How to Fight Global Warming? Maybe Just Live With It

April 2, 2007 — -- Global warming has moved to center stage, backed by widespread consensus that we are in for big changes in the years ahead, but the scale of the problem is so huge that many are left feeling there's nothing they can do to stop it. And they're probably right.

Even if by some miracle greenhouse gases that are now warming the planet could be frozen at their current level, the Earth would continue to grow warmer for decades because the amount of carbon dioxide pumped into the atmosphere is already higher than at any time in the past 650,000 years, scientists say. And the chance that we're going to turn that around is about as good as that proverbial snowball in hell.

So what's a body to do? Learn to live with it.

For some odd reason, nearly all the agony over the possible impact of global climate change seems to be directed at stopping it. Relatively little thought is given to trying to figure out how to adapt to changes that are now inevitable. That subject, according to one group of scientists, is "taboo."

"Adaptation has been portrayed as a sort of selling out, because it accepts that the future will be different from the present," said Daniel Sarewitz, director of Arizona State University's Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes. "The future will be different from the present no matter what, so to not adapt is to consign millions to death and disruption."

Sarewitz, joined by an international group of colleagues, argued in a recent issue of the journal Nature that we have become obsessed with trying to reduce human impact on climate and have ignored the more urgent need to deal with inevitable changes. Sarewitz doesn't have to look beyond his own backyard to see evidence of that.

While driving through Arizona a couple of weeks ago, I saw subdivisions and even shopping centers that weren't there when I passed through the same area just four months ago. Growth is next to godliness in that part of the country, but there's a problem. The Southwest is now in its eighth year of drought, and some climate experts believe droughts will be longer, and more intense, there in the years ahead because of global warming.