The world should stop arguing about whether humans are causing climate change and start taking action to stop dangerous temperature rises, the president of the World Bank said on Wednesday.

Jim Yong Kim said there was 97 to 98 per cent agreement among scientists that global warming was real and caused by human activity.

"If you disagree with the science of human-caused climate change you are not disagreeing that there is anthropogenic climate change. What you are disagreeing with is science itself," Kim told a Thomson Reuters Newsmaker event in London.

"It is time to stop arguing about whether (climate change) is real or not," he said.

A study last month found that 97 per cent of around 4,000 scientific reports giving an opinion about the cause of climate change since the 1990s said it was mainly human. Sceptics said the survey wrongly omitted thousands of papers which did not give a view.