Climate Change Adaptation Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Climate Change Adaptation. Here they are! All 94 of them:

It's about enabling the generation of materials and structures designed to interact, adapt and respond to the natural environment.
Neri Oxman
Climate intelligence enables action-oriented, climate-aligned decisions to mitigate risks, build resilient adaptation, and identify emerging opportunities.
Roger Spitz (The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption: Volume IV - Disruption as a Springboard to Value Creation)
Incremental climate adaptation needs to shift to exponential climate adaptation.
Roger Spitz (The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption: Volume IV - Disruption as a Springboard to Value Creation)
I'm always amazed at the human capacity to not make fundamental changes, but instead merely adapt. I see these pictures of people in Beijing and New Delhi, walking around with masks on, because you can't walk outside your house and breathe? If you can't breathe?…If that's not the cue to make a fundamental change, I don't know what is!
Bill Maher
No species has ever survived by trying to cling to what's gone. You can't exist if you're trying to get back to an environment or culture or climate that's changed. You have to adapt if you want to keep going.
Lauren James (The Quiet at the End of the World)
Permaculture economics empowers communities to adapt and thrive in a changing climate.
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr. (Principles of a Permaculture Economy)
To avert climate crises, it's important that humanity invests in climate resilience, not just climate adaptation.
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
When you talk with people, one of the arguments they'll throw back at you is that the climate has always changed, and that is absolutely right. It's the rate of change that is the problem right now. It's changing so quickly that it exceeds the adaptive capacity of some species.
Michael Crimmins
Bill McKibben named his climate change advocacy group 350.org, because 350 ppm of atmospheric carbon dioxide is what Dr. James Hansen, former head of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies and one of the most respected climatologists in the world, says is the maximum level to “preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted.” Tragically, we have now exceeded 400 ppm.
Bernie Sanders (Our Revolution: A Future to Believe In)
The best ones to solve the climate change problem are businesses all around the world. If each business adapts permaculture principles, we would see massive improvements in climate and natural ecosystem conditions.
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
As far as extinction is concerned, the absolute climate is not to blame, nor is the direction of change. It is the rapidity of change that is important. Communities of organisms need time to adapt – if too much change is thrust upon them at once, devastation and loss is the common response. This is true of the end-Cretaceous, when the impact of an extraterrestrial rock caused near-immediate global winter, and of the end-Permian, when skyrocketing greenhouse gases from unprecedented volcanic eruptions sparked global warming.
Thomas Halliday (Otherlands: Journeys in Earth's Extinct Ecosystems)
The fossil fuel companies have known for decades that their core product was warming the planet, and yet they have not only failed to adapt to that reality, they have blocked progress at every turn. Meanwhile, oil and gas companies remain some of the most profitable corporations in history...These companies are rich, quite simply, because they have dumped the cost of cleaning up their mess onto regular people around the world.
Naomi Klein (This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate)
Was Superstorm Sandy caused by greenhouse warming of the planet? In a word, no. Individual storms arise from specific conditions in the atmosphere. Since records have been kept, hurricanes have varied in number and intensity each season with cycles going up and coming down. The temptation to attribute any specific weather event to global warming distracts us from considering and adopting adaptive strategies, such as improving and expanding irrigation for agriculture and the water supply for cities, that will serve us well when climate changes inevitably arrives on our doorstep.
E. Kirsten Peters (The Whole Story of Climate: What Science Reveals About the Nature of Endless Change)
The late twentieth century has witnessed a remarkable growth in scientific interest in the subject of extinction. It is hardly a new subject—Baron Georges Cuvier had first demonstrated that species became extinct back in 1786, not long after the American Revolution. Thus the fact of extinction had been accepted by scientists for nearly three-quarters of a century before Darwin put forth his theory of evolution. And after Darwin, the many controversies that swirled around his theory did not often concern issues of extinction. On the contrary, extinction was generally considered as unremarkable as a car running out of gas. Extinction was simply proof of failure to adapt. How species adapted was intensely studied and fiercely debated. But the fact that some species failed was hardly given a second thought. What was there to say about it? However, beginning in the 1970s, two developments began to focus attention on extinction in a new way. The first was the recognition that human beings were now very numerous, and were altering the planet at a very rapid rate—eliminating traditional habitats, clearing the rain forest, polluting air and water, perhaps even changing global climate. In the process, many animal species were becoming extinct. Some scientists cried out in alarm; others were quietly uneasy. How fragile was the earth’s ecosystem? Was the human species engaged in behavior that would eventually lead to its own extinction?
Michael Crichton (The Lost World (Jurassic Park, #2))
Change the clouds and you will change the world.
Steven Magee
By the time we are convinced of the climate change impacts; there would be nothing we could do to help.
M.F. Moonzajer (LOVE, HATRED AND MADNESS)
Resilience includes knowing when an unwanted transformation is inevitable.
Rosanna Xia (California Against the Sea: Visions for Our Vanishing Coastline)
On a human flourishing standard, we want to avoid not “climate change” but “climate danger”—and we want to increase “climate livability” by adapting to and mastering climate, not simply refrain from impacting climate.
Alex Epstein (Fossil Future: Why Global Human Flourishing Requires More Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas--Not Less)
The ACM also develops the following traits: •Strength of character; •Experience and intuition through repetitive skills training; •An understanding of the value of self-study; and •Proper understanding of a command climate that promotes adaptability accepts change and encourages innovation.
Don Vandergriff (Raising the Bar)
The greatest challenge we face is a philosophical one: understanding that this civilization is already dead. The sooner we confront our situation and realize that there is nothing we can do to save ourselves, the sooner we can get down to the difficult task of adapting, with mortal humility, to our new reality. Carbon-fueled capitalism is a zombie system, voracious but sterile. This aggressive human monoculture has proven astoundingly virulent but also toxic, cannibalistic, and self-destructive. It is unsustainable, both in itself and as a response to catastrophic climate change.
Roy Scranton (Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization (City Lights Open Media))
f we view climate changes as our enemy we will always be defeated, for climate will always change. Natural climate change is frequent, often extreme, and sometimes rapid. Industrial CO2 is a real problem just as you have heard, but it’s only a fragment of the whole story of climate. In other words, I’m not a global warming denier – I want to add to the discussion of climate change from the point of view of geology and natural change. What may matter most is not our carbon policies, but whether we invest in adaptive strategies that can serve us well when change inevitably arrives on our doorstep.
E. Kirsten Peters (The Whole Story of Climate: What Science Reveals About the Nature of Endless Change)
The reason for this is that sharks adapt to their environment. If you catch a small shark and confine it, it will stay a size proportionate to the aquarium in which it lives. Sharks can be six inches long and fully mature. But turn them loose in the ocean and they grow to their normal size. The same is true of potential leaders. Some are put into an organization when they are still small, and the confining environment ensures that they stay small and underdeveloped. Only leaders can control the environment of their organization. They can be the change agents who create a climate conducive to growth.
