by Playfuls Staff |
4th April 2007
Start talking about global warming and the mood typically turns to doom, gloom and alarm about greenhouse gases. But the focus may be shifting to a new reality: learning to live [more] with a warmer world.
Two decades of UN reports on threats such as rising sea levels, vanishing coastlines and stronger tropical storms have pushed industrial nations into action against emissions from the burning of fossil fuels, which scientists believe are warming Earth.
As politicians, celebrities and environmentalists rallied against emissions, less attention was paid to how countries could cope with warming. That is changing as scientists converge on the notion that climate change will affect us for centuries, whatever anti-pollution steps we take now.
"It's just within the last year that it's crept into the discussion," Gregg Marland, a climate expert at the US government's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, said in a telephone interview. "I think it's a concession that we've gotten far enough down the line that some change is inevitable."
The debate played out at talks in Brussels ahead of Friday's upcoming release of a UN report on the human impact of climate change, part of a 2007 trilogy that peaks in May with recommendations to policymakers.
Striking a balance between making peace with climate change and taking further steps to curb greenhouse-gas emissions was a key topic in the Brussels talks, said Thomas Wilbanks, a US government scientist and one of the report's authors.
More provocatively, four US- and British-based scientists recently argued that while "enormous intellectual, political, diplomatic and fiscal resources" were devoted to reducing emissions in the last 15 years or so, talk of adapting to climate change had been "taboo" as a signal of defeat.
They cite two factors - ferment among scientists, including the UN's global panel of climate experts, and worry among developing countries expected to be hardest hit - as elements that are pushing the "adaptation" discussion higher on the agenda.
"Historical emissions dictate that climate change is unavoidable," the four experts said in a commentary in the February edition of the journal Nature. "And even the most optimistic emissions projections show global greenhouse-gas concentrations rising for the forseeable future."
The trick is to protect people against the impact of climate change as part of a broader development strategy that is in tune with the environment, the scientists argued. Americans needed look no further than the 2005 hurricane that flooded New Orleans and drove out most residents.
"As Hurricane Katrina made devastatingly clear, climate vulnerability is caused by unsustainable patterns of development combined with socioeconomic inequality," said the experts.
Building cleaner cars, power plants and "green" houses helps cut down emissions. In contrast, adaptation can range from improving a low-lying nation's flood defences to chopping down trees that might fall on your house in a storm.
The Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF) says governments need to move now to protect people and nature against storms, drought and rising seas, which can trigger forest fires, damage to coral reefs and crop failure.
But pinpointing what regions might be hit by destructive climate change in the future is notoriously difficult. Still, speculation has already begun about who wins and loses in a warming world.
Melting polar ice could open up new shipping and oil exploration opportunities in places like Canada and Russia, American writer Gregg Easterbrook predicted in The Atlantic monthly. Be ready to sell coastal real estate and, for Europe, possibly to grow colder - a development that could undermine its powerful economy, he says.
Despite the tantalizing prospects, Easterbrook said he opposes "just letting climate turmoil happen and seeing who profits."
"The history of antipollution programmes shows that it is always cheaper to prevent emissions than to reverse any damage they cause," he said.
By Tony Czuczka
© 2007 DPA
