‘Adapt or Die’ Becomes Mantra Against Warming

Some species adjust, but humans hampered by costs and speed of change

The Thames Barrier has 10 steel gates that protect London from tidal surges but, fearing rising seas from global warming, Britain is investing $500 million to beef up those defenses. (Photo credit: Leon Neal / AFP — Getty Images file)

Dec. 3, 2009

With the world losing the battle against global warming so far, experts are warning that humans need to follow nature’s example: Adapt or die.

That means elevating buildings, making taller and stronger dams and seawalls, rerouting water systems, restricting certain developments, changing farming practices and ultimately moving people, plants and animals out of harm’s way.

Adapting to rising seas and higher temperatures is expected to be a big topic at the U.N. climate-change talks in Copenhagen next week, along with the projected cost – hundreds of billions of dollars, much of it going to countries that cannot afford to do it themselves.

That adaptation will be a major focus is remarkable in itself. Until the past couple of years, experts avoided talking about adjusting to global warming for fear of sounding fatalistic or causing countries to back off efforts to reduce emissions. …

Some biologists point to how nature has handled the changing climate. The rare Adonis blue butterfly of Britain looked as if it was going to disappear because it couldn’t fly far and global warming was making its habitat unbearable. To biologists’ surprise, it evolved longer thoraxes and wings, allowing it to fly farther to cooler locales.

“Society needs to be changing as much as wildlife is changing,” said Texas A&M biologist Camille Parmesan, an expert on how species change with global warming.

Change to fast to adapt?

One difficulty is that climate change is happening rapidly.

“Adaptation will be particularly challenging because the rate of change is escalating and is moving outside the range to which society has adapted in the past” when more natural climate changes happened, U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration chief Jane Lubchenco, a marine biologist, told Congress on Wednesday.

Cities, states and countries are scrambling to adapt or are at least talking about it and setting aside money for it. Some examples:

• England is strengthening the Thames River flood control barrier at a cost of around half a billion dollars.
• The Netherlands is making its crucial flood control system stronger.
• California is redesigning the gates that move water around the agriculturally vital Sacramento River Delta so that they can work when the sea level rises dramatically there.
• Boston elevated a sewage treatment plant to keep it from being flooded when sea level rises. New York City is looking at similar maneuvers for water plants.
• Chicago has a program to promote rooftop vegetation and reflective roofs that absorb less heat. That could keep the temperature down and ease heat waves.
• Engineers are installing “thermal siphons” along the oil pipeline in Alaska, which is built on permafrost that is thawing, to draw heat away from the ground.
• Researchers are uprooting moisture-loving trees along British Columbia’s coastal rainforests and dropping their seedlings in the dry ponderosa pine forests of Idaho, where they are more likely to survive.
• Singapore plans to cut its flood-prone areas in half by 2011 by widening and deepening drains and canals and completing a $226 million dam at the mouth of the city’s main river.
• In Thailand, there are large-scale efforts to protect places from rising sea levels. Monks at one temple outside Bangkok had to raise the floor by more than 3 feet.
• Desperately poor Bangladesh is spending more than $50 million on adaptation. It is trying to fend off the sea with flood control and buildings on stilts.

President Barack Obama and Congress are talking about $1.2 billion a year from the U.S. for international climate aid, which includes adaptation. …

The World Bank estimates adaptation costs will total $75 billion to $100 billion a year over the next 40 years.

The International Institute for Environment and Development, a London think tank, says that number is too low. It may even be $200 billion a year or $300 billion a year, said Chris Hope, a business school professor at the University of Cambridge and part of the IIED study.

Nevertheless, Hope said failing to adapt would be even more expensive – perhaps $6 trillion a year on average over the next 200 years. Adaptation could cut that by about $2 trillion a year, he said. …

‘Planned relocation’ ahead?

As for helping plants and animals, British climate scientist Martin Parry said the world will have to create a triage system to figure out which living things can be saved, which can’t and are effectively goners, and which don’t need immediate help. …

INTERACTIVE Costs along coasts View some of the largest coastal cities vulnerable to rising seas.

Some islands, such as the Maldives, and some coastal cities will not be able to survive rising seas no matter what protections are put in place, said Saleemel Huq, a senior fellow at IIED who runs an adaptation center in Bangladesh. In those cases, he said, the world will need “planned relocation” of people and cities.

Parmesan said people are going to have to realize that “some areas are not going to be good enough to live in in the next 100 years.”