John C. Maxwell (Developing the Leaders Around You: How to Help Others Reach Their Full Potential)
We shall best understand the probable course of natural selection by taking the case of a country undergoing some physical change, for instance, of climate. The proportional numbers of its inhabitants would almost immediately undergo a change, and some species might become extinct. We may conclude, from what we have seen of the intimate and complex manner in which the inhabitants of each country are bound together, that any change in the numerical proportions of some of the inhabitants, independently of the change of climate itself, would most seriously affect many of the others. If the country were open on its borders, new forms would certainly immigrate, and this also would seriously disturb the relations of some of the former inhabitants. Let it be remembered how powerful the influence of a single introduced tree or mammal has been shown to be. But in the case of an island, or of a country partly surrounded by barriers, into which new and better adapted forms could not freely enter, we should then have places in the economy of nature which would assuredly be better filled up, if some of the original inhabitants were in some manner modified; for, had the area been open to immigration, these same places would have been seized on by intruders. In such case, every slight modification, which in the course of ages chanced to arise, and which in any way favoured the individuals of any of the species, by better adapting them to their altered conditions, would tend to be preserved; and natural selection would thus have free scope for the work of improvement.
Charles Darwin
If whole societies and polities are to adapt then the necessary decisions will need to be made collectively, within political institutions, as happens in wartime or national emergencies. After all, isn’t that what politics, in its most fundamental form, is about? Collective survival and the preservation of the body politic?
Amitav Ghosh (The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable)
Once there were three tribes. The Optimists, whose patron saints were Drake and Sagan, believed in a universe crawling with gentle intelligence—spiritual brethren vaster and more enlightened than we, a great galactic siblinghood into whose ranks we would someday ascend. Surely, said the Optimists, space travel implies enlightenment, for it requires the control of great destructive energies. Any race which can't rise above its own brutal instincts will wipe itself out long before it learns to bridge the interstellar gulf. Across from the Optimists sat the Pessimists, who genuflected before graven images of Saint Fermi and a host of lesser lightweights. The Pessimists envisioned a lonely universe full of dead rocks and prokaryotic slime. The odds are just too low, they insisted. Too many rogues, too much radiation, too much eccentricity in too many orbits. It is a surpassing miracle that even one Earth exists; to hope for many is to abandon reason and embrace religious mania. After all, the universe is fourteen billion years old: if the galaxy were alive with intelligence, wouldn't it be here by now? Equidistant to the other two tribes sat the Historians. They didn't have too many thoughts on the probable prevalence of intelligent, spacefaring extraterrestrials— but if there are any, they said, they're not just going to be smart. They're going to be mean. It might seem almost too obvious a conclusion. What is Human history, if not an ongoing succession of greater technologies grinding lesser ones beneath their boots? But the subject wasn't merely Human history, or the unfair advantage that tools gave to any given side; the oppressed snatch up advanced weaponry as readily as the oppressor, given half a chance. No, the real issue was how those tools got there in the first place. The real issue was what tools are for. To the Historians, tools existed for only one reason: to force the universe into unnatural shapes. They treated nature as an enemy, they were by definition a rebellion against the way things were. Technology is a stunted thing in benign environments, it never thrived in any culture gripped by belief in natural harmony. Why invent fusion reactors if your climate is comfortable, if your food is abundant? Why build fortresses if you have no enemies? Why force change upon a world which poses no threat? Human civilization had a lot of branches, not so long ago. Even into the twenty-first century, a few isolated tribes had barely developed stone tools. Some settled down with agriculture. Others weren't content until they had ended nature itself, still others until they'd built cities in space. We all rested eventually, though. Each new technology trampled lesser ones, climbed to some complacent asymptote, and stopped—until my own mother packed herself away like a larva in honeycomb, softened by machinery, robbed of incentive by her own contentment. But history never said that everyone had to stop where we did. It only suggested that those who had stopped no longer struggled for existence. There could be other, more hellish worlds where the best Human technology would crumble, where the environment was still the enemy, where the only survivors were those who fought back with sharper tools and stronger empires. The threats contained in those environments would not be simple ones. Harsh weather and natural disasters either kill you or they don't, and once conquered—or adapted to— they lose their relevance. No, the only environmental factors that continued to matter were those that fought back, that countered new strategies with newer ones, that forced their enemies to scale ever-greater heights just to stay alive. Ultimately, the only enemy that mattered was an intelligent one. And if the best toys do end up in the hands of those who've never forgotten that life itself is an act of war against intelligent opponents, what does that say about a race whose machines travel between the stars?
Peter Watts (Blindsight (Firefall, #1))
behavior is always changing, all the time. Our planet is a dynamic, active environment. Weather is changing. The land is changing. Continents drift. Oceans rise and fall. Mountains thrust up and erode away. All the organisms on the planet are constantly adapting to those changes. The best organisms are the ones that can adapt most rapidly. That’s why it’s hard to see how a catastrophe that produces a large change could cause extinction, since so much change is occurring all the time, anyway.” “In that case,” Thorne said, “what causes extinction?” “Certainly not rapid change alone,” Malcolm said. “The facts tell us that clearly.” “What facts?” “After every major environmental change, a wave of extinctions has usually followed—but not right away. Extinctions only occur thousands, or millions of years later. Take the last glaciation in North America. The glaciers descended, the climate changed severely, but animals didn’t die. Only after the glaciers receded, when you’d think things would go back to normal, did lots of species become extinct. That’s when giraffes and tigers and mammoths vanished on this continent. And that’s the usual pattern. It’s almost as if species are weakened by the major change, but die off later. It’s a well-recognized phenomenon.
Michael Crichton (The Lost World (Jurassic Park, #2))
What does it take to build something so that it’s really easy to make comfortable little modifications in a way that once you’ve made them, they feel integral with the nature and structure of what is already there? You want to be able to mess around with it and progressively change it to bring it into an adapted state with yourself, your family, the climate, whatever. This kind of adaptation is a continuous process of gradually taking care.
Stewart Brand (How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built)
There is such a furor of concern about the linkage between greenhouse forcing and floods that it causes society to lose focus on the things we already know for certain about floods and how to mitigate and adapt to them. Blaming climate change for flood losses makes flood losses a global issue that appears to be out of the control of regional or national institutions. The scientific community needs to emphasize that the problem of flood losses is mostly about what we do on or to the landscape and that will be the case for decades to come.
