Archive of posts filed under the adaptation category.

Heat, Not Drought, May Pose Biggest Food Threat Under Climate Change

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Interesting bit of work in today’s Science arguing that heat, rather than drought, may be the most significant determinant of declining food production as a result of climate change: It will be extremely difficult to balance food deficits in one part of the world with food surpluses in another, unless major adaptation investments are made …

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Malaria and Global Warming

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Roger Pielke Jr., my favorite thrower of inconvenient hand grenades, wrote a provocative post this week about the linkage between malaria and global warming. Malaria, Jeffrey Sachs writes, causes poverty. (( The End of Poverty, p. 197)) It does this by reducing economic productivity, creating a vicious cycle in which people get sick, can’t work, …

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Adaptation v. Mitigation – Again

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For those of you who insist that of course every right thinking person agrees that the need to adapt to climate change shares equal importance with greenhouse gas reductions, Roger Pielke Jr. has another example worthy of your attention. The quote is from ClimateWire: Environmental and humanitarian activist groups plan to formally ask the World …

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Gristmill Scorecard

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Given David Roberts’ apparent conversion to the view that simply everyone who matters in the climate change community agrees that the need to adjust to the problems being caused by climate change (“adapt”, in the lingo) shares equal importance with the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions (“mitigate”), I thought a scorecard of Gristmill’s coverage …

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Tail Wags Dog

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Just when you thought this whole adaptation-mitigation discussion could not get more absurd comes this document from California’s state government interagency Water-Energy Subgroup of the Climate Action Team (WET-CAT). California faces some potentially serious climate change-related water problems, and the new report suggests some useful approaches to reduce the state’s water consumption. The reason? Reduced …

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New Mexico’s Climate Change Initiative

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I’d like to offer up a very concrete example that illustrates the problem with the current dynamic in the political debate over the extent to which thinking about adaptation should be explicitly made a part of the political discussion about our societal response to climate change. I wrote a story for the newspaper a year …

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Adaptation v. Mitigation, Episode XVI

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David Roberts and Roger Pielke Jr. took another turn around the adaptation/mitigation block today. Roger argued, as he has for some time, that adaptation to the problems caused by climate change needs to be given the same due in policy discussions as attempts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions (“mitigation,” in the parlance of the field.) …

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Santa Goes Green

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This just in: NORTH POLE — Kris Kringle announced today that he has dropped the centuries-old tradition of stuffing coal into the stockings of naughty boys and girls. The decision comes at a time when record warm temperatures and thinning sea ice are threatening the very existence of Kringle’s North Pole toy-making and distribution center. …

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