For many climate activists, “adaptation” has long been a dirty word. The notion that the way to deal with a warming earth is through localized, adaptive activities, not large-scale, internationally organized science-based political action, has been derided as failing to get to the root causes of global warming, an admission of defeat, focusing only on dealing with effects.
But a May 6 article in the peer reviewed journal Climate Change by Columbia University meteorologist Adam Sobel, argues that “the only climate science that is truly usable is that which is oriented towards adaptation, because current policies and politics are so far from what would be needed to avert dangerous climate change that scientific uncertainty is not a limiting factor on mitigation.”
In the article titled “Usable climate science is adaptation science,” Sobel says, “I define ‘usable science’ as science oriented towards decision-making.” He adds, “My primary claim is that at the present historical moment, climate science is only usable to the extent that it is oriented towards climate adaptation, rather than towards climate mitigation.”
The conventional approach to mitigation, he argues, relies on the idea that understanding “the basic physical, chemical, and biological processes of long-term climate” drives the concept of “climate sensitivity.” But. Sobel says, “The earth’s climate sensitivity has remained stubbornly uncertain over half a century of study.”
But policies based on uncertain estimates of climate sensitivity, such as the 1.5-degree or 2.0-degree goals of the Paris climate according, while sounding precise, are entirely impractical. “No emissions reductions are planned that come anywhere near those necessary to stay under either a 1.5 or a 2C target. Decades of international negotiations have, by any reasonable account, been a failure. And for the four years leading up to the most recent Presidential election, national policy in the USA in particular moved in the opposite direction,” Sobel writes. Additionally, “New research is very unlikely to change the situation.”
Climate mitigation efforts, Sobel says, have become hopelessly politicized. “It is clear today that the climate mitigation problem is a political one, meaning that it will be solved only by changes in leadership, and beyond that, in the relative and absolute power held by relevant interest groups — especially, but not only, the fossil fuel industry and some electric power utilities. It will not be solved by advances in climate science, both because existing science is already adequate to justify more action than seems likely, and because the actions under consideration by current (and likely future) political actors are guided by science only, at best, in the loosest way.”
“Mitigation,” Sobel says, “is a global problem,” while adaptation, “on the other hand, is local; unlike mitigation, it is different everywhere. There may be commonalities, potential for shared learning, and so on, but the nature of climate hazards varies greatly across the planet, as do the ways in which the hazard interacts with social, economic, political, and cultural factors to generate the risks that adaptation aims to address. The users, or ‘stakeholders,’ need not be national governments; they need not be governments at all. Thus, they are a much more diverse set of actors than those who have major roles in mitigation, and this diversity creates many more opportunities to do scientific research in support of adaptation.”
While advancing basic climate science is worthy and worthwhile, argues Sobel, it may not lead to practical applications to reduce the problem. “For many of us, though, there would be value in a more conscious, examined, and self-critical effort to develop a ‘theory of change’ that explains the mechanism by which our research offers value to society.”
–Kennedy Maize
(kenmaize@gmail.com)