Roger Pielke (The Rightful Place of Science: Disasters and Climate Change)
think of climate change as slow, but it is unnervingly fast. We think of the technological change necessary to avert it as fast-arriving, but unfortunately it is deceptively slow—especially judged by just how soon we need it. This is what Bill McKibben means when he says that winning slowly is the same as losing: “If we don’t act quickly, and on a global scale, then the problem will literally become insoluble,” he writes. “The decisions we make in 2075 won’t matter.” Innovation, in many cases, is the easy part. This is what the novelist William Gibson meant when he said, “The future is already here, it just isn’t evenly distributed.” Gadgets like the iPhone, talismanic for technologists, give a false picture of the pace of adaptation. To a wealthy American or Swede or Japanese, the market penetration may seem total, but more than a decade after its introduction, the device is used by less than 10 percent of the world; for all smartphones, even the “cheap” ones, the number is somewhere between a quarter and a third. Define the technology in even more basic terms, as “cell phones” or “the internet,” and you get a timeline to global saturation of at least decades—of which we have two or three, in which to completely eliminate carbon emissions, planetwide. According to the IPCC, we have just twelve years to cut them in half. The longer we wait, the harder it will be. If we had started global decarbonization in 2000, when Al Gore narrowly lost election to the American presidency, we would have had to cut emissions by only about 3 percent per year to stay safely under two degrees of warming. If we start today, when global emissions are still growing, the necessary rate is 10 percent. If we delay another decade, it will require us to cut emissions by 30 percent each year. This is why U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres believes we have only one year to change course and get started. The scale of the technological transformation required dwarfs any achievement that has emerged from Silicon Valley—in fact dwarfs every technological revolution ever engineered in human history, including electricity and telecommunications and even the invention of agriculture ten thousand years ago. It dwarfs them by definition, because it contains all of them—every single one needs to be replaced at the root, since every single one breathes on carbon, like a ventilator.
David Wallace-Wells (The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming)
Evolution is largely a temporal phenomenon, Merrill. The environment changes, and populations in that environment change in turn, or they languish. Individual organisms don't evolve; populations do. Nature doesn't give a damn about individuals. The only role we play in evolution is surviving long enough to give birth to offspring who are slightly different from us. Some of our offspring will prosper in a changing environment, and some of them will not. As for us individuals, once we've reproduced, nature has no more use for us. We perish along with our ill-adapted young. Death has always been an essential factor in species survival. Now consider the human race. We are a partial exception to the rule. Unlike other species, we have developed culture. Instead of adapting to a changing environment biologically, we can sometimes adapt to it culturally. If an Ice Age comes along, we don't need to grow fur on our bodies if we invent the fur coat. Culture allows us to adapt to almost any environment, including the harshest, like space. In fact, our cultural adaptation is so robust that it all but obviates the need to evolve biologically. We are so good at adapting to changing conditions with our knowledge and technology that we may deceive ourselves into believing that we are above nature. But only a fools believes that. Nature always has the last word. A star in our neighborhood could go supernova and wipe out all life in our solar system, and no amount of culture could save us from that. That, I believe, is the main reason you want to seed humanity throughout the galaxy. So as not to have all our eggs in one basket... The chief difference between biological and cultural adaptation is that while biological evolution doesn't care about individuals, cultural evolution does, often at the expense of the species. Look at how many times we've nearly wiped ourselves out through cultural means: the nuclear bomb, pollution, climate change, the Outrage. We can't seem to help ourselves. Look at what we've done: we've made individuals all but immortal, even when it means we can have no more children. In one stroke, we've eliminated the two key ingredients of evolution: offspring and death. From a biological perspective, we're skating on mighty thin ice. ... ...as long as the individual reigns supreme, there's a finite limit to our survival. ... We need a means for the individual, not just the species, to participate in biological evolution, and that's what my project is all about. We need to be able to let our biological bodies die, to have offspring that are molded by the changing needs of the environments we find ourselves in, and yet to serially inhabit these bodies as the same individual. That means we need to be able to move our minds from one body to the next. ... Mine is a singularity in which the obsolete individual is invited to cross over to the new, not simply to die out. The existing person need not die to make room for the newcomer. Anyone can play.
David Marusek (Mind Over Ship)
The future of democracy in developed countries will depend on their ability to deal with the problem of a disappearing middle class. In the wake of the financial crisis there has been a rise of new populist groups from the Tea Party in the United States to various anti-EU, anti-immigrant parties in Europe. What unites all of them is the belief that elites in their countries have betrayed them. And in many ways they are correct: the elites who set the intellectual and cultural climate in the developed world have been largely buffered from the effects of middle-class decline. There has been a vacuum in new approaches to the problem, approaches that don’t involve simply returning to the welfare state solutions of the past. The proper approach to the problem of middle-class decline is not necessarily the present German system or any other specific set of measures. The only real long-term solution would be an educational system that succeeded in pushing the vast majority of citizens into higher levels of education and skills. The ability to help citizens flexibly adjust to the changing conditions of work requires state and private institutions that are similarly flexible. Yet one of the characteristics of modern developed democracies is that they have accumulated many rigidities over time that make institutional adaptation increasingly difficult. In fact, all political systems—past and present—are liable to decay. The fact that a system once was a successful and stable liberal democracy does not mean that it will
Francis Fukuyama (Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy)
propose that we consider our farmers on a spectrum, let’s say, of agrarianism. On one end of the spectrum we have farmers like James, interested in producing the finest foodstuffs that they can, given the soil, the climate, the water, the budget, and their talent. They observe how efficacious or not their efforts are proving, and they adapt accordingly. Variety is one of the keys to this technique, eschewing the corporate monocultures for a revolving set of plants and animals, again, to mimic what was already happening on the land before we showed up with our earth-shaving machinery. It’s tough as hell, and in many cases impossible, to farm this way and earn enough profit to keep your bills paid and your family fed, but these farmers do exist. On the other end of the spectrum is full-speed-ahead robo-farming, in which the farmer is following the instructions of the corporation to produce not food but commodities in such a way that the corporation sits poised to make the maximum financial profit. Now, this is the part that has always fascinated me about us as a population: This kind of farmer is doing all they can to make their factory quota for the company, of grain, or meat, or what have you, despite their soil, climate, water, budget, or talent. It only stands to reason that this methodology is the very definition of unsustainable. Clearly, this is an oversimplification of an issue that requires as much of my refrain (nuance!) as any other human endeavor, but the broad strokes are hard to refute. The first farmer is doing their best to work with nature. The second farmer is doing their best despite nature. In order for the second farmer to prosper, they must defeat nature. A great example of this is the factory farming of beef/pork/chicken/eggs/turkey/salmon/etc. The manufacturers of these products have done everything they can to take the process out of nature entirely and hide it in a shed, where every step of the production has been engineered to make a profit; to excel at quantity. I know you’re a little bit ahead of me here, but I’ll go ahead and ask the obvious question: What of quality? If you’re willing to degrade these many lives with impunity—the lives of the animals themselves, the workers “growing” them, the neighbors having to suffer the voluminous poisons being pumped into the ecosystem/watershed, and the humans consuming your products—then what are you about? Can that even be considered farming? Again, I’m asking this of us. Of you and me, because what I have just described is the way a lot of our food is produced right now, in the system that we all support with our dollars. How did we get here, in both the US and the UK? How can we change our national stance toward agriculture to accommodate more middle-size farmers and less factory farms? How would Aldo Leopold feel about it?
