Collide-a-scape

I’ve been traveling, so I’ve only been keeping up with the news sporadically. But this front page NYT story from Monday, about Chicago (and other cities) preparing for climate change, deserves mention. It also highlights the parallel (but strikingly different) universes of the climate change debate. In her piece, Leslie Kaufman nicely displays the disconnect here:

“Cities adapt or they go away,” said Aaron N. Durnbaugh, deputy commissioner of Chicago’s Department of Environment. “Climate change is happening in both real and dramatic ways, but also in slow, pervasive ways. We can handle it, but we do need to acknowledge it. We are on a 50-year cycle, but we need to get going.”

Across America and in Congress, the very existence of climate change continues to be challenged — especially by conservatives. The skeptics are supported by constituents wary of science and concerned about the economic impacts of stronger regulation. Yet even as the debate rages on, city and state planners are beginning to prepare.

City and state planners, like U.S military planners, are taking climate science seriously. If this trend continues, persistent climate skeptics–the kind who are sneeringly dismissive of climate change concerns and antagonistic to climate science–are likely to find themselves increasingly marginalized.

It’ll probably take another few election cycles before the two parallel (climate) universes are more closely aligned.

Over at Frontier Earth, some musing about beaches, climate change, and homeowners beating back an advancing sea.

That’s what I’m wondering, anyway, over at Frontier Earth.

Actually, it’s David Roberts at Grist, and he recommends that adaptation undergo a linguistic makeover to make it more palatable. More on that in a minute.

What’s most notable about Roberts’ post is that he has had a change of heart on an issue that, based on my own anecdotal experience, will be met with growls from some of the hardcore climate advocates in his community. Here’s the admission from Roberts:

Back when I started covering my beat, it was conventional wisdom among greenies that it’s best not to talk too much about adapting to climate change. The worry was that it might lure people into a false sense of security, get them thinking there’s no need to cut emissions since they can adapt to whatever changes come.

I’ve come to think that this is a deeply counterproductive way of looking at things. In fact, adaptation may be the most effective way to approach climate change.

Welcome aboard my lonely train, David. Two years ago, I asked:

Would climate change have greater urgency in the public mind if we started talking more about adaptation?

The silence was deafening. (In fairness, the blog was just getting off the ground and my mother didn’t feel confident enough to speak on behalf of the climate community.)

Since then, I’ve periodically returned to flog the issue that dare not speak its name, with much the same result.

More recently, last month I asked if the climate concerned community was finally ready to have a conversation about adaptation. Based on the heaping scorn vented in the comment thread, I took the answer to be a resounding no.

So it’s a curious thing to see Roberts change his mind at this point in time–or at least go public with it. Part of me wonders if it’s borne out of frustration with the lack of policy and political action. Regardless, Roberts still isn’t fond of the term adaption (too “bloodless”) and recommends replacing it with….get ready for it: ruggedizing.

Yeah, that’s an improvement. If you consider incomprehensible better than “bloodless.” And it rolls off the tongue nicely, heh?

Is this the same guy who coined the clever climate hawk term? Oh well, let’s get ready to ruggggggedize.

The Economist explains why adaptation has long been marginalized in the climate debate:

The green pressure groups and politicians who have driven the debate on climate change have often been loath to see attention paid to adaptation, on the ground that the more people thought about it, the less motivated they would be to push ahead with emissions reduction. Talking about adaptation was for many years like farting at the dinner table, says an academic who has worked on adaptation over the past decade. Now that the world’s appetite for emissions reduction has been revealed to be chronically weak, putting people off dinner is less of a problem.

The article is titled “Facing the Consequences,” and its thrust is captured in the subtitle:

Global action is not going to stop climate change. The world needs to look harder at how to live with it.

Is that a conversation the climate concerned community is ready to have?

Well, I’m not gone yet. I just read this op-ed in today’s NYT by Thomas Homer-Dixon, which is related to, um, a certain controversial post.

Count Homer-Dixon among those who believe it will take a major, unequivocal climate shock to spur worldwide action on global warming. Meanwhile, he writes:

Policy makers need to accept that societies won’t make drastic changes to address climate change until such a crisis hits. But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing for them to do in the meantime. When a crisis does occur, the societies with response plans on the shelf will be far better off than those that are blindsided. The task for national and regional leaders, then, is to develop a set of contingency plans for possible climate shocks — what we might call, collectively, Plan Z.

Some work of this kind is under way at intelligence agencies and research institutions in the United States and Europe. Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government has produced one of the best studies, “Responding to Threat of Climate Change Mega-Catastrophes.” But for the most part these initiatives are preliminary and uncoordinated.

