Ministers Musings
Earth Day 2008: Joel Smith talks about Adaptation as a Response to Climate Change
I spoke 6 or 7 years ago at a UU Forum on what might be considered a dangerous level of climate change. This was based on a chapter I had lead for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in a report published in 2001.
Back then, we identified five types of climate change impacts that could be considered “dangerous”: unique systems (endangered species), extreme events, equity of impacts, total economic impacts, and potential for events such as melting of Greenland.
We thought then that there could be problems with some of these impacts with as little as 2 degrees F above 1990; an amount of warming we’ll probably surpass by around 2030. We thought there might be some benefits (such as improved agricultural output) at that amount of warming.
In general, we thought that even with increases up to 3 to 5 degrees F, there could be a mix of impacts. Above that things looked bad across the board.
I participated again in the latest IPCC report, published last year. We looked at the same questions.
Even though there is still potential for benefits such as increased agricultural output up to a point, we came away more pessimistic than we were in 2001.
One of the reasons was that we were more pessimistic, and this was surprising to many of us, is that we were seeing impacts of climate change a lot faster than we thought we would.
The most dramatic may have been the heat wave in Europe in 2003. Temperatures were a good 20 degrees F above normal for several weeks. At least 35,000 people died. Scientists studying the event conclude it would probably not have happened if we had not increased greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. In other words, global warming appears to be the main culprit.
We are seeing coastal villages in Alaska having to be moved because with the retreat of sea ice, their coastlines are getting eroded.
Closer to home, we are seeing more wildfires in the west and these have been tied to climate change.
And even closer, we’ve recently seen beetles infest lodgepole pines first in the Western Slope, and now they are coming into the Front Range. A number of scientists believe this infestation is much worse than past ones because of climate change.
We were also more pessimistic because projections of future impacts is more negative.
Recent research has made us better understand the losses we might face because of increases in extreme events such as hurricanes and floods.
Finally, we realize that a 2 to 7 degree F warming above 1990 could trigger the melting of Greenland. Greenland has enough ice to raise sea levels 20 feet. That won’t happen in one day like in the movies. Indeed, it would probably take centuries to Millennia to be realized. But we could trigger it in the next generation.
So, I am more pessimistic about this.
Your program says I am going to talk about adaptation and I will get to that in a moment.
I want to emphasize the notion that we need to reduce the emissions of greenhouse gases. Indeed, while global emissions are rising, even accelerating in recent years, we need to slow down, reverse it, and indeed substantially cut emissions to avoid the worst effects of climate change.
Why adaptation? Why not just reduce GHG emissions and avoid the problem?
Unfortunately, a mitigation only policy won’t work. The climate is already warming. We had more than a degree F of warming in the last century. Even if we stopped increasing GHG concentrations, we could almost get another degree Fahrenheit of warming.
The Europeans and many people in the US are calling for a stabilization of concentrations some 20 to 50% higher than today’s levels. That would mean several degrees more of warming. And that would take a heroic effort to achieve
Whether we hold climate change to those levels or go higher, there will be more hot days, fewer cold ones, higher sea levels, more intense rain events and flood risks. It also means that many plants and animals will have to change their location to survive.
All of this requires adaptation. So, adaptation is not option; we have to do it.
So, what are our choices on adaptation? Our basic choice is either to prepare for coming changes or let them happen and adapt as they do (and as we can. Adapting as impacts happen would be better in many ways. For one thing we don’t know exactly how climate will change. (At a Seder last night, we read about Joseph, who told the Pharaoh that there would be seven years of rain followed by seven years of drought. Well, Joseph must have one heck of a model, because we can’t make those kind of forecasts!). We don’t know how much warming we’re going to get. And there is a lot of uncertainty about precipitation. The climate models say it is likely that it will be drier in the southwest and wetter in the north and especially east. In Colorado, we don’t know if precipitation will increase or decrease. So, waiting until the changes in climate happen would be preferable.