Related reports: “Climategate”

Scientist in climate flap to step down for now (AP, Dec. 2, 2009)

Climate e-mails debated at House hearing (AP, Dec. 2, 2009)

University in climate flap details inquiry reach (AP, Dec. 3, 2009)

Penn State prof welcomes climate flap inquiry (AP, Dec. 3, 2009)

United Nations to probe climate e-mail leak (AP, Dec. 3, 2009)

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12/12/09 Update

Review: E-mails Show Pettiness, Not Fraud

By Seth Borenstein, Raphael Satter and Malcolm Ritter
Dec. 12, 2009

LONDON – E-mails stolen from climate scientists show they stonewalled skeptics and discussed hiding data – but the messages don’t support claims that the science of global warming was faked, according to an exhaustive review by The Associated Press.

The 1,073 e-mails examined by the AP show that scientists harbored private doubts, however slight and fleeting, even as they told the world they were certain about climate change. However, the exchanges don’t undercut the vast body of evidence showing the world is warming because of man-made greenhouse gas emissions.

The scientists were keenly aware of how their work would be viewed and used, and, just like politicians, went to great pains to shape their message. …

Some e-mails expressed doubts about the quality of individual temperature records or why models and data didn’t quite match. Part of this is the normal give-and-take of research, but skeptics challenged how reliable certain data was. …

The AP studied all the e-mails for context, with five reporters reading and rereading them – about 1 million words in total. …

Read full report

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1/5/10 Update

Related reports:

C.I.A. is sharing data with climate scientists (William J. Broad, New York Times, Jan. 5, 2010) — The nations top scientists and spies are collaborating on an effort to use the federal governments intelligence assets to assess the hidden complexities of environmental change. In October 2009, the C.I.A. opened a small unit to assess the security implications of climate change.

Climate change seen as threat to U.S. security (John M. Broder, New York Times, Aug. 9, 2009) — A growing number of policy makers say that the worlds rising temperatures, surging seas and melting glaciers are a direct threat to the national interest.

Spy chief backs study of impact of warming (Mark Mazzetti, New York Times, May 12, 2007) — The United States top intelligence official has endorsed a study by spy agencies about the impact of global warming on national security.

Terror in the weather forecast (Thomas Homer-Dixon, New York Times, Apr. 24, 2007) — Climate stress may well represent a challenge to international security just as dangerous and more intractable than the arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union during the cold war.

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1/19/10 Update

2000s Warmest Decade on Record

Jan. 19, 2010

WASHINGTON – The 2000-2009 decade was the warmest on record, easily surpassing the previous hottest decade – the 1990s – researchers said Tuesday in a report providing fresh evidence that the planet may be warming at a potentially disastrous rate.

In 2009, global surface temperatures were 1.01 degree above average, which tied the year for the fifth warmest year on record, the National Climatic Data Center said.

And that helped push the 2000-2009 decade to 0.96 degree above normal, which the agency said “shattered” the 1990s record value of 0.65 degree above normal.

The warmest year on record was 2005 at 1.11 degrees above normal.

The findings follow years of gradually rising global temperatures which atmospheric scientists attribute to the warming effect of gases released into the air by human activities, including burning fossil fuels. …

Concerns about the effects of a warmer climate include rising sea levels and the potential spread of tropical diseases, changes in hurricane patterns, increased drought in some areas, disruption of crop growth and wildlife patterns, and loss of species unable to adapt. …

Last year’s climate milestones included:

• The 10th consecutive summer with above-normal temperatures in the U.S. Northwest.
• Record winter drought in Texas.
• The deadliest February tornado in Oklahoma history.
• The largest wildfire in Los Angeles County history.
• Most active tornado season in a decade in Louisiana and Alabama.
• New seasonal snowfall records for Spokane, Wash., and International Falls, Minn.
• Worst deluge in decades in northern Brazil, affecting 186,000 people.
• Heavy rainfall in northern Argentina, causing a landslide affecting 20,000 people.
• Disastrous floods triggered by heavy rain in Central Europe.
• Britain’s heaviest snowstorm since 1991.
• Extratropical storm Klaus (similar to a category 3 hurricane) kills 30 in France and Spain.
• Heaviest snowfall in northern China in 55 years.
• Typhoons batter the Philippines causing fatal flooding.
• More than 600 die in the deadliest typhoon to hit Taiwan in five decades.

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FROM THE ARCHIVES: One Year Ago – December 3, 2008

Obama Foreign Policy Shift

One-year retrospective: One year ago today, I reported that Bush administration Defense Secretary Robert Gates signaled a willingness to forge ahead with two key priorities for the incoming Obama administration: accelerating the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq and shutting down the Guantanamo Bay detention center. I also reported that President-elect Barack Obama’s national security team will include two veteran cold warriors — former NATO commander Gen. James L. Jones as national security adviser and Robert M. Gates as defense secretary — and a political rival — Hillary Clinton as secretary of state — whose records are all more hawkish than the new president’s.