Freedman: Warming up to Adaptation
When he takes the oath of office on January 20th, President-elect Barack Obama will inherit a sobering climate change and energy challenge. Global emissions of greenhouse gases continue to increase, driving up global average surface temperatures and leading to widespread repercussions from pole to pole. At the same time, the global financial meltdown has many experts questioning whether the U.S. and other leading economies can afford to take serious action to reduce emissions, since some steps may increase short-term costs for industry and consumers in pursuit of longer term environmental and economic gains.
While efforts to mitigate climate change impacts are likely to comprise the bulk of an Obama administration's initial climate change agenda, scientific research demonstrates that adaptation efforts will need to be high on the list of priorities as well. While mitigation refers to efforts aimed at preventing climate change from getting out of hand in the first place, adaptation means taking action to boost society's capacity to withstand climate change-related impacts, many of which are already occurring. Building seawalls in flood-prone coastal areas is an example of an adaptation measure, whereas reducing greenhouse gas emissions from power plants falls under mitigation.
For more on the need to adapt to climate change, keep reading. See our full forecast for the outlook through the week.
Environmental activists have been 'warming up' to adaptation as an integral component of climate change solutions. For years it was taboo to talk about adaptation, because it was feared that focusing on it would be a distraction from efforts to stop man made climate change from occurring. Recently, however, this dynamic has shifted.
In an article in the Economist in early September, for example, prominent climate change activist Al Gore said he regretted his reluctance to push adaptation efforts. "I used to think adaptation subtracted from our efforts on prevention," Gore said. "But I've changed my mind."
The Economist cited two main reasons for the shift. One is that scientists have become more pessimistic in their assessments of climate change, and another is that it's increasingly clear that poor countries, which have less adaptive capacity, will be hardest hit regardless of how severe climate change turns out to be. This means that they will need help adapting to impacts such as shifts in precipitation patterns and sea level rise.
A recent study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) last month, highlights the necessity of adaptation in a comprehensive approach to climate change. The study illuminates some of the difficulties that Obama and other world leaders will confront in upcoming high stakes rounds of international climate change treaty negotiations. The PNAS study, by a large group of researchers from Europe, North America and Asia, makes clear that significant climate change is likely to occur even if drastic emissions cuts are made during the next 50 years.
For the study, researchers used computer models to examine how the climate may change based on a wide range of emissions scenarios and climate policies. Each scenario depicts a different version of a future earth, with varying global population sizes and emissions.
Some of the scenarios that researchers investigated included significant increases in population and emissions, while under others; countries would take major steps to curb emissions. What makes the study different from previous projections of climate change is that, in order to make the results as realistic as possible, it included in its projections specific climate policy proposals that are already under consideration. The researchers' aim was to determine how much warming could be avoided by current mitigation proposals.
What the scientists found was unsettling. A significant amount of warming - an average minimum of 1.4 degrees Celsius, or 2.5 Fahrenheit compared to 1990 levels - would still take place even if the most stringent emissions reduction policies were to be implemented. "This value is substantially above previously estimated committed warming based on climate system inertia alone," the study stated.
In an email conversation, lead author Detlef van Vuuren, a scientist with the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, said that in the most ambitious scenarios greenhouse gas emissions would be reduced from all industrial sectors and countries starting in 2013, would peak soon after 2020 and decline significantly thereafter. Van Vuuren said under such stringent scenarios the climate would warm between 1.1 and 3.4 degrees C compared to preindustrial levels. The range reflects uncertainties in the climate system and carbon cycle, van Vuuren said. "In other words, if we are really lucky, it could be 1.1 [degrees Celsius]; but it could also be 3.4 degrees C," he said.
Van Vuuren said the study underscores the need to ramp up adaptation planning. "The main thing is too see that adaptation and mitigation are not mutually exclusive - but in fact need each other," he said.
| November 10, 2008; 10:30 AM ET
Categories: Climate Change, Freedman, Government, Science
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