AP: Is adaptation, including a Noachian approach to saving some wildlife, the new Plan A (or Plan A- at least) for climate change?
We could feel this coming. For years talk of changing our ways to live with, rather than prevent, serious global warming got shunted to the side rooms of academic meetings as, well, defeatist. Yesterday the world’s biggest wire service, the AP, and its reporter Seth Borenstein filed a feature story unblinkingly declaring in its lede, “With the world losing the battle against global warming so far….” It’s not a novel sentiment, but one that does not usually get such prominent play. But it will, one expects, become commonplace.
The account benefits, per the bottom credit, from additional reporting by Michael Casey in Bangkok, Alex Kennedy in Singapore, and Minh Tran in Hanoi.
The hed proffered by the service mentions higher dams to buffer intensified droughts and downpours, and stilts – for houses to ride above storm surges in a world of rising sea levels and flood-prone rivers. It says human agencies will need to give nature a hand as species and ecosystems find themselves in need of a lift to chase the climate zones they need (if there are any available).
Borenstein’s been working on this piece for months. It benefits from reinforcing quotes from the head of the IPCC. He mentions testimony in Congress just this week.
It comes just a day after California – scroll down one notch for yesterday’s post – unveiled its own top-level plan for accommodating climate change. The story sees adaptation as a featured topic of the meetings in Copenhagen in coming weeks where – one must say – the primary issue will still be control of greenhouse gases. The story includes plenty of examples of other governmental agencies around the world with plans to cope with what many now see as unavoidable, serious change in climate and sea level. Whether it is merely a seriously costly blow to humanity and nature, or a global calamity on the scale of the great geological extinctions, is about all the preventionist factions have left to talk about. That’s just me talking, not Seth Borenstein or his sources. But it is how many may feel after reading this dispassionate, just-the-facts report.
Good luck, all you little children being born this year.
- Charlie Petit
