Why Isn't Adaptation to Climate Change a Hot Issue?

The media generates tons of greenhouse gas mitigation stories but not enough about the need to adapt to the coming storms. We should not only work on mitigating causes of global warming but also on mitigating the effects. One reason the media neglects this important story is because environmentalists and politicians rarely talk about it. Environmentalist may be afraid that adaptation could be used as an excuse not to curb greenhouse gases. Maybe adaptation just doesn't capture people's imaginations the way electric cars and wind turbines the size of 747 jet planes do.

This NASA satellite image above shows wildfires blazing in California on Oct. 23, 2007. Fire activity is shown with red pixels. Plumes of smoke can be seen blowing out over the Pacific Ocean. Scientists have done studies and found that global warming is increasing wildfire activity in the Western United States. It might be time for elected officials to push new building codes and zoning for fireproofing homes and preventing building in indefensible places. This is an example of adapting to climate change.

While it's reassuring that President George Bush addressed climate change in his State of the Union address and the Democratic presidential candidates discussed the issue in their debates, the term adaptation never comes up. There's no reason why we can't work on mitigation and adaptation at the same time. In fact, we would be stupid not to.

World Bank President Robert Zoellick made a statement about this during his trip to China in December: "For developing countries the adaptation challenge is as important, if not more so, than the mitigation challenge, but there has been less work on adaptation.”

In November I toured the National Center Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, where I heard a presentation by Gerald A. Meehl, a research scientist. Meehl spoke about research he and other scientists had done on "committed warming." In short, greenhouse gases we produced in the 20th century have committed us to further climate change in the 21st century. Even if we could stabilize our concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere yesterday,we can expect our planet to warm an average of 1 degree C per decade for at least the next three decades. It takes centuries for warming to reach the bottom of the ocean and so the heating of the ocean is lagging behind the heating of the earth's surface. He and his colleagues reached their findings using computer modeling, backed up by real world observations. A few years ago, scientists began taking the oceans' temperature from boats and by deploying Argo floats worldwide to measure underwater temperatures as deep as 2,000 meters.

Even supercomputers make mistakes, but it makes good sense to prepare for the effects of climate change. Below are some excellent sites to learn about adaptation to climate change.

I was encouraged to find that Marketplace, produced and distributed by American Public Media, did a series called “Plan B: Adapting to a Warmer World”

IPCC: Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Working Group II did an asessment report “Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability” which can be found in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Fourth Assessment Report, Chapter 17: Assessment of adaptation practices, options, constraints and capacity

NCAR's Societal-Environmental Research and Education Laboratory is working to better understand these impacts and to help decision makers anticipate and respond to them.


NCAR's Center for Capacity Building