Clarity of thinking might aid in designing political policy
From New Zealand:
Let me use an example: it will be almost impossible to farm in a world that is three degrees warmer.
That’s an absurd statement. Temperature differences across viable farmland are already larger than three degrees. So, we know that we can farm at three degrees warmer. True, we might need to change cultivars, or even exactly where specific crops are grown, but the idea that farming is impossible - or even near so - with a three degree increase is nonsense.
As can be proven more locally. The temperature variation across New Zealand is already larger than three degrees. Perhaps Auckland methods might move south to Wellington and so on but the claim of impossible is that nonsense.
Sadly, this gets worse.
A slew of opportunistic right-wing voices is lining up to use recent disasters to argue that the government should shift its efforts away from cutting emissions towards adaptation. This is as unscientific as it is dangerous. It is also utterly out of touch with the needs of the people they purport to represent. It is a disingenuous, harmful and bad faith argument that distracts from the conversations we need to be having.
The claim is then that mitigation is the thing, that adaptation simply isn’t the solution at all. Which could even be true - no, we do not believe that but we’re willing to at least consider it as a logical position - but what then follows is again nonsense:
Second, even if we limit warming, there will be effects we cannot avoid. The world has already warmed by about 1.1 degrees. Even if we stopped polluting the atmosphere tomorrow, the climate will continue to change. Extreme weather events will increase and overlap, each one testing the limits of our resiliency and recovery. We need to plan for this.
Our focus needs to shift from short-term preparedness towards creating stronger communities. Resilient, affordable, inclusive communities that can meet everyone’s needs despite the challenges of the disrupted climate.
We need to get serious about this new approach. Otherwise, the changes we experience will be forced on us by extreme weather disasters, rather than our efforts to create vibrant, connected communities, even as climate change shapes how we live.
The solutions must be necessarily wide ranging. Some will require changes to our legislation, so developers stop building in high-risk areas. New rules, so that when we do build, we’re constructing more resilient homes and buildings designed to handle extreme weather. Greater use of areas that filter and store water for increasingly long and severe droughts will be critical. More housing is essential for our cities, but we also need to make sure we’re meeting this demand without car-dependent sprawl that concretes over natural areas, or builds in flood-prone areas.
The nonsense being that that’s all adaptation. The very thing we’re told that we shouldn’t be doing instead our efforts must be on mitigation. Don’t do that but also gird your loins to spend a fortune on doing that - logic, eh?
James Shaw is New Zealand’s minister for climate change
Ah, yes, that clarity of thinking just is so useful in the construction of political policy, isn’t it?
As we’ve been saying for a couple of decades now. Assume that the insistences of a problem are correct. The answer is a carbon tax at the social cost of carbon. They gave Nordhaus the Nobel for pointing this out, we are supposed to all follow the science, aren’t we?
Everyone’s entirely at liberty not to believe the insistences but those shouting that we’ve got to do so and also follow the science might like to try doing so.