November
3, 2002
The
global climate is changing
in big ways, probably
because of human actions,
and it is time to focus on
adapting to the impacts
instead of just fighting
to limit the warming.
That, in a nutshell, was
the idea that dominated
the latest round of
international climate
talks, which ended on
Friday in New Delhi. While
many scientists have long
held this view, it was a
striking departure for the
policy makers at the talks
— the industry
lobbyists, environmental
activists and government
officials. For more than a
decade, their single focus
had been the fight over
whether to cut smokestack
and tailpipe emissions of
carbon dioxide and other
heat-trapping greenhouse
gases. Many
environmentalists had long
avoided discussing
adaptation for fear it
would smack of defeatism. Experts
espousing the views of
industry were thrilled
with the shift in New
Delhi. "By
building capabilities to
deal with climate change,
we'll be much better off
than by just paying
attention to global
warming," said Myron
Ebell, who directs climate
policy for the Competitive
Enterprise Institute, a
private group that opposes
regulatory approaches to
environmental problems. Although
they conceded its
importance, environmental
campaigners said an
approach that focused on
adapting to climate change
rather than preventing it
would inevitably fail,
because the impact of
unfettered emissions would
eventually exceed people's
ability to adjust. Moreover,
many said, coral reefs,
alpine forests and other
fragile ecosystems —
without the resiliency of
human societies — would
simply be unable to cope
with fast-changing
conditions. The
change in attitude,
expressed in the
negotiations and in a
formal declaration adopted
Friday, has been partly
driven by unusual weather
this year — record
floods in Europe,
landslides in the
Himalayas, searing drought
in southern Asia and
Africa. No
single weather event can
be linked to human-caused
warming. But as the costs
of weather-related
disasters rise, unease
about climate change
rises, too. So far this
year, unusual weather is
blamed for 9,400 deaths
and $56 billion in damage,
according to the United
Nations and insurers, and
deaths and costs have been
rising for years. Another
impetus is the rising
realization that many
significant shifts have
already been set in motion
by a century-long
accumulation of warming
gases. Even if
emissions stopped today,
some experts say, the
volume of greenhouse gases
already in the atmosphere
would slowly raise sea
levels for a century or
two as warmed water
expands and terrestrial
ice melts. The result
would be coastal erosion
and salt water intrusion
into water supplies. The new
focus suits the agendas of
the Bush administration
and many developing
countries, which for
different reasons want to
avoid cutting emissions of
the warming gases. But
some environmental
campaigners say the shift
will discourage efforts to
cut dependence on fossil
fuels like coal and oil,
the main source of the
offending gases, in favor
of building dikes,
designing hardier crops or
other engineering fixes. "Adaptation
is like the `wear
sunglasses and a hat'
theory of fighting ozone
depletion," said Kert
Davies, the research
director for Greenpeace,
referring to the
Reagan-era debate over
chemicals that were
weakening the earth's
atmospheric shield against
harmful radiation. In that
case, the offending
synthetic chemicals were
banned under a 1987
treaty, but only because
damage to the ozone layer
had become vividly
apparent in satellite
images — and because
industry had come up with
alternatives. But no
ready substitutes exist
for cheap, plentiful
fossil fuels. Many experts
say the use of coal and
oil is bound to keep
rising for decades,
particularly as poor
countries climb the
economic ladder from
bicycles and water buckets
to cars and washing
machines. Conservative
policy analysts said
proposed curbs on fuel use
were thus unrealistic and
unjustified, while making
countries more resilient
to extremes of weather
made sense for many
reasons. One goal, Mr.
Ebell said, should be to
enable low-lying countries
like Bangladesh to respond
to typhoons the way
Florida responds to
hurricanes. There
are also ways to foster
development in poor
countries that limit harm
from climate change.
Experts say that in
semi-arid zones in Africa
and Asia, agricultural
assistance could improve
farmers' ability to endure
heat and drought. In some
areas, adaptation is
already under way. In the
Himalayas, some
communities, with the help
of the United Nations, are
installing alarm systems
to warn of flash floods as
expanding lakes of glacial
meltwater grow to the
bursting point in the next
decade. Low-lying
island nations, like the
Maldives in the Indian
Ocean, have been watching
the slow rise of the seas
for decades and have not
only been planning to
build storm barriers, but
possibly to evacuate
entirely at some point. The
emphasis on adapting is a
profound turnabout from
the course set a decade
ago after President George
Bush and other world
leaders signed the United
Nations Framework
Convention on Climate
Change. Though that treaty
and subsequent addenda
contained vague
commitments by industrial
nations to help vulnerable
countries adapt, the
emphasis was always about
curbing emissions to
prevent dangerous changes
in the climate system. Adaptation
got support in New Delhi
because it suits both the
current Bush
administration, which has
tried to shift debate away
from emissions reductions,
and developing countries,
which have expressed
frustration at the
developed world's inertia
in limiting its own
emissions and its delays
in pledged aid. At the
meeting, poorer countries
did not quite say it was
their turn to pollute but,
led by the host country,
they did demand the right
to grow out of
destitution, a path that
will require vast use of
existing fuel reserves —
mainly coal. Opening
the plenary session last
Wednesday, India's prime
minister, Atal Bihari
Vajpayee, said per capita
use of such fuels by the
world's poorest
populations was a fraction
of that of people in the
industrial powers.
Mitigating fuel use, he
said, "will bring
additional strain to the
already fragile economies
of the developing
countries." The
adaptation issue also got
support from a new
scientific analysis,
published Friday,
suggesting that the only
way to safely stabilize
greenhouse gases by
midcentury was with a
hugely ambitious
Apollo-size research
program on fusion, solar
power, and other
nonpolluting energy
sources. The lead
authors of that study
echoed other experts in
saying it was nearly
inconceivable that the
Bush administration or
Congress would finance
such a costly crash
program. They
also said that modest
emission reductions called
for under the Kyoto
Protocol, a climate treaty
supported by Europe and
Japan, would not be enough
to spur governments and
businesses to seek the
necessary technological
shift. The protocol, an
addendum to the 1992
climate convention, is
moving toward taking legal
force sometime next year,
when Russia is expected to
ratify it. But President
Bush has rejected it, and
without the adherence of
the United States, the
world's biggest source of
greenhouse gases, the
Kyoto pact's impact on
climate will be
negligible, scientists and
treaty experts say. Still,
some experts said Kyoto's
significance should not be
discounted. "Your
first trip to the gym
doesn't improve your
health, but you've got to
get into a regular
habit," said David D.
Doniger, the director of
climate policy for the
Natural Resources Defense
Council, a private group.
"Kyoto is that first
trip. It provides a
structure to build
on." Mr.
Doniger and other veterans
of the climate wars with
varying perspectives said
the best — and perhaps
only — hope lay in a
blend of all of the above:
a mix of finding ways to
improve energy efficiency
now; to protect the most
vulnerable countries and
ecosystems from
accelerating change; and
to push the technological
frontier to determine if
any far-flung solutions
can come to the rescue. Dr.
Martin I. Hoffert, the New
York University physicist
who led the new
clean-energy study, said
he was confident that
technology held an
eventual solution.
"We started World War
II with biplanes, and
seven years later had
jets," he said. But he and other climate experts acknowledged that wartime innovations emerged in crisis, not ahead of a slow-moving environmental shift.
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