Collide-a-scape

Today, the world can’t agree on how to curb carbon emissions. So imagine the not-too-distant future, when climate change has unmistakably arrived but countries can’t settle on which technological fixes should be employed.

So the International Institute for Strategic Studies wonders,

what’s to stop a country facing monsoon after monsoon from unilaterally trying to cool the Earth?

Such “rogue geo-engineering” could easily worsen matters for everyone.  That prospect would then force countries to treat climate change as a serious geopolitical issue.

Better late than never, I suppose.

At some point, there’s going to be a vigorous, public debate over adaptation to climate change. How, for example, will we make agriculture more drought resistant? Cue the scary music for biotechnology, since genetically modified organisms will inevitably assume a greater role.

But as Yael Borasky argues,

If we acknowledge the potential pitfalls and benefits of biotechnology, it is possible to safely and effectively employ it to meet an ever-multiplying demand for food, whose supply is threatened by climate change.

And you thought the debate over mitigation measures, such as cap and trade versus a carbon tax, was testy.

Are we finally having a debate on climate adaptation?

Sorta. Maybe. Not

If politicians, policymakers and climate advocates were really engaging the thorny issue of adaptation, this story by Bruce Stutz, which appeared late last month on Yale Environment 360, would have circled the globe by now. This quote alone from Columbia University’s Wallace Broeker should have lit a fuse:

My view is that we’ll be lucky if we can stop CO2 at 600 ppm. There’s no way we’re going to stop at 450. Impossible. If we’re going to double CO2, we’d better prepare what we’re going to do about it.

Stutz’s excellent piece generated four comments. Not a ripple in the blogosphere. In contrast, a recent interview that Yale Environment 360 conducted with Freeman Dyson has elicited more than 50 comments. People do seem to respond in full to the guy who says you can learn a lot from climate models,

but you cannot learn what’s going to happen 10 years from now.

Never mind that more climate advocates are inclined to agree with Broeker’s prediction, which means, as Stutz summarizes,

the planet will experience myriad far-reaching changes to which humans, plants and animals will need to adapt: higher sea levels, the melting of glaciers that have long supplied hundreds of millions of people with water, drought-stressed agriculture, more severe storms, spreading disease, and reduced biodiversity.

Maybe the persistence of think tanks will help spur a national discussion. Today, for example, one of them–the Center for a New American Security is releasing a concept paper, entitled, “Natural Security.” In the section on climate change it states:

Mitigation can reduce the potential severity of future change, but as some climate change is already underway and proceeding faster than scientists had predicted as recently as the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment report in 2007,  the nation should consider adopting a comprehensive adaptation strategy that anticipates a range of future scenarios.

Anybody game for that?

This new poll of climate scientists by The Guardian will raise many an eyebrow. If the quotes in the article reflect where the climate science community is heading, get ready for an ugly debate that will probably split the environmental community.

The mitigation crowd has already boarded its freight train. If the adaptation crowd gets big enough to warrant its own train, watch out for an ensuing collision.

Just as an aside: I know plenty of ecologists who would agree with this kicker in The Guardian piece:

Many of the experts stressed that an inability to hit the 2C target did not mean that efforts to tackle global warming should be abandoned, but that the emphasis is now on damage limitation.

As I outlined here, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service (FWS) is grappling with global warming in a big way. Additionally, federal biologists from Florida to Arizona are currently at work on new long-range plans that factor in the unpredictable effects of climate change on vulnerable species. It’s a complicated task, fraught with many uncertainties.

Yet they are proceeding.  “Among us biologists, climate change is a real issue that we have to deal with now,” Scott Richardson, a FWS biologist based in Tucson, Arizona, told me today. There, in the biodiversity-rich Sonoran desert, where  invasive species and sprawl are already stressing the native ecosystem to a near breaking point, climate change is a devilish wild card.

“Most of the [climate] models out there show the Southwest becoming hotter and drier, beyond what it already is,” says Richardson. “It’s assumed that many species will shift north, but in some places like the Sky Islands–our mountain ranges–you can’t go north. You can go higher, but you can only move up so far.” That means less suitable habitat for at-risk species such as the Mexican spotted owl and mount Graham squirrel.

As if crafting these new recovery plans  weren’t complex enough, federal biologists also have to decide which species have the best shot at making it. Says Richardson, “The really frustrating thing about this is that you have to prioritize because resources and funding are limited. What you hope for is that you’re basing your decision on the best information available.”

Even then, success is far from assured. As described in its draft strategic plan, the FWS identifies two types of adaptive managment for climate change: “reactive” and “anticipatory.”

For example, “combating rising sea level by pumping sand ashore to replenish beaches and maintain habitat for nesting sea turtles and shorebirds” is considered reactive adaptation.

The second approach manages “toward future, and often less certain, landscape conditions by predicting and working with the effects of climate change.” So to use the same example, anticipatory adaptation would mean sacrificing existing beaches to rising sea level to focus instead on establishing “new shorelines landward for nesting sea turtles and shorebirds.”

And you got pissed off at piping plovers because their seasonal nesting protections cut into your beach volleyball. How does no beach at all strike you?

I jest. What I’m getting at here is that safeguarding vulnerable wildlife from climate change will require many tough calls in the months and years ahead. Land managers and biologists are already agonizing over this.

Tomorrow, Florida FWS biologists weigh in with their titanic climate change quandry.

While public debate in the U.S. swirls over the best and quickest course of action to reduce carbon emissions, another  debate on global warming is quietly unfolding in anonymous government offices across the country: how to manage wildlife and ecosystems that are certain to be greatly impacted by the forces of climate change already underway.

