland has tripled since 2004.

This melting will also continue to affect the world's mountain ranges, and in Peru all the glaciers will disappear from the Andean peaks that currently supply Lima with water. In California, the loss of snowpack from the Sierra Nevada - three-quarters of which could disappear in the two-degree world - will leave cities such as Los Angeles increasingly thirsty during the summer. Global food supplies, especially in the tropics, will also be affected but while two degrees of warming will be survivable for most humans, a third of all species alive today may be driven to extinction as climate change wipes out their habitat.

Scientists estimate that we have at best 10 years to bring down global carbon emissions if we are to stabilise world temperatures within two degrees of their present levels. ..."

You can read the entire review here:
Six steps to hell
You can read Mark Lynas's blog here:
Marklynas.org