The Adaptation Follies; or Ignoring the Un-Conceived
Flooding graphic from the San Francisco Chronicle, "Oceans Rising Fast, New Studies Find," March 24, 2006.
Adaptation is a fairy land that the business-as-usual crowd visits with increasing frequency, a hand-wave in the face of rising ocean waves. Ask yourself, how far does the conversation ever go beyond the word "adaptation"? Do proponents of adaptation define it, suggest how much it would cost, explain how populations might change? Can adapters give a heads up about what places should adapt, and in what ways? To me, "adaptation" sounds more like "reaction." The world is changing beyond anything in our experience. The places that humans have settled for thousands of years -- where rivers meet, atop productive soils, on ocean shores just yards from all the fish they can eat -- may not be such great places to settle in 50 or 100 years. But don't listen to me. Let's go to a reputable source for talking about adaptation, the brick put out last year by the IPCC's Working Group II, Climate Change 2007: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability, specifically Chapter 17 (pdf), "Assessment of Adaptation Practices, Options, Constraints and Capacity." Here's what the IPCC has to say about adaptation:
"There are significant barriers to implementing adaptation. These include both the inability of natural systems to adapt to the rate and magnitude of climate change, as well as technological, financial, cognitive and behavioural, and social and cultural constraints. There are also significant knowledge gaps for adaptation as well as impediments to flows of knowledge and information relevant for adaptation decisions."But there is limited progress, the authors aver.
"While adaptation is increasingly regarded as an inevitable part of the response to climate change, the evidence in this chapter suggests that climate change adaptation processes and actions face significant limitations, especially in vulnerable nations and communities. In most of the cases, adaptations are being implemented to address climate conditions as part of risk management, resource planning and initiatives linked to sustainable development...Right. So, essentially, despite some isolated hopeful examples, adaptation is poorly defined, difficult to prepare for, and hard to talk about. Adaptation is to climate change what appeasement was in Munich.
"Recent reviews indicate that a 'wait and see' or reactive approach is often inefficient and could be particularly unsuccessful in addressing irreversible damages, such as species extinction or unrecoverable ecosystem damages, that may result from climate change... Knowledge of climate change causes, impacts and possible solutions does not necessarily lead to adaptation. Well-established evidence from the risk, cognitive and behavioural psychology literatures points to the inadequacy of the 'deficit model' of public understanding of science, which assumes that providing individuals with scientifically sound information will result in information assimilation, increased knowledge, action and support for policies based on this information."
The most eloquent and forceful interview I've had on this topic is with David Rind, a senior scientist at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Here's what he told Elizabeth Kolbert, author of Field Notes From a Catastrophe. This passage comes from Kolbert's May 5, 2005 New Yorker article, "The Climate of Man II: The Curse of Akkad":
There is a 20-year-wide chasm between the business-as-usual community and current climate science. The central question in all of this is, What does the present generation owe future generations? Is our message to future generations, "React to whatever's coming!"? Certainly seems that way. Otherwise we would have started coping with our emissions a decade ago. Debate over the rights of women and the rights of the unborn have riven this country like no other issue since the Civil War. But how much do you hear about the rights of the un-conceived? Given the state of child care in this country, wanna-be parents actually have to sign up their un-conceived children for day care lists if they want a spot to open up by the time the child is conceived, born, and 3-6 months old. Seems like while we're signing the un-conceived up for private-sector social services we should also think about what the planet's going to look like when they're old.One afternoon, when I was talking to Rind in his office, he mentioned a visit that President Bush's science adviser, John Marburger, had paid to GISS a few years earlier. "He said, 'We're really interested in adaptation to climate change,' " Rind recalled. "Well, what does 'adaptation' mean?" He rummaged through one of his many file cabinets and finally pulled out a paper that he had published in the Journal of Geophysical Research entitled "Potential Evapo—transpiration and the Likelihood of Future Drought." In much the same way that wind velocity is measured using the Beaufort scale, water availability is measured using what's known as the Palmer Drought Severity Index. Different climate models offer very different predictions about future water availability; in the paper, Rind applied the criteria used in the Palmer index to GISS's model and also to a model operated by NOAA's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory. He found that as carbon-dioxide levels rose the world began to experience more and more serious water shortages, starting near the equator and then spreading toward the poles. When he applied the index to the GISS model for doubled CO2, it showed most of the continental United States to be suffering under severe drought conditions. When he applied the index to the G.F.D.L. model, the results were even more dire. Rind created two maps to illustrate these findings. Yellow represented a forty—to—sixty-per-cent chance of summertime drought, ochre a sixty-to-eighty-per-cent chance, and brown an eighty-to-a-hundred-per- cent chance. In the first map, showing the GISS results, the Northeast was yellow, the Midwest was ochre, and the Rocky Mountain states and California were brown. In the second, showing the G.F.D.L. results, brown covered practically the entire country.
"I gave a talk based on these drought indices out in California to water-resource managers," Rind told me. "And they said, 'Well, if that happens, forget it.' There's just no way they could deal with that.”
He went on, "Obviously, if you get drought indices like these, there's no adaptation that's possible. But let's say it's not that severe. What adaptation are we talking about? Adaptation in 2020? Adaptation in 2040? Adaptation in 2060? Because the way the models project this, as global warming gets going, once you've adapted to one decade you're going to have to change everything the next decade.
"We may say that we're more technologically able than earlier societies. But one thing about climate change is it's potentially geopolitically destabilizing. And we're not only more technologically able; we're more technologically able destructively as well. I think it's impossible to predict what will happen. I guess--though I won't be around to see it--I wouldn't he shocked to find out that by 2100 most things were destroyed." He paused. "That's sort of an extreme view.”
"Adaptation-only" is a message of self-serving arrogance to posterity.
Thank you for that last paragraph. I keep wondering why people with children and grandchildren (i.e. most adults) aren't the class most committed to lessening this crisis. Do they/we not want a comfortable future for their family?
I wrote "lessening" above because, unfortunately, it seems that the time for completely averting crisis has passed.
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