Mitigaptation

A new term for our mission: MITIGAPTATION. No, I don't expect that I'll ever actually pronounce it in conversation, but it makes my point here, which is that we cant' afford to abandon either of the two approaches to climate change. We must learn to practice both mitigation and adaptation simultaneously.

Mitigation is critical to lessen the future impact of global warming and prevent feedback processes from setting off runaway deadly (to humans) overheating of the environment. Adaptation is essential because there's no way - no matter how effective our mitigation - that we're going to escape the impacts of the current growing carbon concentration in the atmosphere.

If the impacts catch you now, you'll have your hands full adapting. Just ask the folks affected by Katrina and last summer's floods in the Midwest. Those of us who have not been fully impacted by climate change must insist that both our governments and the companies that provide us with products and services make drastic changes to reduce carbon emissions. In our own lives, we must make the same kinds of changes in our buying and living habits. These are both mitigating and adapting behaviors. Get used to it or be prepared to scramble aboard what might be a comparatively uncomfortable adaptive bandwagon.

I've just been introduced by Rick Piltz of Climate Science Watch to a new consulting group called Adaptation Network , a project of Earth Island Institute (which, as many of you know, was founded by the late environmental pioneer David Brower.)

I like how the Network describes adaptation.

Adaptations we make to climatic change need to be aimed at making systems more resilient and healthy now and in the long run. Resilient, healthy systems can better withstand perturbations of all types than systems that are unbalanced or at the edge of their survival. Making a system more resilient could mean reducing pressures that are already stressing the system. It could mean providing greenways and migration routes for plants and animals that need to move to better match the environment that is best for them. It could mean restoring natural floodways to allow the natural system to better protect the built environment. It could mean investing in long-term projects that reduce vulnerability (of people, infrastructure, or even investments) rather than increasing it. It could mean investing in educating the public to increase their awareness and availability of more environmentally friendly choices and options open to them. In short, adaptation action can vary greatly from one location to another. That is also why adaptation may require a significant level of planning and feedback prior to and following implementation.

Hazard Mitigation in California

California has a Hazard Mitigation Portal maintained by the Governor's Office of Emergency Services. Hazards listed include Fire, Flood, Earth Movement (Landslide), Seismic (Earthquakes, Tsunamis) and Other Hazards.

Other includes Avalanches, Drought, Freezes, Insect Pests, Civil Disturbances, Dam Failure, Hazardous Material Spills, Polution, Terrorism, Volcanoes, and Less Significant Hazards.

Hurricane's are one of the "Less Significant Hazards," along with nuclear power accidents, tornadoes, airline crashes, computer breaches and train derailments.

In assessing whether or not hurricanes present a threat to California, the state currently relies on information found in the USA Today Weather Book by Jack Williams, which dismisses the possibility with this statement:

No hurricanes have hit California in recorded history because tropical storm winds generally blow from east to west, but California is affected by heavy rain resulting from tropical winds that blow north from Mexico and become colder by the time they hit California.

Thus, recorded history determines policy. In fact, though California certainly faces enough threats that have historically been devastating - earthquakes, wildfires, inland flooding and mudslides - the mitigation planning does not even consider the effects of climate change. Nowhere is sea level rise mentioned, or the possibility that eastern Pacific hurricanes may reach further north than before, or the possibility that both drought and extreme rainfall will become even greater threats than before.

Yes, California is leading the way in state-promoted green programs, but given its long coastline and its vulnerability to weather extremes, one can only hope that contingency planning will take place for the changes we're beginning to see in our daily climate.

Records gathered by NOAA show the mean sea level at San Francisco has risen by about 0.2 meters (about 7 inches) from 1850 to 2000. For an interesting - and scary - comparison, check out the graph for Grand Isle, Louisiana.

The Southeast Drought and Mitigation

I've previously mentioned the National Drought Mitigation Center, located at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln campus. Mitigation, as they define it, is "taking actions in advance of drought to reduce its long-term risk."

In fact, Alabama has a drought mitigation plan, finalized in 2004. The abstract of the plan includes these statements:

There is no way to prevent a drought from occurring, however the effects of a drought can be reduced or even eliminated altogether. The impact of drought can be reduced by improving the overall forest health which reduces the risk of drought-caused fires, by improving and maintaining water systems which will reduce pumping failures. Also, by establishing and implementing contingency plans, such as, predetermined water conservation measures, or by designating alternative emergency water sources.

In actual practice, it's not at all clear that these mitigation actions had yet been taken, and if they had, that they were effective. Bark beetle infestations of the southern pine forests are quite the opposite of "improving overall forest health." The extended period of wildfires in Georgia and Florida through the spring and early summer point to a failure reduce that risk. Whatever water conservation measures have been taken don't seem to be "mitigating" anything.

To put the drought into graphic presentation, NDMC provides an array of maps including this one that shows drought severity according to the "Palmer Index." Note that the severe drought in the Southeast is a relatively small area compared to what is happening in the West, where the tendency toward drought is more natural.