The daunting challenges are broadly spelled out in this 32-page strategic plan put forth in December by the U.S Fish & Wildlife Service (which FWS is careful to label an “internal discussion draft”). As this passage makes clear, there is obvious concern that the “unprecendented scope and magnitude” of climate change may overwhelm the agency’s best efforts:

In the history of wildlife conservation, the Service and the larger conservation community have
never experienced a challenge that is so ubiquitous across the landscape.  Our existing
conservation infrastructure will be pressed to the limit — quite likely beyond its limit — to
respond successfully.

Thus, some tough decisions lie ahead. The FWS envisions

that some populations and species will be lost, and some will only survive in
the wild through our direct and continuous intervention.  We will be especially challenged to
conserve species and habitats that are particularly vulnerable to climate-driven changes, but we
will dedicate our best efforts and expertise to the task, recognizing that we cannot save everything. We will need to make choices, and we will need to apply ourselves where we can make the greatest difference.

In my next post, I’ll describe the two courses of action that will guide federal wildlife management in the years to come. I’ll also speak with several biologists about the most vulnerable habitat and species they see threatened immediately by climate change.

You may not know this but between now and doomsday, there’s still a lot of choices to be made related to climate change. (I’ll get to a few of them in a minute.) That’s because all the news and blog chatter in recent months has focused on how we all of a sudden found ourselves on the fast track to carbon hell.  Let’s quickly recap:

This eye-popping study published in late January, with its headline cut from the tabloids, had an End Times feel to it for environmentalists already convinced that a Final Reckoning was coming due, in the form of Australian wildfires and California drought. The paper (through no fault of the authors) likely set the stage for what came next: an ugly (and to my mind, frivolous) sideshow over the media’s supposed culpability as a facilitator of planetary collapse.

By last week, the dire warnings and urgent call to action that came out of Copenhagen solidified the gestalt on global warming: we’re screwed…unless we act now.

Actually, we’re already screwed no matter what.  It’s time we stopped obsessing primarily on how to avert doomsday and started paying an equal amount of attention to how we’re going to adapt to the many widely anticipated impacts from climate change that are, in fact, just down the road. In terms of our own societal and ecosystem vulnerabilities, Tom Yulsman provides an excellent rejoinder to those who seem to ignore the clarion call for climate change adaptation.

Fortunately, numerous organizations and federal agencies are thinking hard about the game-changing impacts to wildlife, which are expected to occur even if the world changed to a carbon-free economy tomorrow. In November, Defenders of Wildlife issued a report titled, “Protecting wildlife and Ecosystems in a Warming World.” The report urged policymakers to rank ecological adapatation measures on par with that of carbon emission reductions.

In December, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service released a little-noticed draft “Climate Change Strategic Plan,” to be implemented over the next five years. The FWS is currently soliciting feedback from its employees and citizens on the plan, before it releases a final version later this year.

In the meantime, here’s the first graph:

Climate change is the most compelling conservation challenge of our time. Accelerating climate change will amplify current resource management challenges involving habitat fragmentation, degradation, and loss, as well as urbanization, invasive species, disease, parasites, and water management. As rising temperatures affect the dynamics of complex natural systems, the potential exists for mass species extinctions and disruptions.

The rest of this week I’ll be talking to ecologists and scientists at FWS and other federal agencies that are working on incorporating climate change into long-term management plans for ecosystems and wildlife. Check back occasionally to hear how ecological adaptation is being wrestled with in regions ranging from the Sonoran desert to the Everglades.

It’s time the public started wrestling with this issue as well.

In the orthodox house of climate change advocacy, adaptation is the abused stepchild. It sleeps in the attic, is denied sunlight and proper nourishment.

This ill-treatment owes largely to the mitigation brood, who have the run of the house. They ridicule and beat up on adaptation whenever he tries to sneak into the pantry for some food. Mitigation doesn’t like to share.

If only adaptation could somehow contact the outside world, get word to his cousin, Natural Hazards & Disasters.

But I just learned from Kathleen Tierney, the Director of the National Hazards Center at the University of Colorado, that this is unlikely to happen. “The climate change community has a different terminology than [the discipline of] Natural Hazards,” she explained today, at the weekly Center for Environmental Journalism seminar (where I’m a visiting Fellow).

Mitigation, she said, means one thing in the climate change community and another in the Natural Hazards world. In the former, mitigation is narrowly defined as a policy or action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. To Natural Hazards & Disasters scientists, mitigation is the whole enchilada. “It means preparedness, response, and recovery,” said Tierney. “By mitigation, we mean things you can do in advance.”

Language barriers aside, why can’t climate change advocates take this larger perspective and embrace both sides of the AGW problem? Why must adaptation be ostracized and treated like an outcast? If the impacts to climate change are already being felt, then it makes sense that adaptation be part of the equation. I mean, if nothing else, all our new gadgetry has taught us how to multi-task.

In the unofficial climate change anxiety index, you won’t find archaeology ranked very high. That’s understandable. If the worst scenarios come to pass, the world will be in a heap of trouble and people are going to worry about saving themselves, not the remains of ancient civilizations.

But in the meantime, archaeologists are sounding the alarm in their own circles. An article in the March/April issue of Archaeology magazine catalogs the degradation of numerous ruins from melting glaciers, desertification, and floods.

Action may require quick action, the magazine reports, such as “documenting sites before they disappear,” and “in some places, simple steps like putting roofs over melting or rain-threatened areas” to preserve them.

That’s called adaptation. You’ll be hearing that term a lot in the years to come.