A really, really scary, but thought-provoking March 16th Guardian article by George Monbiot examines the political prospects for the world to adapt to climate change, and they ain't good. In fact, he concludes that they are worse than the prospects for developing a mitigation regime.
More below the fold ...
His basic point is that if you look at the costs associated with coping with or adapting to climate change, the costs of mitigating it seem more feasible--or at least our best hope to get out alive.
The money quote:
The world won’t adapt and can’t adapt: the only adaptive response to a global shortage of food is starvation. Of the two strategies it is mitigation, not adaptation, which turns out to be the most feasible option, even if this stretches the concept of feasibility to the limits. As Dieter Helm points out, the action required today is unlikely but "not impossible. It is a matter ultimately of human well being and ethics."
I think we need to develop a frame around climate change that moves from a dichotomy between:
- Staying with our comfortable familiar ways of doing things because there is really no danger (the denier position) versus
- Making big, expensive, scary changes to our ways of doing things because there is a disaster looming (the reality-based position).
to a choice between:
- Taking action to manage climate change versus
- Sitting around while climate change destroys our way of life.
We need to get away from doing nothing being framed as the zero cost option; there will be a high cost to doing nothing, in both lives and money.