Proof of Threat

In kidnapping/ransom situations, those negotiating for the release of the hostage will often demand proof of life - some undeniable evidence that the person who being held is still alive. Without that proof, the ransom may be paid for no good reason - the hostage is already dead.

Climate Frog demands proof of threat - convincing evidence of an urgent need to take immediate action to offset damage that is already occuring or that is sure to come. The keyword here is urgency.

One current so-called "green" activity is the movement to use carbon offsets as a way to reduce overall carbon emmissions around the world. An article in the New York Times (registration required) explains the controversy around this practice and why it doesn't exhibit the Climate Froginess required to serve as an example here.

Under the carbon offset program (of which there are many, with varying standards), an airline might allocate a certain amount of its revenues to purchasing "credits" that would pay for some activity (planting trees) that would absorb the amount of carbon being emmitted by its jet engines over a period of time. The carbon would still be pumped into the atmosphere, but at least some action would be taken to deal with that fact. This, to me, seems like the anti-urgent path to carbon responsibility. How long will it take for those tree seedlings to grow to a size where they could actually absorb the carbon from a year's flights?

In Carbon-Neutral Is Hip, but Is It Green? by Andrew Revkin we learn just how controversial carbon offsetting has become in the environmental community.

“The worst of the carbon-offset programs resemble the Catholic Church’s sale of indulgences back before the Reformation,” said Denis Hayes, the president of the Bullitt Foundation, an environmental grant-making group. “Instead of reducing their carbon footprints, people take private jets and stretch limos, and then think they can buy an indulgence to forgive their sins.”

“This whole game is badly in need of a modern Martin Luther,” Mr. Hayes added.

Proponents of carbon offsets say that it's better than nothing - that it's the only way that most carbon-produding corporations with shareholders can justify environmental responsibility. I don't buy it. As Auburn Professor Michael Solomon tells the article's author,

“Consumers are always going to gravitate toward a more parsimonious solution that requires less behavioral change,” he said. “We know that new products or ideas are more likely to be adopted if they don’t require us to alter our routines very much.”

In Climate Frog's world, carbon offsets would be like persuading the frog that he can stay longer in the heating water because someone somewhere is making a deal that will eventually slow the gas flow to the burner beneath the pot.

"The Cost of Holding Back the Sea" - EPA, 1991

The Environmental Protection Agency responded to the threat of global sea level rise in 1991 with an analysis of the costs of protecting vulnerable coast-side communities, wetlands, properties and facilities. The report, titled Greenhouse Effect and Sea Level Rise: The Cost of Holding Back the Sea. This report demonstrates that the EPA fully recognized the threats of global warming when George H. W. Bush was still in office. It's full of interesting statistics, charts, tables and drawings. The techniques and technologies it describes haven't changed much in the past 16 years...

Possible responses fall broadly into three categories: erecting walls to hold back the sea; allowing the sea to advance and adapting to it; and raising the land

...though the value of the dollar and the value of property located in coastal areas have certainly changed a lot. The total cost the report projects ($270-475 billion) looks laughably small today. Probably, current satellite mapping allows for a much more accurate assessment today.

From the abstract of the report we get some impressive numbers, which may still hold fairly accurate if corrected for the amount of coastal development that's happened since 1991. (Think of how much dot com money must have gone into building homes on the coastline):

We estimate that if no measures are taken to hold back the sea, a one meter rise in sea level would inundate 14,000 square miles, with wet and dry land each accounting for about half the loss. The 1500 square kilometers (600-700 square miles) of densely developed coastal lowlands could be protected for approximately one to two thousand dollars per year for a typical coastal lot. Given high coastal property values, holding back the sea would probably be cost-effective.

The authors offer some cautions for implementation and the ultimate solution:

The environmental consequences of doing so, however, may not be acceptable. Although the most common engineering solution for protecting the ocean coast• pumping sand• would allow us to keep our beaches, levees and bulkheads along sheltered waters would gradually eliminate most of the nation's wetland shorelines. To ensure the long-term survival of coastal wetlands, federal and state environmental agencies should begin to lay the groundwork for a gradual abandonment of coastal lowlands as sea level rises.

I'll be looking around to see if there's a more up-to-date assessment by the EPA, but in the meanwhile, this report serves as a good overview and intro to the challenge that we face in dealing with even minimal sea level rise.

Climate Frogs in your own backyard

I live in Marin County, California. Though it's rarely referred to as a peninsula, it could claim that description, with the Pacific Ocean defining its western boundary, the San Francisco and San Pablo Bays defining its eastern boundary and the Golden Gate Bridge crowning its southern end. Western Marin is separated from the rest of the county by a spine of coastal hills and Mt. Tamalpais. Much of the county has been preserved as park land, open space and agricultural trusts, and most of that land makes up West Marin. There is little land there for development and its population is very small. But most of that limited development is either vulnerable to sea level rise or on land that is vulnerable to landslides or forest fires - the byproducts of weather extremes.

