Quote:
Originally Posted by Lamplighter
To prove my own bias, I could add Q6:
What are the consequences of doing nothing,
if Q2 is answered in the affirmative with respect to CO2 release due to human activities ?
|
What annoys me about the climate change debate is that there is some inherent assumption that we should not work to adapt to any changes in our global climate. Looking throughout history, natural climate change has usually gone side by side with some of the biggest falls of civilization and important times of innovation so whether climate change is man-made or not, why are we not looking at way to adapt to our new potential world? I understand there is no way to predict what is going to happen, but our military has a response plan for most imaginable situations so why can't there be discussion of response plans from multiple scenarios of climate change, ranging from nothing changing to apocalyptic changes of our climate.
In my opinion, there should be two seperate debates about climate change: one political and one apolitical. The political debate should discuss human influence in climate change, pollution, energy security, etc, and how that should affect our investments and regulations taking both economics and environment into consideration.
The second apolitical debate should focus solely on a human response to climate change. This debate should take into account multiple possible climate change outcomes and their effects on society. For example, if regions in Africa starts to become drier and hotter, hurting agriculture in that region, what should we do in response and how can we plan for it. If the same regions in Africa start to become colder and wetter, making the current crops useless, what new crops could be planted and what can be done to ease the transition?
I feel there is no much discussion about adaptation since most of the energy with climate change is directed towards human influence and stopping climate change. So these people will not want to discuss adaptation because they would rather avoid the entire situation by stopping climate change. By creating a second debate where we get rid of the economic and environmental politics and take a pragmatic approach, real ideas could appear to our possible responses to possible climate change.