Roger Pielke Jr. has an overheated post up today wondering why I don't care about the suffering of "millions, perhaps billions" of people around the world adversely affected by climate. Oy. I hesitate to reply, but here goes.
People, mainly poor people -- in the U.S., but far more so in developing countries -- are increasingly vulnerable to severe weather: floods, droughts, hurricanes, etc. The reasons have mainly to do with growing population, bad land-use decisions, economic dislocation, oligarchic greed, and other socioeconomic forces. Global warming plays some role at the margins, increasing the severity of the weather, but for now it only adds incrementally to the damages primarily attributable to those social forces. As global warming proceeds, its role will likely increase, but for the foreseeable future it will be socioeconomic changes that most increase vulnerability to climate. This is, I hardly need to point out, Roger's Point, which he finds endless, ingenious ways to rephrase.
The U.S. government ought to be doing what it can to reduce the vulnerability of the poor, in this country and elsewhere, to climate, by counterbalancing those socioeconomic forces. This would mean better land-use policy, better family planning services, sustainable development assistance, less corporatism, and, well, giving a damn. All indications are that the Bush administration doesn't give a damn. But it ought to. Roger and I, and as far as I know every other sentient being, agree on this. And indeed, it is environmentalists that have done more than anybody else to advocate for these sorts of policies.
But those policies would not be responses to climate change. They would simply be responses to human suffering.
The debate over climate change is a separate beast. In that context, "adaptation" simply means doing the sorts of things we ought to be doing anyway to reduce vulnerability to climate -- i.e., it means doing nothing in particular about climate change. There's one way to directly address climate change, and that's reducing the GHG emissions that drive it. In the context of the climate-change debate, advocating for adaptation means advocating for a non-response. It means advocating for nothing.
I, for one, am not going to provide that kind of political cover for those who are protecting their corporate contributors. Roger's calculus may be different. But neither of us suffers from any deficit of empathy or concern for the suffering of the world's most vulnerable.
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Comments
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Kif Scheuer Posted 11:54 pm
05 Jun 2006
Impacts from climate change will continue to escalate unless we mitigate.
Accepting the need for adaptation is implicitly accepting that GHG==>climate change, and I'm unaware of any climate change models that forsee a leveling off if GHGs aren't brought under control.
Adaptation is sensible, prudent and will be neccesary as Dave outlines above, but unless we mitigate we're going to adapt ourselves into oblivion. Why in the world would you want to focus on adaptation policies without simultaneously mitigating the the source of the problem? So we adapt to 1 ft sea level rises, then we adapt to 2 and then 3 and so on, all the while failing to reduce emissions that are making the problem worse. That's the ultimate folly.
Of course we have to adapt, but let's make damn sure we only have to adapt to the minimum amount of disruption we can. I'm not convinced talking about adaptation just provides cover to political interests, but I do think you have to preface adaptation with migtigation. It's insanity to do otherwise.
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caniscandida Posted 1:56 am
06 Jun 2006
This is a red herring. It is false and misleading to hypothesize a strict choice between "adaptationist" policies effective today, and "mitigationist" ones the results of which will not be apparent for some time. (I think it was Pielke's commenter Indur Goklany who wrote something to that effect.) There is not enough evidence at this point, it seems, to doubt the basic good intentions of Pielke & Co. Still, it is a cheap rhetorical trick, to claim the moral high ground by asserting one's own compassion for the world's countless suffering, while deploring the lack of it in one's adversary.
I hope you will find it in that creative heart of yours to move the discussion beyond this odd point of confusion. Your position of refusal to contribute to the political-cover tactic is both clear (even if the Iran analogy is not entirely satisfactory), and morally admirable.
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Ana Unruh Cohen Posted 3:29 am
06 Jun 2006
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