The IPCC's Fifth Assement Report.

Today the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released the second chapter of it's fifth Assessment Report (AR5) on the state of the earth's climate. This chapter focuses on Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability to climate change and is around 4000 pages long. As a result I have not read the whole thing but I have skimmed through the executive summary which I found to be a lot easier to understand then I've come to expect.

Despite being easy to follow the findings of this section of AR5 are particularly grim. Essentially it finds that at current rates of warming over the next 100 years the earth's temperature is expected to rise by 4C. If we are unable to keep the earth's temperature from rising by 2C we can expect;

• Death, injury and illness due to storm surges and flooding brought about by an up to 7 metre rise in sea levels, 

• Collapse of infrastructure such as electricity and water supply and health and emergency services, 

• Deaths from extreme heat that causes certain areas to become uninhabitable,

• The breakdown of food supply systems leading to greater food insecurity, malnutrition and starvation,

• The breakdown of water supply systems leading to water insecurity,

• The loss of ocean ecosystems including fish,

• The loss of on land ecosystems including humans.

As such it is clear that the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change's (UNFCCC) efforts to introduce a viable replacement to the Kyoto Protocol (KP) by the end of 2015 simply cannot fail or even be delayed. In order to meet the 2015 deadline developing nations really need to have their preliminary Nationally Adaptation Plans (NAP's) and their Nationally Appropriate Mitigation Actions (NAMA's) ready before the next UNFCCC meeting so work can begin on getting developed nations to draw up their Nationally Appropriate Mitigation Commitments (NAMC's) in time for the spring 2015 deadline. Obviously in order for nation's to draw up either NAP's, NAMA's or NAMC's we first need to develop metrics by which we can measure adaptation and mitigation efforts so I think it is really time for shortlists of options to be drawn up.

I should also point out that one of my main concerns over a replacement for KP is the role of the Gulf states led by Saudi Arabia who seem intent on spending large amounts of money sabotaging the process. Not only do they seem to be indicating that they will use money they have already invested to intimidate nations into toeing their line as they are doing with the United States they also seemed poised to bribe developing nations into fighting for the old Annexes model in order to prevent a new agreement being reached. AR5 makes it quite clear that these developing nations - many on the more central latitudes - will be the ones that will be the most heavily impacted by climate change.

For it's part the UK responded to the publication of this latest chapter of AR5 by starting the dredging of rivers on the Somerset Levels which were at the centre of the winter 2013/14's epic floods. On the face of it these seems like a sensible and constructive contribution to the discussion because dredging and other forms of waterway management are legitimate adaptation methods. However the public demand for the resumption of dredging seems to come from a refusal to believe that the main cause of the floods which saw the groundwater table over-topped was simply that there was too much rain. By agreeing to start dredging in such a high profile way the British government certainly doesn't seem to be willing to challenge that public misconception.

That is a shame because if the predictions of AR5 prove to be true then we're going to have to move away from adaptation methods such as river dredging towards methods such as building water pipelines like gas and oil pipelines to shift fresh water from parts of the globe that are flooded to parts of the globe which are in perpetual drought. The already desert Gulf region is likely to be one of the worst affected.

20:55 on 31/3/14 (UK date).