We need a much more deliberate Plan Z, with detailed scenarios of plausible climate shocks; close analyses of options for emergency response by governments, corporations and nongovernmental groups; and clear specifics about what resources — financial, technological and organizational — we will need to cope with different types of crises.

Let me thus amend Eli’s 4th bullet point to read:

The Mitigation-centric blinders drives the procrastination penalties for Adaption to tragic proportions.

Several weeks ago, a varied group of distinguished scholars released a provocative treatise, called The Hartwell Paper: A new direction for climate policy after the crash of 2009. It got a decent splash of media coverage. The Economist wrote an excellent overview and analysis. The BBC’s Richard Black posted a respectful and mildly critical review.

This week, I’ve been conducting email exchanges with several of the Hartwell authors, and I’d like to start posting these Q & A’s today. But first, I thought this passage from The Economist overview would serve as a helpful introduction:

The degree to which debates about climate change have become debates about climate-change science reflects the fact that this way of looking at the issue presents “the science” as a reason to act; those who want action thus have an interest in exaggerrating the conclusions or certainty of the science, and those who do not wish to act are incentivised in the opposite direction.

The Hartwellites do not disagree with the science in general and certainly don’t think there is no reason to act. They simply doubt that action along this one axis (carbon-dioxide reduction) can ever be made politically compelling. Instead, their oblique strategies (not derived from the useful tool of that name created by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt, though they would probably approve) are to concentrate on easy opportunities and efficiency, energy and dignity.

The Hartwell paper argues that only a “radical reframing” of the approach to climate policy will achieve true “decarbonisation of the global economy.” In future posts this week, I’ll delve into how the authors propose to achieve this decarbonisation. Today, I want to focus on the argument they make for a conceptual reframing of the public debate.

To this end, there is a fascinating section in the Hartwell paper that talks about how it was an early mistake to frame climate change in the emerging public discourse as a conventional environmental problem. Instead, the paper asserts that climate change should be understood as a ‘wicked’ problem. The authors write:

Originally described by Rittel and Webber in the context of urban planning, ‘wicked’ problems are issues that are often formulated as if they are susceptible to solutions when in fact they are not. Technical knowledge was taken as a sufficient basis from which to derive Kyoto’s policy, whereas ‘wicked’ problems demand profound understanding of their integration in social systems, their irreducibly complexity and intractable nature.

I take this to mean that, until we stop viewing climate change as simply an environmental problem, we can’t have a smart debate on climate change, much less a smart policy to address it.

If so, this implies that there can’t be a real policy shift until there is a paradigm shift in the way climate change is publicly discussed. So I put this to Hartwell co-author, Steve Rayner, Director of Oxford University’s Institute for Science Innovation and Society.

Q: Shouldn’t we be talking a lot more about climate change as one of those ‘wicked’ problems, and how can we do that?

SR: With regard to climate change as a wicked problem, the Hartwell paper is largely reiterating the case outlined in The Wrong Trousers and Time to Ditch Kyoto.

The first application of the Rittel and Webber formulation to climate that I am aware of was my Jack Beale Memorial Lecture in Sydney in 2006. Mike Hulme picks up the term in his book: Why we disagree about climate change, for which I wrote the Foreword.

So, “Yes” we do need to get people to appreciate the fact that climate is not a “problem” to be “solved” in any conventional sense. How would we know when it was “solved”? And in any case since “climate kills” already, what is so special about the status quo? We could save countless lives and improve living conditions of at least 2 billion people by better climate adaptation in the present.

So why the obsession with the incremental damage that is projected to occur in the future while we ignore present losses? Answer: because prophesies of doom are seen by some as effective ways to coerce desired behavior about all sorts of things in the present – although I disagree that this is sustainable.

***Postscript***

As I mentioned at the outset, I will be posting Q & A’s on various aspects of the Hartwell Paper the rest of this week. I do encourage people to have a look at the paper–it is reader-friendly. Additionally, some of the points Rayner made above are put into larger context by this passage in the conclusion:

The aim of this paper has been to reframe the climate issue around matters of human dignity. Not just because that is noble or nice or necessary–although all of those reasons–but because it is likely to be more effective than the approach of framing around human sinfulness–which has just failed. Securing access to low-cost energy for all, including the very poor, is truly and literally liberating. Building resilience to surprise and to extremes of weather is a practical expression of true global solidarity. Improving the quality of air that people breathe is an undeniable public good. Such a reorientation requires a radical rethinking and then reordering of the climate policy agenda.

