Clintel.org has just issued a nice press release about the idea of preparing to adapt to climate changes, rather than the more controversial idea of destroying the fossil fuel industry in the hope that reducing CO2 emissions will somehow make the climate better.
So far we have been unable to measure the influence of additional CO2 on the climate, although some think the impact is somewhere between 1.5 degrees and 4.5 degrees per doubling of the CO2 concentration. We cannot even be sure of that, because there are credible estimates that are less than one degree.
So, it seems reasonable to spend our hard-earned money adapting to whatever happens. Adaptation works if the changes are natural or man-made. The article is by Guus Berkhour and Marcel Crok of The Netherlands, where they understand adaptation better than most countries. Their dikes have a flooding probability of 1 time in 10,000 years.
Read the press release here.
