Climate Change Is Inevitable — It’s Time to Adapt

[The Straight Story]

Climate Change Is Inevitable — It’s Time to Adapt



In the waning weeks of 2009, planeloads of scientists, politicians, and assorted climate wonks from 192 countries will blow through a few million tons of CO2 to jet to Copenhagen, one of the world’s most carbon-conscious cities. The occasion is the much-awaited United Nations Climate Change Conference, aka Kyoto 2. Speeches will be made. Goals and targets will be hammered out. Limited victory will be declared. Set a Google News alert for “Last Chance to Stop Global Warming.”

There’s just one problem. As many of the participants—certainly the scientists—are only too aware, the global war on carbon has not gone well for the atmosphere. The really inconvenient truth: We’re toast. Fried. Steamed. Poached. More so than even many hand-wringing carbonistas admit. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, C02 that’s already in the air or in the pipeline will stoke “irreversible” warming for the next 1,000 years. Any scheme cobbled together in Copenhagen for slowing—forget reversing—the growth of greenhouse gases will be way too little, way too late. In the apt jargon of industry, a hotter planet is already “baked in.” James Lovelock, the British chemist who redubbed Mother Earth as “Gaia,” tells the ungilded truth: Can we hit a carbon Undo button? “Not a hope in hell.”

...

Ditto the other supposed horsemen of the climate apocalypse. Drought? Check out Perth, on the edge of the Great Australian Desert, where more than a million people keep hydrated with seawater that’s been desalinated by wind power. Famine? Talk to the biotech wizards designing postindustrial crops for every microclimate (and, yes, palate). Plague? Getting real health care to the several billion people who lack it will be much better insurance against illness than wishful thinking about a Goldilocks climate. None of these are complete solutions—it’s the sum of all progress that will get us through.

It’s worth keeping in mind that the planet we inhabit has always been fundamentally out of control, driven by fantastically complex, chaotic systems we scarcely understand. With or without our help, dear Mother Earth is capable of producing circumstances highly inimical to human life. Pick whatever black swan you like—how about the next asteroid or an avian superplague or that Yellowstone volcano? Climate change could end up being just a side note.

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/11/st_essay_globalwarming/

[The Doctor.]

1. Well, responsibility is in our laps for this one.

It's going to be an interesting century.

[Birthmark]

2. Adapt to what?

You gotta know what things are going to look like if you want to adapt. No one knows exactly where our crops will grow in the future. In a civilization sustained by industrial farming that's probably a massive killer. There won't be any effective adaptation on any scale for quite some time...after the human population has been whittled down substantially.

Or maybe we can just adapt to stepping over the bodies of those dead from starvation or dehydration?

[truedelphi]

3. First thing we can do is to demand that our news media carry

Articles related to chemtrails.

In 1997, Ed Teller said that having jet planes fly overhead and spray particulate matter across our skies would be wonderful way to deflect sun's heat.

Then an indie group did the science on this and found out that "Oops!" that program would ensure that more pollution was created by flying the jets and using that jet fuel, and by scattering the particulates overhead than by the offset amount fromt he sun's warming.


It is clear to many of us that this program exists - I not only live in an area that has little in the way of real commercial jet traffic, I also witness planes flying continually in V shaped patterns unlike flight patterns of any military or commercial planes.

The Obama Administration came out in April and siad they might begin such a program, while meanwhile in Germany, the citizens have filed suit against NATO and their government to have them STOP this chem trailing. It is hastening Global Climate Crisis - and it needs to be discussed and ENDED at once.

[jimlup]

4. Of course but ...

I personally don't believe it means giving up. We don't really know where peak oil will occur and we don't know when people will stop putting CO2 into the atmosphere.

Current models are suggesting as much as 16F warming. That is a fairly serious catastrophe that would need to be meet with an engineering response of global proportions.

I agree that the Copenhagen talks will likely do little, they still represent what will eventually be a concerted effort to limit CO2. After 16F will we still be dumping CO2 into the atmosphere? I think perhaps not. Maybe now would be a good time to start working on this very difficult problem.