I welcome discussion of this effort to recast climate change as a “wicked problem” and hope that some of the Hartwell authors can join in.

More proof that environmentalists can’t chew gum and talk about climate adaptation at the same time comes in this post from David Roberts at Grist.

The cognitive dissonance from this crowd continues to amaze me. As we learned earlier this year, the carbon load already in the atmosphere is projected to lead to irreversible climate change for the next millennium:

Among illustrative irreversible impacts that should be expected if atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations increase from current levels near 385 parts per million by volume (ppmv) to a peak of 450–600 ppmv over the coming century are irreversible dry-season rainfall reductions in several regions comparable to those of the “dust bowl” era and inexorable sea level rise.

With all due respect to Bill McKibben’s noble cause, respectable scientists believe we should prepare for life beyond that catchy 350 number. Real environmental journalism outlets (as opposed to activist clearinghouses) find it reasonable to have this discussion.

The irony is that Roberts posts a set of global land use & ecological impact graphs to make his point that geoengineering won’t save humanity from all the upward trends in the graphs. So if every ecological and climate indicator demonstrates that the earth is becoming less livable because of increasing carbon dioxide concentrations and other global land uses, then is it realistic to take geoengineering off the table just because someone like Richard Branson makes a glib and simplistic statement like this:

If we could come up with a geoengineering answer to this problem, then Copenhagen wouldn’t be necessary. We could carry on flying our planes and driving our cars.

I suspect that what really bugs Roberts about this is the inference in the latter part of the comment that we could carry on with our carbon-intensive lives if only we could suck all that nasty CO2 out of the atmosphere. Fair enough. I can respect that.

But the truth is that no matter happens at Copenhagen and in the U.S. Congress, some type of adaptation measures will be necessary. Roberts is a very smart guy, and I know he’s capable of chewing gum and talking about climate adaptation at the same time. The fact that he doesn’t want to likely results from his belief–which is shared widely by climate activists–that any discussion of climate adapation is an unwelcome distraction from the debate at hand on mitigation. Why there isn’t room for both discussions to occur beats me.

I had no idea that NYC was taking such a pro-active approach to climate adaptation.  When I read stories like this, which also discusses how other major cities in the world are making similar plans for a hotter, more turbulent climate, I can’t help but wonder if climate change debate has broken off into two parallel tracks: one focused entirely on mitigation, which dominates public discourse, and the other focused on banal matters such as building codes and floodplain maps, which takes place in bureaucratic agencies. As this excerpt makes clear, not everyone is waiting to see what comes out of Copenhagen:

An Adaptation Task Force, made up of some 20 city departments, New York State and interstate authorities, and power and communications industries, has begun developing an inventory of infrastructures at risk. Working with local communities they hope to develop strategies — from keeping development away from the waterfront, to maintaining sewer systems, to evacuation plans, to protecting waterfront neighborhoods.

The Department of Buildings will reassess building codes to reduce energy use and make certain that homes can avoid flooding and high-rise apartment buildings can withstand increased storm winds. The city’s Office of Emergency Management is updating its floodplain maps to bring them into correspondence with predictions of rising sea level and expected storm surges.

As I was reading Bruce Stutz’s piece in Yale Environment 360, my jaw kept dropping at the level of detail and the seriousness of purpose.  Here’s the big-picture mindset and an example of the coordination already underway:

While the costs of adapting to climate change will be in the billions of dollars, New York City’s working philosophy is that the costs of not adapting will be far greater. Gary Heath, Director of the Bureau of Operations for the DEP’s Bureau of Environmental Planning and Analysis, says that the NPCC’s report puts everyone on the same page, providing a common set of predictions that every agency can work with.

This is an impressive demonstration of foresight and planning. It’d be great if other journalists can track the adaptation developments as they proceed. There’s bound to be many hiccups and obstacles in such a massive and novel operation.  If other cities look to NY as a model, then they can also learn from the kinds of setbacks NY encounters along the way.

I don’t understand how someone can call himself a climate change “pragmatic” and entirely dismiss the need for adaptation.

Let me see if I get Joe Romm’s logic right:

The tragedy of Katrina demonstrated that we can’t do adaptation, so why bother?

I understand that Romm and many other climate advocates regard talk of adaptation as a bait and switch tactic, but it’s not responsible. Or pragmatic. A more reasonable position would be that of this commenter at Climate Progress:

The top priority should clearly be preventing and mitigating further climate change, but aren’t we at a point where preparation for and adaptation to climate change is also necessary? My understanding is that there’s quite a bit of climate change already “in the pipeline”, based on past emissions which we cannot take back.