Rosebud
12-30-2007, 05:51 PM
Just read a very interesting Newsweek article (http://www.newsweek.com/id/81390) about the changes that will be necessary to adapt to global warming. The article says that at this point, there's nothing we can do to stop it, so we're going to have to figure out how to live with it. This will include:
-Inland areas making room for environmental refugees
-Building massive sea walls to hold back rising oceans
-Increased budgets for fire fighting teams in dry areas
-Lengthening airport runways (because in hotter/denser air planes need more room to become airbourne)
-Creating power lines that will hold up to increased ice (which the Midwest will get)
-Building bridges above anticipated storm surges
Article excerpts:
It's such a polite, unthreatening word: "adapt." The kind of thing you do as you roll with the punches or keep a stiff upper lip, modifying your behavior to a new situation. But as it will be used in 2008, adaptation is a euphemism for widespread, expensive changes that will be needed to cope with climate change. Although some adaptations will be modest and low tech, such as cities' establishing cooling centers to shelter residents during heat waves, others will require such herculean efforts and be so costly that we'll look back on the era beginning in 1988, when credible warnings of climate change reached critical mass, and wonder why we were so stupid as to blow the chance to keep global warming to nothing more extreme than a few more mild days in March.
According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (which just picked up its Nobel Peace Prize), we are in for a minimum of 90 more years of warming no matter how many Hummers are junked in favor of Priuses. The reason is both atmospheric (greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide remain aloft for about a century) and political (the world can't seem to summon the will to reduce greenhouse emissions).
Thoughts?
-Inland areas making room for environmental refugees
-Building massive sea walls to hold back rising oceans
-Increased budgets for fire fighting teams in dry areas
-Lengthening airport runways (because in hotter/denser air planes need more room to become airbourne)
-Creating power lines that will hold up to increased ice (which the Midwest will get)
-Building bridges above anticipated storm surges
Article excerpts:
It's such a polite, unthreatening word: "adapt." The kind of thing you do as you roll with the punches or keep a stiff upper lip, modifying your behavior to a new situation. But as it will be used in 2008, adaptation is a euphemism for widespread, expensive changes that will be needed to cope with climate change. Although some adaptations will be modest and low tech, such as cities' establishing cooling centers to shelter residents during heat waves, others will require such herculean efforts and be so costly that we'll look back on the era beginning in 1988, when credible warnings of climate change reached critical mass, and wonder why we were so stupid as to blow the chance to keep global warming to nothing more extreme than a few more mild days in March.
According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (which just picked up its Nobel Peace Prize), we are in for a minimum of 90 more years of warming no matter how many Hummers are junked in favor of Priuses. The reason is both atmospheric (greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide remain aloft for about a century) and political (the world can't seem to summon the will to reduce greenhouse emissions).
Thoughts?