Researchers stress adaptation to global warming
Pastor Dale Morgan
Posted on Wed, Sep. 29, 2006
*Researchers stress adaptation to global warming*
By Robert S. Boyd
McClatchy Newspapers
(MCT)
WASHINGTON - Install massive steel barriers in the waters around New
York City to ward off storm surges as sea levels rise. Plant
heat-friendly corn instead of heat-sensitive wheat. Air-condition
stifling apartments to prevent widespread heat-related deaths. Require
new buildings to be set well back from the seashore or raised on stilts.
These are some of the ideas that scientists and engineers are discussing
to help the world adapt to climate change. No matter what efforts are
made to slow global warming, even many skeptics say that further
temperature increases are inevitable.
As a result, adaptation - actions that individuals, companies or
governments take to reduce damage from climate change - is gaining more
attention from researchers and policymakers.
"We have already bought into a certain amount of climate change," said
Jay Gulledge, a senior researcher at the Pew Center on Global Climate
Change in Arlington, Va. "Adaptation is obviously something we're going
to have to do."
"Without adaptation, the consequences of global warming and sea level
rise would be disastrous," the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
warned in its most recent five-year report.
Adaptation isn't a substitute for measures to control carbon dioxide and
other greenhouse gas emissions, which most scientists believe have
increased average global temperatures by about 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit
over the past century. If emissions continue to grow at the present
rate, scientists say, the Earth could become 3 to 5 degrees warmer by
the year 2100.
"Climate-change policy requires that both of these issues (adaptation
and carbon reduction) be addressed simultaneously," said Robert
Mendelsohn, an environmental scientist at the Yale School of Forestry &
Environmental Studies in New Haven, Conn. "Countries should prudently
anticipate warming and prepare to adapt to climate change."
Adaptation can include such measures as switching crops, building
seawalls, controlling water use, adopting new building codes, even
moving away from danger zones.
People, of course, have always adapted to changes in their environment.
Half a million Oklahomans and other Southwesterners migrated to
California during the Dust Bowl droughts of the 1930s. Thousands of New
Orleans residents will never return to their Hurricane
Katrina-devastated city.
As the United States gets hotter, people will try to move north,
Gulledge predicted. "Unfortunately, all the good places are already
taken," he said. As a result, "Canada will be more populous 500 years
from now."
Animals, plants and insects already are migrating toward cooler climes.
Since 1975, 1,700 biological species have been moving poleward at an
average speed of 25 miles per decade, James Hansen, a NASA environmental
scientist, reported in this week's edition of the Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences.
There will be winners as well as losers as humans try to adapt to a
hotter world. Many farmers are likely to benefit. "Higher carbon-dioxide
levels will increase crop productivity," Mendelsohn said.
On the other hand, poor countries that lack the capacity to adapt will
be worse off. For example, people on low-lying islands may find their
homes uninhabitable.
"There is an urgent need to help vulnerable communities adapt to the sea
level rise, which is already under way," Achim Steiner, the executive
director of the United Nations Environment Programme, said in a report
last month on the plight of Pacific Ocean islands. Some islands, such as
Fiji and American Samoa, already have lost much of the mangrove swamps
that protect their coastlines.
Many of the world's major cities lie close to the sea and are threatened
by rising water. Venice, Italy, and St. Petersburg, Russia, are building
huge barriers to protect themselves. London has installed a series of
locks to block tides surging up the River Thames.
For more than five years, Malcolm Bowman, an oceanographer at the State
University of New York at Stony Brook, Long Island, has been promoting
the idea of placing four 50-foot-high storm-surge barriers in the rivers
and harbors surrounding New York City. Parts of the city lie only a few
feet above the Atlantic Ocean and are subject to severe flooding in
storms. Federal, state and local agencies are helping to finance
Bowman's study.
According to Bowman, the surge gates would be left open for ship
traffic, but when a storm threatened they could be closed for a day or
two until the worst danger passed.
"It sounds kind of fanciful, I know," Bowman said. "It would be a huge
engineering project. It would cost billions. But 100 years down the
road, our descendants are going to have to decide either to build or to
retreat."
Another huge engineering project under discussion is a proposal to
divert the mouth of the Mississippi River to rebuild wetlands threatened
by rising water south of New Orleans. The Louisiana Department of
Natural Resources and the U.S. Corps of Engineers will hold a
brainstorming session on the idea this fall.
"We have already bequeathed a more dangerous world to our
grandchildren," Neil Adger, a climate expert at the University of East
Anglia in England, wrote in his new book, "Fairness in Adaptation to
Climate Change." "Adaptation to climate change will be required from all
of us, whether we want it or not."
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For more information online about adapting to climate change, go to
http://www.aiaccproject.org