But, there are problems with that wait-and-see approach.
We can get extreme events that lead to death and widespread destruction, like more heat waves like the one that hit Europe in 2003. Under one of the higher emission scenarios, one study found that a repeat of similar heat waves every other year by the end of the century.
Or we could get more Hurricane Katrinas. Now, we cannot link Katrina to climate change. But, we can learn many important lessons from it about adaptation. One key lesson is that even a wealthy and powerful nation such as ours can get overrun by extreme conditions. To be sure, there are many conditions that make New Orleans and Katrina unique. Essentially, having a city sit below sea level seems crazy. Yet it is there and people are coming back to New Orleans.
I was in New Orleans last November. I met with people from the water and sewer authority. They thought everything would be over in three days. They ended up living in their offices for a month getting the city’s water system operating again. (Their stories were quite moving.) I also saw some of the destruction in New Orleans’ Lakeview region.
One of the lessons I took away from talking to the people in New Orleans was that Katrina was a failure of imagination. The people at the water and sewer authority could imagine one levee failing, but not several and the whole city getting flooded.
There may be other failures of imagination: pine beetle outbreaks, increased fires, more intense hurricanes in the Gulf and Atlantic. It’s not just natural disasters that we need to be concerned about. There are a host of other problems. Coastal regions are rapidly developing, yet sea levels are rising and storms such as hurricanes are projected to get stronger.
The nation is spending tens of billions of dollars rebuilding its water supply and treatment infrastructure. These are designed to provide safe and reliable water supplies during droughts or low flow periods or to protect us from floods. Yet, paradoxically, the intensity of both floods and drought can increase. In the future, these water systems may not work as they are designed to.
We can’t wait for these events to happen. Prudence dictates that we try to account for climate change. As I mentioned, this is a challenge because we cannot predict what will happen.
So, what do we do? The good news is there is a lot we can do. Let me be clear: I don’t think adaptation solves all problems. There will be surprises. In addition, we do not have a good idea how to avoid widespread dislocation of ecosystems and loss of species. But, there is still a lot we can do to reduce our risks from many potential climate change impacts.
One of the fist things is do what we call “no regrets” adaptations. These are the many ways that we should be managing our natural resources anyway that make sense now (but we’re not doing), and make more sense considering climate change.
For, example we should be using water more wisely, especially in the West, where supplies are limited. Does it make sense to make the West look like East coast suburbia. Does it make sense to offer subsidized water for agriculture? This makes even less sense if conditions will become drier, which they well could.
We should be limiting development in areas that are prone to flooding and may be more at risk under climate change. One example is New Orleans, but there are many others.
These no regrets adaptations are important, but not everything we need. We need to make some changes beyond what makes sense anyway to anticipate climate change. For example, we need to consider the arrival of new diseases and pests that could affect people as well as those that could affect our terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. We’ll need monitoring and response plans.
When building infrastructure, we need to plan for the future. The way infrastructure has been typically built is to look at historic extreme events, such as the 1950s drought. That is not good enough under climate change because those extremes can (and may already are) get worse in the future. So, we need to try to anticipate such changes in sensible ways. (One of the challenges is that we have to recognize that climate will change for a long time; so we need approaches to adapt to constant change.)
In New Orleans, they are putting in hurricane storm gates which will not even work for a repeat of Katrina.
We also need a changing of attitudes. People can’t expect to be completely protected from climate variations. I am wrapping up a NOAA funded project on climate change and Boulder’s water supply. Carol Ellinghouse from the city pointed out that in future people may have to get used to things like “golden lawns” in the summer.
Fundamentally, what we need is a rethinking of how we manage climate sensitive resource such as forests, water resources, agriculture, coastal resources, and human health. We cannot afford more failures of imagination.
Climate change is going to be one of the great challenges this century. If we are smart and start moving on it, I think we greatly limit its extent and better prepare for what still will come. It’s not too late. But, we need to get moving.