http://e360.yale.edu/content/feature.msp?id=2156 26 May 2009: Report
Adaptation Emerges As Key Part Of Any Climate Change Plan
After years of reluctance, scientists and governments are now looking to adaptation measures as critical for confronting the consequences of climate change. And increasingly, plans are being developed to deal with rising seas, water shortages, spreading diseases, and other realities of a warming world.
by bruce stutz
Adaptation. For many in the climate change community, the word has had a traitorous ring, implying that its proponents were giving up on the notion that the world might mitigate the threat of global warming by significantly reducing emissions of greenhouse gases. Adaptation was for quitters.
Not anymore.
With nations in the industrialized and developing worlds continuing to pump record levels of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, hopes are fading that over the next half-century atmospheric CO₂ levels can be kept below 450 parts per million (ppm) and global warming held to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit). Now, a new sense of urgency has arisen as to how the world will adapt to a warming planet, where carbon dioxide levels could hit 600 parts per million and global temperatures could rise by 3 to 4 degrees C (5.4 to 7.2 degrees F).
“My view is that we’ll be lucky if we can stop CO₂ at 600 ppm,” says Wallace Broecker, a geoscientist at Columbia University’s Earth Institute. “There’s no way we’re going to stop at 450. Impossible. If we’re going to double CO₂, we’d better prepare what we’re going to do about it.”
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“Everyone is now talking about adaptation, but for all the talk there’s little actually being done,” says Schneider.
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