Nick Offerman (Where the Deer and the Antelope Play: The Pastoral Observations of One Ignorant American Who Loves to Walk Outside)
The woolly mammoths occupied northern Eurasia and northern North America; the Columbian mammoth's range was transcontinental, from Alaska south throughout most of the United States, and went from an elevation of 9,000 feet in the mountains of Utah to sea level in Florida and Mexico. It seems unlikely that such adaptable animals could have been totally wiped out by even the most severe weather conditions.
Paul S. Martin (Twilight of the Mammoths: Ice Age Extinctions and the Rewilding of America)
Comparing African and Egyptian circumstances also points to other reasons why churches survived in some regions and failed in others. From earliest times, Christianity had developed in the particular social and economic world of the Mediterranean and the Near East, and networks of church organization and mission followed the familiar routes of trade and travel. Also, this social world was founded upon cities, which were the undisputed centers of the institutionalized church. Mediterranean Christianity was founded upon a hierarchical system of metropolitans and bishops based in cities: even the name metropolitan suggests a fundamentally urban system. Over time, though, trade routes changed and some cities lost power or vanished altogether. Between the fifth century and the ninth, these changes had a special effect on the Mediterranean, as sea routes declined in importance and states tended to look more inland, to transcontinental routes within Asia and Africa. This process was accelerated by the impact of plague, particularly during the 540s, and perhaps of climate change. Cities like Carthage and Antioch shrank to nothing, while Damascus and Alexandria lost influence before the new rising stars of Baghdad and Cairo.11 These changes coincided with the coming of Islam rather than being caused by that event, but they had immense religious consequences. Churches that remained wedded to the old social order found themselves in growing difficulty, while more flexible or adaptable organizations succeeded. Nestorians and Jacobites coped well for centuries with an Eastern world centered in Baghdad and looking east into Asia. Initially, too, the old urban framework adapted successfully to the Arab conquest, and Christian bishops made their peace quite easily. Matters were very different, though, when the cities themselves were faced with destruction. By the seventh century, the decline of Carthage and its dependent cities undermined the whole basis of the North African church, and accelerated the collapse of the colonial social order. Once the cities were gone, no village Christians remained to take up the slack. The Coptic Church flourished because its network of monasteries and village churches allowed it to withstand changes in the urban system.
Philip Jenkins (The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia—and How It Died)
Even when we try to adapt, we move too slowly. Economist Richard Hornbeck specializes in the history of the American Dust Bowl; he says that farmers of that era could conceivably have adapted to the changing climate of their time by cultivating different crops. But they didn’t, lacking credit to make the necessary investments—and were therefore unable to shake inertia and ritual and the rootedness of identity. So instead the crops died out, in cascading waves crashing through whole American states and all the people living in them.
David Wallace-Wells (The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming)
Change made me the person I am.
Steven Magee
Change is progress.
Steven Magee
Like many other world religions, nationalism requires its adapts to adhere to a strict dogma. They must also provide a sacrifice of blood and money to its altar. It is just that nationalism is clever enough not to call itself a religion. Science, inspired by the same mechanism is not reluctant to instill guilt, call in for prophets of doom to provide us with the reason for the end of the world, through climate change, and provide us with dates of when all hell will break loose as a punishment for our environmental crimes. How to find one’s way through the maze? It seems to me that it is only reason that doesn’t require any reasons for it is itself a reason. - On Nationalism and Science as Religions
Lamine Pearlheart (Awakening)
The climate defines the skin color and skeleton structure.
Steven Magee
Maybe even more important was the fungi’s ability to reproduce rapidly. Their short life cycle would enable them to adapt to the rapidly changing environment—fire and wind and climate—much faster than the steadfast, long-lived trees could manage. The oldest Rocky Mountain juniper is about 1,500 years old and the oldest whitebark pine around 1,300, in Utah and Idaho, respectively. Meanwhile the
Suzanne Simard (Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest)
As I will argue later in this book, we also need to stop believing that any story with climate in it is best solved through climate policies. As we will see, when we are told about the hundreds of millions of people flooded because of global warming, the argument easily becomes “we need to save them with carbon cuts.” But we will find out how little that would help. We will see that even if we went all-in and spent hundreds of trillions on climate policies, sea levels would still rise, only slightly less than if we did nothing. Millions would still get flooded. If we instead went all-in on adaptation, we could for less than a hundredth of the cost save almost everyone. The same with heat deaths; focusing on climate policies costs vastly more yet helps much, much less than air conditioning.
Bjørn Lomborg (False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet)
Philip Morris always managed to make billions of dollars in profits. It did so by adapting to the changes in the political, legal, and cultural climate. The same couldn’t be said, however, of the nearby public hospital that treated thousands of Virginians each year for heart disease, lung cancer, and emphysema. This was especially true of MCV’s years of hand-wringing about finally stamping out its racist practices.
Chip Jones (The Organ Thieves: The Shocking Story of the First Heart Transplant in the Segregated South)
Maybe even more important was the fungi’s ability to reproduce rapidly. Their short life cycle would enable them to adapt to the rapidly changing environment—fire and wind and climate—much faster than the steadfast, long-lived trees could manage.
Suzanne Simard (Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest)
Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas in the Earth's atmosphere that traps the sun's heat. The amount of carbon dioxide in the air has risen steadily since the nineteenth century and is now at it's highest levels in 800,000 years. As a result, global temperatures are also rising: 2020 was one of the hottest years on record. But the planet is not warming evenly. The polar regions are heating up five times faster than anywhere else on Earth. As a result, polar habitats are changing dramatically. Snow covers the Arctic for fewer days each decade, and the glaciers over Greenland and Antarctica are melting away. Sea ice is changing, too, getting thinner and covering less ocean. Polar bears depend on Arctic summer sea ice for hunting and traveling, but within a few decades, there might be none left. Changes in climate and habitat have other consequences for polar animals. Some adaptions that supported survival are becoming unhelpful or even harmful. For example, blubber keeps marine mammals warm in cold water (see page 13). As temperatures continue to rise, the same blubber could cause those animals to overheat. When days get longer, ptarmigan turn brown for camouflage when the snow melts (see page 20). If warmer spring temperatures melt snow before the days lengthen, birds that are still white will be more visible to predators. As climate chance continues, these and other polar species may find it harder to persist.
L.E. Carmichael (Polar: Wildlife at the Ends of the Earth)
Just because rice has served as our staple crop for thousands of years doesn't guarantee its perpetual role. The shift in climate necessitates crops that exhibit greater resilience and reduced dependence on resources.
Sayem Sarkar
Just as a river finds new courses when the landscape shifts, our staple crops must chart a new course to navigate the terrain of climate change.
