Adapting to lose

The Telegraph suggests that the debate over global warming may soon take a turn, as the issue may soon become one of whether to actually try to prevent the problem, or merely to try to minimize the resulting damage:

Developing drought-tolerant crops, constructing flood defences, improving building insulation or banning building close to sea level are as important as cutting emissions, according to Frances Cairncross, the president of the British Association and chairman of the Economic and Social Research Council.

"We need more sheltered public spaces. It is going to be either sunnier or rainier," she says. Plants, insects and animals that need to migrate north away from hotter climates should be provided with species corridors, among many other measures.

"Adaptation policies have had far less attention than mitigation, and that is a mistake," says Miss Cairncross. "We need to think now about policies that prepare for a hotter, drier world."...

"We cannot relocate the Amazon or insulate coral reefs — so we need mitigation too. But the Government could and should put in place an adaptation strategy right away."

Unfortunately, it's probably true that some effects of global warming are indeed unavoidable. And that will necessitate the type of planning proposed by Cairncross, though hopefully not at the expense of a real effort to minimize such effects as well.

But the lesson to be taken from that outcome shouldn't be that similar issues can be safely ignored until the consequences become unavoidable. After all, the adaptation strategy appears likely to cause far more disruption than would have been needed if substantive action had been taken to reduce emissions when the need to address global warming first became obvious. And we can only hope that the costs of inaction on global warming lead to greater efforts to deal with global issues more quickly and decisively when they arise in the future.