The flooded streets and scores of displaced people it left behind showed that the region is still insufficiently prepared to manage natural disasters. Also in January [2013], record breaking snow fall in Amman, Jordan, overwhelmed the city’s drainage system, with the resulting floods trapping residents in their homes. In the Zaatari refugee camp, north of the Jordanian capital, hundreds of tents were destroyed, leaving thousands of Syrian refugees with no shelter. In the past years, storms have disrupted traffic in the Suez Canal and forced Egyptian authorities to close down the port of Alexandria, multiple fatalities have been reported in Lebanon due to severe weather, and sandstorms are increasingly affecting Gulf countries, shutting down airports, schools and cities.

The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region is no stranger to severe weather – floods, earthquakes and multi-annual droughts have been on the rise. While the number of natural disasters around the world has almost doubled since the 1980s, in MENA it has almost tripled. Rapid urbanization, water scarcity, and climate change have all aggravated the impact of natural disasters and created new development challenges for the region.

It is increasingly unlikely that an early and explicit global climate change agreement or collective ad hoc national mitigation policies will deliver the urgent and dramatic reversal in emission trends necessary for stabilization at 450 ppmv CO2e. Similarly, the mainstream climate change agenda is far removed from the rates of mitigation necessary to stabilize at 550 ppmv CO2e. Given the reluctance, at virtually all levels, to openly engage with the unprecedented scale of both current emissions and their associated growth rates, even an optimistic interpretation of the current framing of climate change implies that stabilization much below 650 ppmv CO2e is improbable.

The analysis presented within this paper suggests that the rhetoric of 2 C is subverting a meaningful, open and empirically informed dialogue on climate change. While it may be argued that 2 C provides a reasonable guide to the appropriate scale of mitigation, it is a dangerously misleading basis for informing the adaptation agenda. In the absence of an almost immediate step change in mitigation (away from the current trend of 3% annual emission growth), adaptation would be much better guided by stabilization at 650 ppmv CO2e (i.e. approx. 4 C). 14 However, even this level of stabilization assumes rapid success in curtailing deforestation, an early reversal of current trends in non-CO2 greenhouse gas emissions and urgent decarbonization of the global energy system.

Finally, the quantitative conclusions developed here are based on a global analysis. If, during the next two decades, transition economies, such as China, India and Brazil, and newly industrializing nations across Africa and elsewhere are not to have their economic growth stifled, their emissions of CO2e will inevitably rise. Given any meaningful global emission caps, the implications of this for the industrialized nations are bleak. Even atmospheric stabilization at 650 ppmv CO2e demands the majority of OECD nations begin to make draconian emission reductions within a decade. Such a situation is unprecedented for economically prosperous nations. Unless economic growth can be reconciled with unprecedented rates of decarbonization (in excess of 6% per year 15 ), it is difficult to envisage anything other than a planned economic recession being compatible with stabilization at or below 650 ppmv CO2e.

Ultimately, the latest scientific understanding of climate change allied with current emission trends and a commitment to ‘limiting average global temperature increases to below 4 C above pre-industrial levels’, demands a radical reframing 16 of both the climate change agenda, and the economic characterization of contemporary society.

This paper presents simulations of climate change with an ensemble of GCMs driven by the A1FI scenario, and also assesses the implications of carbon-cycle feedbacks for the climate-change projections. Using these GCM projections along with simple climate-model projections, including uncertainties in carbon-cycle feedbacks, and also comparing against other model projections from the IPCC, our best estimate is that the A1FI emissions scenario would lead to a warming of 4°C relative to pre-industrial during the 2070s. If carbon-cycle feedbacks are stronger, which appears less likely but still credible, then 4°C warming could be reached by the early 2060s in projections that are consistent with the IPCC's 'likely range'.