Sayem Sarkar
Suraj solar and allied industries, Wework galaxy, 43, Residency Road, Bangalore-560025. Mobile number : +91 808 850 7979 **Enlighten Your Roads with Eco-Accommodating Splendor: Solar Street Light Manufacturers in Bangalore** Lately, the worldwide shift toward feasible and environmentally friendly power sources has prepared for creative arrangements in metropolitan framework. Among these, sunlight based road lighting has arisen as a reasonable and effective option in contrast to customary streetlamps. For occupants and organizations in Bangalore looking for solid sunlight based streetlamp producers, Sunease Sun powered stands apart as a main supplier in this eco-accommodating transformation. Sun based streetlamps work utilizing sun oriented energy, bridling the force of the sun during the day and switching it into power over completely to enlighten roads after dusk. This lessens power utilization as well as eliminates carbon impressions, making them a harmless to the ecosystem choice for metropolitan spaces. Sunease Sun oriented's scope of sun based streetlamps consolidates cutting edge innovation with supportable practices to offer an answer that serves both usefulness and eco-cognizance. Bangalore, known for its clamoring roads and quick urbanization, has seen a developing requirement for further developed road lighting arrangements. Customary streetlamps consume huge power, stressing power assets and adding to ecological debasement. Nonetheless, with Sunease Sun oriented's sun based streetlamp frameworks, this story is evolving. Their items incorporate high-proficiency sunlight based chargers, high level Drove installations, and savvy light administration frameworks, guaranteeing that the lights work proficiently over the course of the night while adjusting to changing atmospheric conditions. One of the basic benefits of settling on Sunease Sun oriented's items is their obligation to quality and solidness. Their sun based streetlamps are intended to endure unforgiving weather patterns, including weighty downpour, solid breezes, and outrageous temperatures, making them an ideal fit for the powerful environment of Bangalore. Additionally, their items require insignificant support, offering long haul investment funds on both substitution and upkeep costs. The establishment interaction is one more huge advantage of sun oriented streetlamps from Sunease Sun based. Not at all like conventional lighting arrangements that frequently require broad wiring and framework, sun oriented lights can be introduced rapidly and productively. They are independent units that accompany worked in sun powered chargers and batteries, empowering simple arrangement in different areas without the requirement for broad foundation. This adaptability permits metropolitan organizers to upgrade public security and local area spaces without disturbing the current climate. Sunease Sun based likewise accentuates mechanical coordination in their sun powered streetlamp frameworks. With highlights, for example, movement sensors and shrewd lighting controls, these lights change their brilliance in view of continuous necessities, considering energy reserve funds and expanded effectiveness. This innovation expands the life expectancy of the lights as well as saves roads protected and sufficiently bright for people on foot and vehicles, exhibiting a guarantee to local area security and commitment. As well as being an innovator in assembling sun oriented streetlamps, Sunease Sun based advocates for greener metropolitan practices. They work intimately with civil bodies, property engineers, and private networks to advance the reception of environmentally friendly power sources, in this manner adding to the bigger discussion about maintainability in Bangalore.
Solar Street Light Manufacturers in Bangalore
You may notice that life was flourishing back in the cretaceous. Living things were happily adapted to the way things were. Climate deniers sometimes like to throw this point into their bag of arguments as well: See, lots of CO2 isn’t so bad after all! Uh yeah, it’s fine … if you happen to be a dinosaur. Herein lies an essential idea. We cannot remind ourselves often enough: It’s not the total amount of carbon dioxide in the air today that poses a threat to us. It is the rate of change—the speed at which the fraction of CO2 is growing—and our modern society is built around a specific kind of climate and a specific level of carbon dioxide.
Bill Nye (Unstoppable: Harnessing Science to Change the World)
Unlike intelligent adaptation to any warming that might occur, which in any case will mean different things in different regions of the world, and which requires no global agreement, decarbonisation can make no sense whatever in the absence of a global agreement. And there is no chance of any meaningful agreement being concluded. The very limited Kyoto accord of 1997 has come to an end; and although there is the declared intention of concluding a much more ambitious successor, with a UN-sponsored conference in Paris 2015 at which it is planned that this should happen, nothing of any significance is remotely likely.
Alan Moran (Climate Change: The Facts)
Climate Change is a bit like our advanced societies. Too late to "fix." The only choice left is that we adapt to what we've created.
Shilpa Menon
If any element of the greenhouse fear turns out to be false—if CO2 emissions don’t cause dramatic warming, if dramatic warming doesn’t cause harmful climate change, or if human beings can adapt well, then CO2 emissions are not catastrophic.
Alex Epstein (The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels)
Climate change is a global problem with grave implications: environmental, social, economic, political and for the distribution of goods. It represents one of the principal challenges facing humanity in our day. Its worst impact will probably be felt by developing countries in coming decades. Many of the poor live in areas particularly affected by phenomena related to warming, and their means of subsistence are largely dependent on natural reserves and ecosystemic services such as agriculture, fishing and forestry. They have no other financial activities or resources which can enable them to adapt to climate change or to face natural disasters, and their access to social services and protection is very limited. For example, changes in climate, to which animals and plants cannot adapt, lead them to migrate; this in turn affects the livelihood of the poor, who are then forced to leave their homes, with great uncertainty for their future and that of their children. There has been a tragic rise in the number of migrants seeking to flee from the growing poverty caused by environmental degradation. They are not recognized by international conventions as refugees; they bear the loss of the lives they have left behind, without enjoying any legal protection whatsoever. Sadly, there is widespread indifference to such suffering, which is even now taking place throughout our world. Our lack of response to these tragedies involving our brothers and sisters points to the loss of that sense of responsibility for our fellow men and women upon which all civil society is founded.
Pope Francis
Milankovič cycles I describe in chapter 4. The wobbling of Earth’s axis and the vibrating eccentricity of its orbit, forced by the gravitational pull of the other planets, leads to phases of high and low climate variability. At times, Africa has experienced extreme and rapid fluctuation between dry and wet conditions, forcing extinctions and rapid adaptations. What Rick and his colleagues have found is that all the major genera in our family tree, including Australopithecus (around 4 million years ago), Paranthropus (2.7 million years ago), and our own genus, Homo (about 2.8 million years ago), first appeared during these periods of erratic climate change. Periods
David Grinspoon (Earth in Human Hands: Shaping Our Planet's Future)
One of the things I did differently was to make my milkshakes with a soft product drawn from a tank, instead of hand-dipping ice cream. This changed the layout and gave us more space. One major problem in adapting the California-style building to the Midwestern climate was ventilation. I brought in architectual consultants one after the other in an attempt to solve the problem of exhausting the stale air and replacing it with fresh cool or heated air.
