climate change adaptation

The Versace beach will be refrigerated

Is this a sign of the times to come or a sign of the crimes to come? The UK Times reports: Versace, the renowned fashion house, is to create the world’s first refrigerated beach so that hotel guests can walk comfortably across the sand on scorching days. The beach will be next to the the […]

London mayor releases plan for adapting to climate change

London Mayor Boris Johnson unveiled a draft plan Friday to help the city mitigate and adapt to climate change. Johnson put special attention to water conservation, calling for mandatory metering, increased efficiency, improved drainage, and rainwater harvesting. He also envisions more trees and green space. Environmentalists said the adaptation strategy was a good step, but […]

F*ck the Earth Day

Warning: video below contains naughty words. Cover your ears.

RPJr.’s latest achievement in getting huge news coverage for saying very little

I don’t want to get too far into the kerfuffle over the Nature commentary from Pielke Jr. et al. Just a few quick and I guess fairly cynical thoughts: • The trend toward "spontaneous" technology development and efficiency has been going on for centuries, only to pause during the last few years thanks to a […]

We’ll need a lot of Socolow and Pacala’s wedges

The short answer is: "Not today -- not even close."

The long answer is the subject of this post.

Regular readers know that the nation and the world currently lack the political will to stabilize atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide at 450 ppm or even 550 ppm.

The political impossibility is also obvious from anyone familiar with Princeton's "stabilization wedges" [PDF] -- and if you aren't, you should be (technical paper here [PDF], less technical one here [PDF]). The wedges are a valuable conceptual tool for showing the immense scale needed for the solution (although they have analytical flaws).

Of course, if solving the climate problem were politically possible today, I would have found something more useful to do with my time (as, I expect, would you). But 450 ppm or lower is certainly achievable from an economic and technological perspective. Indeed, that is the point of the wedges discussion, since they rely on existing technology, and the conclusion to Hell and High Water.

The purpose of my last post on the adaptation trap was to make clear that 800 to 1,000 ppm, which is where we are headed, is a catastrophe ar beyond human imagining, one that makes a mockery of the word "adaptation," that has a "cost" far beyond that considered by any traditional economic cost-benefit analysis. It is a rationally and morally impossible choice. So too, I think, is 550 ppm, assuming we could stop there -- which as I argued, we probably can't, thanks to the carbon cycle feedbacks like the melting tundra.

What needs to be done?

Potentially a long-term option for putting waste heat to use

RealClimate has a good introductory post on air capture, which they explain as:

The idea would be to let people emit the carbon dioxide at the source but then capture it directly from the atmosphere at a separate facility.

This is going to be a relatively expensive and complicated strategy for decades -- and, of course, you need a place to put the carbon dioxide. That said, a lot of work is going on to see if one can do air capture driven by heat.

Why does that matter? The world has a lot of zero carbon waste heat not currently being used for anything. Indeed, U.S. thermal power plants alone throw away as much energy in waste heat as Japan uses for every purpose! That's more than 20 quads. And that doesn't even count the heat thrown away in industrial processes. Now, the smartest thing to do with that heat, for the next few decades, is obviously either generate electricity with it or use it for heating buildings or industrial processes.

More on Roger Pielke, Jr.

In Part 1, we saw that ...

1. Adaptation as primary strategy for dealing with climate change is widely oversold.
2. This is especially true as atmospheric CO2 concentrations approach 800 to 1,000 ppm, a likely outcome if we listen to either the delayers or deniers.
3. A leading adaptation advocate and apparent delayer-1000, Roger Pielke, Jr., "labels adaptation what is in fact mitigation, and his idea of mitigation is apparently research into adaptation."

Let me elaborate on these points. The day before the dubious pro-adaptation L.A. Times piece, one of Pielke's fellow Prometheus bloggers, Jonathan Gilligan, pointed out, "if our political system stinks at managing floods, coastal storm risks, and fresh-water resources in the absence of anthropogenic climate change, why would it manage better if climate change does turn out to significantly increase the mean severity and/or variance of the distribution?"

Pielke labels adaptation what is actually mitigation

The wheels may be falling off the media's climate discussion, if a recent L.A. Times piece is any evidence. The piece, "Global warming: Just deal with it, some scientists say," is really an article about not dealing with it.

The L.A. Times, with the help of the delayer-1000 du jour, Roger Pielke, Jr., has brought to prominence (and fallen for) what I call the "adaptation trap":

The adaptation trap is the belief that 1) "it would be easier and cheaper to adapt than fight climate change" [as the Times puts it in the sub-head] and/or 2) "adaptation" to climate change is possible in any meaningful sense of the word absent an intense mitigation effort starting now to keep carbon dioxide concentrations below 450 ppm.

Sorry for the long definition, but as we'll see, the second part is especially critical in what has now become an important emerging policy debate, cleverly devoid of specifics. (Indeed, on his blog Pielke says he was misquoted and denies he believes the first part, which actually makes the LAT piece even lamer, as David shows). And being misquoted doesn't mean Pielke isn't very wrong anyway -- as we'll see at the end, Pielke is so confused about adaptation and mitigation that he takes the prize for the most backward analogy in the history of the climate debate, unintentionally proving just how wrong he is.

Thinkers and doers exchange grand visions in the scenic Rockies

The first full day of the first-ever Aspen Environment Forum kicked off Thursday morning with a handful of the impressive invitees taking a couple minutes each to share a “big idea.” Throughout the day, others tossed their sizeable thoughts into the ring. A sampling: Majora Carter. Majora Carter, founder and head of Sustainable South Bronx: […]