Making Climate Change Real & Rapid Adaptation

Climate Change Is Not Real

As a die-hard climate change solutionist, I have to be honest. Even after a decade of advocacy, education, and analysis, here in the Northeastern United States, climate change is not yet real to me.

Yes, NASA just reported that the decade ending in 2009 was the warmest since records began in 1880. Over the past 10 years I've felt that warmth from early Springs in Boston to piping hot Summers in Detroit. I've read stories about the struggles of New England ski resorts and the maple sugar industry as they adapt to a new climate reality.

And, yes, a report  put out in December by World Wide Fund for Nature and Allianz insurers claims that:

• Sea level rise of a little over half an inch per year in the major port towns of the Northeast United States (Boston, Providence, New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore)  could increase asset exposure from an estimated $1.4 trllion to $7.4 trillion by 2050.
• If a hurricane hit the New York region today - don't laugh, it happened in 1938 killing more than 700 and destroying more than 50,000 houses - the total damage would be more than $1 trillion, jumping to $5 trillion by mid-century.

But, I have to be honest - I have not yet planned for, or really thought about 2050 in any facet of my life. Have you? For the students reading this today, you will hit retirement age around 2050. Got a retirement paln in place yet? And I have never seen $7 trillion before, or $700,000 for that matter, so that statistic doesn't hold much meaning for me either. I know we have to reduce human made greenhouse gas emissions and slow down deforestation, but I accept these with a degree of faith.   

The Difference Between Katrina & Haiti

I do, however, distinctly remember one week in late August , five years ago this coming summer, as I sat glued to the television watching an entire region, including a city of 500,000 - about the size of Boston - literally drown. That was very real.

By the time Katrina had passed, it had:

• Created about 1 million "refugees" who fled to cities like Houston, Mobile, and Baton Rouge 
• Killed more than 1800, with another 700 missing - nearly as deadly as the 9/11 attacks
• Caused an estimated $90 billion in 2009 dollars
• Flooded nearly 80% of the City of New Orleans 

In Katrina's aftermath, the US government and citizens opened up their hearts and wallets. In the month of September alone, Congress approved $62.3 billion for victim relief and the US public donated more than $1 billion to the Red Cross.

Most Americans likely had flashbacks to Katrina during the recent devastating, tragic earthquake in Haiti - an island nation with a population close to that of New Jersey. Recent estimates by the Prime Minister count 200,000 dead and 300,000 injured, with 250,000 residences and 30,000 commercial buildings destroyed. Unimaginable human devastation.

But Haiti was different than Katrina in one crucial way. It was hit by an Earthquake. And even with supercomputers, open-source global data, and an industry of seismologists, we still can't predict earthquakes with any level of accuracy .

For Hurricanes, however, we can be more predictive - both in terms of long-term trends and even day-to-day storm trajectories. And there is a strong amount of past and present evidence to show that populations and ecosystems along the Gulf Coast are at increasing risk for more frequent and severe Hurricanes as climate change accelerates. So how to adapt? 

A History of Adaptation

To label today's climate change planning as "adaptation" seems redundant to me. All human planning, taking place as it does in a constantly changing global environment, is adaptation. Rivers overflow their banks and create new paths. Sea levels rise and fall. Glaciers advance and recede. Our growing global population – set to hit 6.8 billion shortly – is the story of short and long term human adaptation to an ever-changing planet.

Just 20,000 years ago, ice covered a large swath of North America – including much of New England, the Upper Midwest, and all of Canada. We can still see the effect of this last glacial period today – from the shape and form of the Great Lakes, to the current course of the Ohio River, to visible grooves left by the rocks in receding ice sheets from Central Park to Boston.

In 1997, author John Barry published Rising Tide, an extraordinary book that tells the story of the tragic 1927 Flood that hit the Mississippi River Valley and New Orleans, killing thousands, flooding huge areas of land, and leading to one of the ugliest racial episodes of the 20th century. When asked in a 2005 interview, When you wrote the book, did you encounter an attitude that this event was long ago, far away, and could never happen again?, Barry responded:

People never expect these things to happen to them, today. It will always happen to someone else, tomorrow. One of the definitions of leadership is to anticipate such dangers and prepare for them, despite a lethargic public.

Just imagine, then, that we had anticipated a storm with the strength of Hurricane Katrina and the $63 billion in US support for the Gulf Coast had been approved a decade earlier. Imagine that the funds had been used to set up evacuation plans, reinforce buildings, and temporarily relocate vulnerable communities rather than clean up dead bodies, rebuild entire neighborhoods, and permanently relocate hundreds of thousands.

To bring it up to the present, imagine if the United States mobilized the kind of support today that would help prepare for the likely potential of another Katrina in the coming decades. Or imagine if the world mobilized enough support to prepare the low-lying coastal communities around the globe for sea-level rise, storm surges, and rapidly changing conditions. That is the task that confronts today's young leaders - making climate change real and anticipating the impacts. And we don't have a moment to lose.