Ray Kroc (Grinding It Out: The Making of McDonald's)
In economic terms, global warming is not merely an externality that we have failed to price in. The free market can only get us so far. This makes it a truly wicked problem, but it also gives us a more perfect moral clarity. We are not simply borrowing against our own future. For the most part, we are not our own victims. To rely on empathy to shape our response to climate change is often considered naive—the victims of warming are distant in space, distant in time, and the bullets are invisible—but I believe it is more naive to hope that we in the north will significantly cut emissions or consumption or give needed adaptation funding to distant countries because we personally feel threatened. In
McKenzie Funk (Windfall: The Booming Business of Global Warming)
these economic demands—for basic public services that work, for decent housing, for land redistribution—represent nothing less than the unfinished business of the most powerful liberation movements of the past two centuries, from civil rights to feminism to Indigenous sovereignty. The massive global investments required to respond to the climate threat—to adapt humanely and equitably to the heavy weather we have already locked in, and to avert the truly catastrophic warming we can still avoid—is a chance to change all that; and to get it right this time. It could deliver the equitable redistribution of agricultural lands that was supposed to follow independence from colonial rule and dictatorship; it could bring the jobs and homes that Martin Luther King dreamed of; it could bring jobs and clean water to Native communities; it could at last turn on the lights and running water in every South African township. Such is the promise of a Marshall Plan for the Earth. The
Naomi Klein (This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate)
The first policy priority is to integrate adaptation with development. The second is to protect, encourage, and increase terrestrial carbon sinks while honoring a broad range of human and environmental values. The third is to adopt full-cost energy accounting that takes into account the entire life cycle of producing and consuming a unit of energy. The fourth is to raise the price of emitting GHGs to a level that roughly reflects their costs. The fifth priority is to force technology adoption and diffusion. The sixth priority is to substantially increase research, especially in renewable energy and carbon sequestration, particularly air capture of carbon. The seventh priority is to plan for the Anthropocene.
Dale Jamieson (Reason in a Dark Time: Why the Struggle Against Climate Change Failed -- and What It Means for Our Future)
In essence a highly developed fingertip feel allows us to shape and reshape the circumstances and conditions. We are not merely responding we are setting up the situation or as Sun Tzu stated: “Therefore it is said that victorious warriors win first, then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first, then seek to win.”3 When having to perform effectively in the complex circumstances conflict and violence offer, we must strive to overcome obstacles and focus on exploiting weaknesses and avoiding adversarial strengths. This takes ability to intuitively feel the climate of an ongoing and rapidly changing situation and then adapt accordingly. The ability and or timing of adaptation can be fleeting as opportunities present and close often times very quickly. Developing fingertip feel so that we can rapidly transition fluidly as the circumstances require is critical. Boyd called these fast transient Maneuvers.
Fred Leland (Adaptive Leadership Handbook - Law Enforcement & Security)
short, the plants that grow naturally in these areas, much like grapes, are well adapted to the local climate. Because wine grapes grow best un­ der a narrow range of climatic condi­ tions, global climate change is causing great concern among winegrowers. For example, scientists in 2013 evaluated the current and future climates in the wine region of California, where
Andrew J. Friedland (Environmental Science for AP)
Watching him pace around these homes, a twinkle in his eye, it struck me that this need to adapt to nature is what drives some people mad about renewables: even at a very large scale, they require a humility that is the antithesis of damming a river, blasting bedrock for gas, or harnessing the power of the atom. They demand that we adapt ourselves to the rhythms of natural systems, as opposed to bending those systems to our will with brute force engineering. Put another way, if extractive energy sources are NFL football players, bashing away at the earth, then renewables are surfers, riding the swells as they come, but doing some pretty fancy tricks along the way.
Naomi Klein (This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate)
We were making some progress on climate-change adaptation in the late 1990s,” Klaus Jacob observed. “But September 11th set us back a decade on extreme-weather hazards, because we started focusing on a completely different set of threats.
Eric Klinenberg (Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago)
Despite overwhelming scientific evidence, the broader public in some nations remains divided over the seriousness of anthropogenic climate change, accelerating extinctions, and other environmental changes with serious global consequences. Would scientific recognition of the Anthropocene change public perceptions and actions to better avoid or adapt to these changes? As with the Anthropocene itself, the jury is still out.
Erle C. Ellis (Anthropocene: A Very Short Introduction)
Limitless Leaders focus on 1. Consciously Constructive development of their people's ADAPTAGILITY capacity... to thrive in uncertainty, ever-changing, challenging, complexities, AND opportunities 2. Teamworking, connection, communication trust and collaboration 3. Limitless Leadership skills and mindsets on ALL levels of the organisation 4. A High Performance Culture, context and climate, that unleashes and engages fullest potentials and possibilities.
Tony Dovale
Actions Summary The following list of new institutions, policies and actions is my best effort at envisaging what is required for Australia to survive the climate emergency. • A National Target and Plan for 95% or more of electricity to be supplied by renewables by 2030. • State plans to electrify all transport, beginning with the swift retirement of non-electric buses and including a plan for 50% of all new car sales to be EVs by 2030. • Implement planned changes to how we work and live so as to minimise unnecessary travel. • A plan for clean hydrogen to replace bunker fuel in shipping. • A plan for the adoption of e-fuels for aviation, with an aim to have all domestic flights running on e-fuel by 2030. • A National Commission for Climate Adaptation, with a Coastal Defence Fund and a Commission for Primary Production operating under its umbrella. • A National Initiative on Drawdown Innovation to provide leadership in early stage research and fund some on-ground projects. • The Federal Government to help convene a Global Working Group on Geoengineering.
Tim Flannery (The Climate Cure: Solving the Climate Emergency in the Era of COVID-19)
The World Bank reported in 2018 that countries needed to prepare for more than 100 million internally displaced people due to the effects of climate change (Rigaud et al. 2018), in addition to millions of international refugees. Despite you, me and most people we know in this field already hearing data on this global situation, it is useful to recap simply to invite a sober acceptance of our current predicament.
Jem Bendell (Deep Adaptation: Navigating the Realities of Climate Chaos)
The future is change.
Steven Magee
Life, by definition, is change.
Steven Magee
Change or die.
Steven Magee
To change or not to change, that is the question.
Steven Magee
For example, some people argue, Yes, climate change is happening, but it’s not worth spending much to try to stop it or adapt to it. Instead, we should prioritize other things that have a bigger impact on human welfare, like health and education. Here’s my reply to that argument: Unless we move fast toward zero, bad things (and probably many of them) will happen well within most people’s lifetime, and very bad things will happen within a generation. Even if climate change doesn’t rank as an existential threat to humanity, it will make most people worse off, and it will make the poorest even poorer. It will keep getting worse until we stop adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, and it deserves to be as much of a priority as health and education.
