How to confront future rising sea levels, droughts, intense heat waves, and other catastrophes stemming from continued global warming? There are really just three options on our menu. We can: 1) try to reduce future fossil fuel use to prevent catastrophic warming; 2) allow the planet's climate to worsen and suffer the consequences; 3) we can try to adapt to the consequences of global warming. In short, we can try to mitigate, we can simply suffer, and we can try to adapt.
For many problems society faces, all three options make sense. As we write, the San Francisco Bay Bridge is shut down because of structural damage. In response, construction work (mitigation) is underway to repair the damage, commuters are jammed up (suffering) on alternative bridges, and extra service (adaptation) has been provided on mass transit. Is global warming like bridge failure? Can a combination of mitigation, suffering, and adaptation get us through the crisis? We'll focus here on adaptation.
Adaptation is certainly being taken seriously. At the recent legislators' forum in Copenhagen, domestic political representatives from the 16 largest economies agreed on a slate of changes to limit greenhouse gas emissions. They also agreed, however, that $100 billion would be needed yearly to help developing nations adapt to climate change.
Confidence in adaptation exposes a fallacy of how people perceive global warming and its consequences. If only global warming were just a bridge failure, a single typhoon, an earthquake, or some other temporary, locally contained condition. With enough stored water and food, one may be able to adapt to the chaos that ensues in the aftermath of a major storm or earthquake. And when stored supplies run out, surely aid will come from elsewhere.
But global warming is a truly historic development. Unlike an earthquake, it is localized neither in space nor in time, for all practical purposes. Humanity has started a planetary process of worldwide change, of ongoing, accelerating and often unpredictable climate change. Unpredictability will impede adaptation.
Examining proposed adaptations shows how futile adaptation can be to a changing climate. For example, agriculturalists argue that we must and can come up with drought resistant crops. But there is a limit to just how drought resistant our food crops can become to the ever more severe and pervasive droughts and floods predicted to result from climate change. We will need to design ever more resistant food crops to both droughts and floods -- is that really possible? How about salt resistance as irrigation waters become more saline from rising sea levels? Simultaneously, can we continue increasing production to feed ever increasing numbers of humans?
In another example, many coral biologists predict the extinction of coral reefs, a major human food source in some tropical areas, by mid-century due to climate change. This is leading some researchers to develop plans for cryogenically preserving coral polyps, which can then be replanted, presumably when the oceans become more livable. But ecologists recognize that coral ecosystems are intricate webs of life. Simply replanting coral will not revive a reef, any more than a few stored pigment samples from a deteriorating Mona Lisa will allow one to recreate it, once a suitable canvas becomes available.
How shall we adapt to the predicted rise in sea levels from global warming? The prospects for coastal residents and coastal infrastructure worldwide are grim. Adaptation would be to move to higher ground or to build sea walls. The cost of doing either worldwide is unthinkable, and the practicality of the latter is questionable. Do we build walls to protect us against 2-foot or 10-foot higher seas? Although the former is more likely, both rises could possibly occur in this century if global warming continues unchecked. Imagine the economic cost of walling off the Atlantic seaboard to protect us from 10-foot higher waters! Imagine the loss of coastal ecosystems that would result!
Adaptation is a convenient and comfortable belief. Soothing the consciences of the highest emitters, it is also a temporary "feel-good" band aid for the world's poor, who will be affected the most by this ongoing change. The danger of believing in adaptation, however, is tri-fold: 1) it lures people into a false sense of complacency, weakening the urgency needed to solve climate change quickly enough so as to forestall an avalanche of catastrophic climatic effects; 2) it fosters a false sense of what climate change is and how it can be solved; 3) it can divert needed time and money from mitigating climate change. As it is, this danger is increasing. According to a recent PEW poll, within the past six months the percentage of US citizens who think there is solid evidence that the earth is warming because of human activity has declined from 47% to 36%.
Some forms of adaptation are also humane goals that we should be striving for anyway: we should continue to protect people from tropical diseases, and help increase sanitation in developing nations. We should learn to grow crops with less water, and grow food nearer to consumers. But adaptation should not become a slippery slope that increasingly diverts resources from mitigating climate change. A city would do well, for example, to use funds to transfer to renewable clean energy, rather than build an ultimately ineffective sea wall.
Nature cannot be negotiated, and the developing scale and breadth of climate change will not yield to adaptation. Nor is nature affected by polls. The only thing that will make a physical planetary difference and truly prevent the suffering that will accompany global warming is decreasing greenhouse gas emissions, and this is where most of our efforts and resources must be focused.
As Fox News, the Obama administration and Jon Stewart participate in distracting media wars, the real news is that we continue to burn fossil fuels, and our planet continues to undergo important and ominous climate change.