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The Best Science Writing Online 2012
Showcasing more than fifty of the most provocative, original, and significant online essays from 2011, The Best Science Writing Online 2012 will change the way...
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For want of a mangrove, the village was lost. In fact, the loss of coastal mangroves made even a costly dyke along the Vietnamese seashore inadequate to cope with a recent typhoon. Plus, the absence of mangroves hit livelihoods—less seafood to catch.
But one village had painstakingly replanted mangroves, scraping barnacles off the seedlings to ensure they took root. In return, those mangroves protected the village from the typhoon that devastated the rest of the coast.
This is not a fable, it's a tale of how people are already adapting to climate change, as revealed at the International Institute for Environment and Development's sixth conference on community-based adaptation to climate change held in Vietnam in April.
Farmers are trying to adapt, too. Whether by growing ginger in the shade of banana fronds in Southeast Asia or planting millet beneath new trees in the Sahel region of Africa.
Those who can't adapt have to move, like Alaskans whose coastal towns have been undermined by severe winds or waves. Or whose water sources have been infiltrated by brine.
—David Biello
[The above text is a transcript of this podcast.]
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Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisTyphoons have wiped out villages for centuries. Floods have washed away crops for centuries. There are remains of settlements in coastal shallow coastal throughout the world from the Bering Sea to the Meditteranean to Taiwan.
What does any of this have to do with 'climate change'?
I am starting to think SA is losing some of its global warmist bias with articles like this. According to the warmist bible/theory, there is no possibility of adaptation to global warming. I suppose the warmists believe this nonsense because their climate model prophet has not yet told them if we will die from burning, freezing, drought or flood. I guess that means adaptation is impossible to a warmist because we don't yet know what calamity to adapt too.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHumans have in fact have a solid history of adapting to the changes in their environments regardless of the cause. The problem with the warmists is they are so fanatically married to their religion they are wasting time and resources on computer models, when we could in fact be spending those resources on mitigation efforts, which includes finding new energy producing alternatives. They want to gamble the life of everyone on their computer model prophets and statistically fabricated "evidence" and if they are wrong then their Armageddon will happen. While the rest of us are practical and sensible enough to observe reality, conduct experiments to find real causes and problems and mitigate the effects of those problems. If the deniers are wrong, we still live. If the warmists are wrong, climate change is either not happening and we have wasted resources on nothing and given power to politicians for no reason OR climate change is natural and their plans will not work, resulting in self fulfilling their own prophecies.
The climate has been warming for the past 20,000 years since the Ice Age.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisPeople have been adapting to changing climate for longer than that, often by moving into areas uncovered by receding glaciers.
The idea that charging Carbon Taxes will do anything about Global Warming or any other type of climate change is ridiculous.
That those tax monies are not being spent to open new places to settle is a crime.
If the oceans rise and coastal areas become uninhabitable, how much tax money should be spent trying to save those coastal cities when the new waterfront land is just up the hill?
I agree with you; climate change has been happening for 4.5 billion years and there is a lot that has to happen for normal climate change to take place, but what you call the "warmist" (sic) and what they are screaming about is that we humans are speeding up the normal climate change by burning tons and tons of fossil fuel. It is a fact, just look around you, that burning all the fossil fuel that we are is polluting our atmosphere and the suit in the smoke is warming up our air. And you are right too, when you said, in part, that we can stop the speeding up of your climate change and bring it back to normal by stop burning fossil fuel and go with cleaner sources of energy like: geothermal, nuclear (as long as thorium is used), solar, wind, hydro, and ocean and river turbine power, plus convert over to all electric vehicles. If we did that, I think that within a year we would be on our way to where we were before we started burning fossil fuel to create electricity and heat.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFor these people who insist on living on ocean front property... I hope you can swim.
"or these people who insist on living on ocean front property... I hope you can swim. "
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe problem is that many millions of people, and more than 40 major cities, are within a few feet of sea level.
Building these cities took hundreds of years. Climate is changing much faster than they can be rebuilt. Does anyone see a problem here?
Part of the problem is people denying that the problem is even happening, despite overwhelming evidence. The economic cost of doing nothing now will be astronomical later.
I want to adapt. I don't want to die. Does Al Gore take PayPal?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWas the International Institute for Environment and Development responsible for reporting on the polar bears stranded on melting icebergs? If so, I will believe it. This report saved the polar bears. They are flourishing now and have even learned to swim thanks to them.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSure, climate changes and sucessfull human adaptation are not new. Yet adaptation is context-sensitive and situational. I strongly doubt, that you can map 1-to-1 former situations to the current one. Major differences in my view: change rate, number of humans and size of net-effect caused per human. We are not talking about black/white: humans go extinct? yes or no. It is about the grade of impact. It is feasible to assume: prevent is cheaper than repair. The earlier mitigation action is taken, the better cost/benefit. In that sense, the mangrove example my be considered: prevention over repair = more effective.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhy are the ones who most believe in evolution also the ones who least believe in survival of the fittest when it comes to adapting to nature's variations?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSmart people know nature is unpredictable and plan ahead. Yet progressives try to put government in charge of disaster response and tell the people, "It's not your fault. It's somebody else's and we'll compensate you for your distress."
Of course climate has often changed in the past. That does not negate the reality of anthropic climate change acting on top of it all!
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