Bill Gates (How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need)
Octavia Butler said, “Civilization is to groups what intelligence is to individuals. It is a means of combining the intelligence of many to achieve ongoing group adaptation.” She also said, “All that you touch you change / all that you change, changes
Ayana Elizabeth Johnson (All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis)
Thanks to our new biotechnologies, we now have the power to change the evolutionary trajectories of species that seem destined to disappear, to rescue and revitalize ecosystems that are threatened by the ever-expanding human footprint or that are struggling to adapt to our planet’s changing climate. We could, for example, transfer the domestic ferret’s resistance to Sylvatic plague to black-footed ferrets that are facing extinction across their native range because of the introduced disease. Or we could transfer heat-tolerance between coral populations that are suffering as the oceans warm, or immunize white-footed mice against Lyme disease so that they can no longer pass the disease to humans. We may even eventually bring something back. Not a mammoth or a passenger pigeon, but instead some trait or function or aspect of an extinct species that can, in its re-establishment, restore some missing ecosystem function and allow other species to thrive in today’s altered world.
Beth Shapiro (How to Clone a Mammoth: The Science of De-Extinction (Princeton Science Library))
failed to create an arm of the government that will be forever attached to his name, nothing like Obamacare or remotely resembling social security. But the thrust of the Inflation Reduction Act can still be described as transformational—and it will change American life. The theory of the legislation is that the world is poised for a momentous shift. For a generation, the economy has taken tentative steps away from its reliance on fossil fuels. New technologies emerged that lowered the costs of solar panels and wind turbines and batteries; the mass market showed genuine interest in electric vehicles and heat pumps. But the pace of adaptation was slow, painfully slow given the looming changes to the climate. On its own, the economy was never going to evolve in time to avert the worst consequences
Franklin Foer (The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden's White House and the Struggle for America's Future)
Climate change is a call to adapt and innovate.
Christopher Howard (3D Printing Artificial Coral Reefs: A comprehensive overview of 3D Printing Artificial Coral Reefs and Marine Structures)
Mycorrhizal associations born of the Anthropocene will determine much of humans’ ability to adapt to the worsening climate emergency.
Merlin Sheldrake (Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures)
The three broad strategies for dealing with climate change are mitigation, adaptation, and amelioration. Mitigation, cutting back on greenhouse gas emissions, has been called avoiding the unmanageable. Adaptation, then, is managing the unavoidable—moving coastal populations to higher ground, developing drought-tolerant agriculture, preparing for masses of climate refugees, and keeping resource warfare localized. And amelioration is adjusting the nature of the planet itself through large-scale geoengineering.
Stewart Brand (Whole Earth Discipline: Why Dense Cities, Nuclear Power, Transgenic Crops, Restored Wildlands, and Geoengineering Are Necessary)
it’s not wrong to prioritize your functioning and find other ways you can contribute to environmentalism. Climate change is real. Environmentalism is important. But we are not going to fix the earth by shaming people with mental health and neurodiverse needs out of adaptive routines they need to function. Take that energy to Congress. Those who feel anger at someone with clinical depression or ADHD for not engaging in eco-optimal behaviors are seriously deluded. One of the major tenets of health professions is harm reduction. No one is made functional overnight, and some people may always have barriers. The goal then is to take steps that reduce harm, first to self, then to those individuals around us, then to our community. You cannot jump right to community harm reduction before first addressing individual harm reduction. Therefore, if a newly widowed woman struggles to eat, she is released from the obligation of having an eco-perfect diet not because eating ethically is unimportant, but because when the real-world choices for someone are eating dairy or eating nothing, it is always the ethical choice to eat. It is always the ethical choice to encourage that person to eat whatever they can manage. Harm reduction is always ethical.
K.C. Davis (How to Keep House While Drowning)
Does moral progress occur incrementally? Or is it the result of sudden, punctuated social change? Given that cultural evolution, unlike biological evolution, can be guided by deliberate human innovation, both incrementalism and punctuation would seem to be live options. ... incrementalism does not mean embracing a stultifying conservatism that favors tradition over reform. Incremental, progressive moral evolution can be relatively fast and even quite groundbreaking. That is, positive moral revolutions do take place—such as the gay rights revolution ... Typically, large-scale moral progress begins with small-scale “experiments in living.” Instead of trying to re-design the culture of a society as a whole, small groups of people use moral reasoning to re-design the sub-culture of their local tribes. If the results of experiments are positive, then they can be adapted elsewhere and scaled up for larger and larger portions of society. That being said, it’s possible that incremental moral change will not be sufficient to deal with the most serious threats to human survival. For example, perhaps something quite different—a moral black swan—is needed to address the problem of anthropogenic climate change. For this reason, we cannot be too confident that strategies that have worked in the past will also work in the future.
Victor Kumar (A Better Ape: The Evolution of the Moral Mind and How it Made us Human)
I think," he mumbled eventually, "I think that in order to solve the problem it is important to define it and to have some sense of what has caused it." Another empty phrase, thought Jean-Yves furiously; not only empty, but, as it happened, untrue. The causes were clearly part of general shifts in society that were beyond their powers to change. They had to adapt to this new business climate, that was all. And how could they adapt to it? This moron clearly hadn't the faintest idea.
Michel Houellebecq (Platform)
As Gregg Easterbrook points out, "Many environmentalists consider the mere mention of adaptation Ito climate change) heretical because it implies that humanity can overcome global warming rather than be overcome by it, thus shifting the emphasis away from green guilt."37
Norman Levitt (Prometheus Bedeviled: Science and the Contradictions of Contemporary Culture)
Let there be no mistake: this is the dawn of climate barbarism. And unless there is a radical change not only in the politics but in the underlying values that govern our politics, this is how the wealthy world is going to "adapt" to more climate disruption: by fully unleashing the toxic ideologies that rank the relative value of human lives in order to justify the monstrous discarding of huge swaths of humanity...These supremacist ideas are not new; nor have they ever gone away. For those of us in the Anglosphere, they are deeply embedded in the legal basis for our nations' very existence...Their power has ebbed and flowed throughout our histories, depending on what immoral behaviours demanded ideological justification. And just as these toxic ideas surged when they were required to rationalize slavery, land theft, and segregation, they are surging once more now that they are needed to justify climate recalcitrance and the barbarism at our borders.
Naomi Klein (On Fire: The Case for the Green New Deal)
And yet the world’s greenhouse gas emissions probably dropped just 5 percent, and possibly less than that. What’s remarkable to me is not how much emissions went down because of the pandemic, but how little. This small decline in emissions is proof that we cannot get to zero emissions simply—or even mostly—by flying and driving less. Just as we needed new tests, treatments, and vaccines for the novel coronavirus, we need new tools for fighting climate change: zero-carbon ways to produce electricity, make things, grow food, keep our buildings cool and warm, and move people and goods around the world. And we need new seeds and other innovations to help the world’s poorest people—many of whom are smallholder farmers—adapt to a warmer climate.
Bill Gates (How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need)
We must rein in temperature increases and help ensure that the most vulnerable can adapt. But today’s popular climate change policies of rolling out solar panels and wind turbines have insidious effects: they push up energy costs, hurt the poor, cut emissions ineffectively, and put us on an unsustainable pathway where taxpayers are eventually likely to revolt. Instead, we need to invest in innovation, smart carbon taxes, R&D into geoengineering, and adaptation...Making the world richer is also important...The richer people are, the more resilient they will be in the face of global warming.
Bjørn Lomborg
The expanding bull’s eye effect means we’re likely to see much more costly disasters happen over time, even if the climate doesn’t change at all… In reality, much (and often all) we’re seeing is that more people with more stuff live in harm’s way.” -p. 37 “We also need to stop believing that any story with climate in it is best solved through climate policies… Even if we went all-in and spent hundreds of trillions on climate policies, SEA LEVELS WOULD STILL RISE, ONLY SLIGHTLY LESS than if we did nothing. Millions would still get flooded. If we instead went all-in on adaptation, we could for less than a hundredth of the cost save almost everyone. The same with heat deaths; focusing on climate policies costs vastly more yet helps much, much less than air conditioning.” -p. 37
Bjørn Lomborg
People are panicking about climate change in large part because the media and environmental campaigners tell us to, because politicians overhype the likely effects, and because scientific research is often communicated without crucial context…: humans adapt to their changing earth. They have for millenia… “We don’t just use up the iron or gas that is there and then give up. We get better at finding more, at lower cost, in effect allowing humanity access to ever more and ever cheaper resources… “Once the human propensity for adaptation is taken into account, the numbers on climate change start looking a lot less scary. And adaptation should ALWAYS be factored into any climate change study, because humans are ALWAYS adapting.” -p. 19, 29, 35
Bjørn Lomborg
Darwin found that if you looked closely enough, nature conveyed a very different message. How could, for instance, the Galápagos Islands serve as home to thirteen separate species of finches, each similar to the other, yet each peculiarly adapted with different-shaped beaks for their particular island habitats? Clearly these finches had migrated over time from the mainland and from one island to another, and then, once separated, had begun to diverge and to become distinct from one another. But how? And why? Why did the giant sloths, whose bones Darwin recovered on his voyage, go extinct, while other creatures thrived in the same environment at the same time? And how was it that some animals seemed poorly designed for their environments, in defiance of Paley’s perfect watchmaker—woodpeckers that lived on treeless terrain, land birds with webbed feet—yet they managed to adapt and survive through makeshift means that no divine designer would ever have intended? Why did pythons have vestigial legs, and why did the bones inside the wings of a bat parallel the bones in the human hand and arm? This was evidence not of a master design, Darwin realized, but of a slow and gradual change in existing forms, spread across the ages, inherited from remote—and shared—ancestors. The evidence he painstakingly assembled on his voyage, then presented, bit by bit, in his classic book, pointed to very slow, very gradual changes in living things over millions of years, to creatures suddenly dying out and disappearing when their forms no longer allowed them to survive in a changing climate or environment, and to new forms of life that emerged and thrived in their place.
Edward Humes (Monkey Girl: Evolution, Education, Religion, and the Battle for America's Soul)
Whether dealing with threats from low-cost competitors or opportunities for growth from innovative products or acquisitions, organizations today need greater speed and flexibility, sometimes much greater, not just to deal with extraordinary events like COVID-19, but to deal with the shifting reality of our present and future. More broadly, the need to adapt rapidly is equally important for society to resolve threats like climate change or food security, as well as to continue capitalizing on opportunities for progress toward a more equitable and prosperous world.
John P. Kotter (Change: How Organizations Achieve Hard-to-Imagine Results in Uncertain and Volatile Times)
Over the last several decades, policy consensus has cautioned that the world would only tolerate responses to climate change if they were free—or, even better, if they could be presented as avenues of economic opportunity. That market logic was probably always shortsighted, but over the last several years, as the cost of adaptation in the form of green energy has fallen so dramatically, the equation has entirely flipped: we now know that it will be much, much more expensive to not act on climate than to take even the most aggressive action today. If you don’t think of the price of a stock or government bond as an insurmountable barrier to the returns you’ll receive, you probably shouldn’t think of climate adaptation as expensive, either. In 2018, one paper calculated the global cost of a rapid energy transition, by 2030, to be negative $26 trillion—in other words, rebuilding the energy infrastructure of the world would make us all that much money, compared to a static system, in only a dozen years.21
David Wallace-Wells (The Uninhabitable Earth: A Story of the Future)
... the most likely societal response will be to adapt to a changing climate, and that adaptation will very likely be effective.
Steven E. Koonin (Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters)
In any case, the list of adaptations that allow wolverines to make an ally of winter is impressive. Yet until scientists started to focus on climate change, no one gave much thought to how creatures with built-in snowshoes, a super-cozy fur coat, smoldering metabolism, and food cached in nature's refrigerators are supposed to handle swimsuit weather in our ever-toastier age of Industrial Exhaust.
Douglas H. Chadwick (The Wolverine Way)
Urbanization, the industrialization of food systems, and the building of highways may have contributed to GDP over the short term, but they have created societal vulnerability over the longer term. In a world of Peak Oil, scarce fresh water, unstable currencies, changing climate, and declining trade, true “development” may require implementation of policies at odds with — sometimes the very reverse of — those of recent decades.
Richard Heinberg (The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality)
climate change is the greatest and widest-ranging market failure ever seen,
Richard Heinberg (The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality)
An extreme, rapid forcing may suddenly drive the climate system into some unanticipated, radically different state to which it is virtually impossible to adapt. Such a catastrophic climate surprise could occur through a changing climate setting off a series of positive feedbacks—for
Dale Jamieson (Reason in a Dark Time: Why the Struggle Against Climate Change Failed -- and What It Means for Our Future)
Remember, “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.” Our evolutionary history thus accounts for how and why our skeletons, hearts, intestines, and brains work the way they do. Evolution also explains how and why in the course of a mere 6 million years we changed from being apes in an African forest to being upright, striding bipeds who peer through telescopes into distant galaxies searching for other forms of life. It’s been an amazing 6 million years, but our species’ evolution occurred through just a few transformations. None of these shifts were drastic, all of them were chance events contingent on previous changes, and, more often than not, they were driven by climate change. In the grand scheme of things, if there is any one most transformative human adaptation that we evolved it must be our ability to evolve through culture rather than just natural selection. Today, cultural evolution is outpacing and sometimes outwitting natural selection. Many recent human inventions were adopted because they helped our ancestors produce more food, harness more energy, and have more children. Unintended by-products of these cultural innovations, however, were increased levels of infectious disease from larger, denser populations, inadequate sanitation, and less nutritious food. Civilization also brought extreme famines, dictatorships, war, slavery, and other modern misfortunes. In recent years we have made much progress to redress these man-made problems, and arguably people in the developed world are now better off than hunter-gatherers ever were.
Daniel E. Lieberman (The Story of the Human Body: Evolution, Health and Disease)