East Marin is much more populous, but its residential and business areas are likewise vulnerable to climate change. I've begun to research county planning to find evidence that, in this region of above average education and income, some forward-thinking precautions are being taken. Slides and fires are perennial threats everywhere in California, and all residents have been informed for years about best practices to reduce risk from these threats. But sea level rise has been all but ignored. In fact, this past March marked the first time that the problem has been brought up for public discussion.

March 2007
Hearings before the Planning Commission on the Marin Countywide Plan are currently taking place. The Commission has recommended that the Baylands Corridor be expanded to protect a larger portion of the interior coast. Using Bay Conservation and Development Commission maps on potential sea-level rise, the Commission has recommended removing high-density development potential from areas subject to future oceanic flooding.

One quarter of humans vulnerable to sea surge

Just to put a rough number on the portion of humanity that might decide to move to higher ground (or build some pretty damn impressive sea walls), a new report from a team at the U.S. Geological Survey reveals that

More than 1 billion people live in low-lying areas where a sudden surge in sea level could prove as disastrous as the 2004 Asian tsunami

Add to that the number of people living less than 100 feet above current sea levels and you get a quarter of the world's population.

But just to provide some perspective to Americans, the article ends with this tidbit from Usery:

A 30-meter surge in Florida would leave the whole state covered except for a little plateau area.

Does this mean that we can expect sea surges and/or tsunamis that rise up to 100 feet? Well, sort of...

The team also found that a 100-foot (30-meter) rise in sea level would cover 3.7 million square miles of land worldwide. A rise of just 16 feet would affect 669 million people and 2 million square miles of land would be lost.

Sea levels are currently rising about 0.04 to 0.08 inches (1 to 2 millimeters) each year, making it unlikely such a scenario would suddenly occur across the globe, Usery [E. Lynn Usery, who led the team] said.

But he said 10,000 years ago sea levels rose 20 meters in 500 years -- a relatively short span -- after the collapse of the continental ice sheets.

"It can happen in a short period of time if we look at the historical data," Usery said.

Using a 500-year example is probably not going to motivate many people at the 50-plus elevation to move. But that billion who are within range of a good-sized tsunami (admittedly not a climate-related event, but becoming more of one as sea levels rise) should seriously be considering a change of scene. The problem for the vast majority of these people is that their livelihoods depend on being at sea level.

Santa Cruz looks ahead

Santa Cruz, California, located on the Pacific coast between San Francisco and Monterey, is known for its local political activism. It's probably one of the most progressive localities anywhere, so it should come as no surprise that it's ahead of the curve in preparing for a rising sea level.

In this article in the Santa Cruz Sentinel, we learn some helpful stuff for climate frogs. For instance, someone has been surveying cities and their governments to find evidence of climate impact preparation.

"People are worried, there's a readiness to take action, but hardly anything is being done," said Susanne Moser, a research scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., who surveyed 300 planners, public works engineers and other officials from city and county governments.

Santa Cruz is rare, but is not alone as a California city planning mitigation projects. The article points to Sonoma, Berkeley and San Luis Obispo as other cities with global warming plans. But planning is only in its earliest stages, with little practical traction yet.

Those surveyed said it's tough to act due to lack of money and other obligations.

"It's not that they need better information," Moser said, "it's that few have time to think about it. There's too much else on their plate"

And we learn about other bureaucratic obstacles to planning and implementation.

Complicating the problem is that responsibility for coastal management — protecting homes, providing water, preserving natural habitat — is spread over multiple state agencies, state commissions and local governments.

Moser's survey has prompted the writing of new legislation in California to create mandated planning across the state.

Legislation proposed by Assemblyman John Laird, D-Santa Cruz, would force cities to better prepare for impacts associated with climate change, such as sea-level rise, by revising local plans and seeking state funding for communities to understand, mitigate and adapt to climate change.

"We're learning quickly how important it is to expand the climate-change discussion to include preparing for future impacts, while also working today to reduce consumption that results in global warming," Laird said in a statement.

It's interesting to note that Santa Cruz is planning for what some consider to be worst-case scenarios - the melting of icecaps on both Greenland and Antarctica.

Most of Santa Cruz will be submerged if Antarctica and Greenland's ice sheets calve or melt entirely, a scenario that climate scientists say will play out in anywhere from 100 to 1,000 years if current trends continue.

Mission Street would be the shoreline if glacial melt follows even the more
conservative projections of some researchers, causing sea levels to rise 70 feet.

Mitigation and Adaptation agreement in China

The United Nations Development Programme announced the signing of a "memorandum of understanding" between China and Norway "to support a new project focusing on developing and implementing provincial programmes on climate change mitigation and adaptation."

As the UNDP representative in China described it, “The project will help in particular the poorest and most vulnerable regions and communities in China to adapt to the adverse effects of climate change through developing and implementing provincial strategies and associated actions and measures.”

Norway has contributed US$2 million to get the project started.

Future Fingers in the Dike

So, yeah...whatARE the Dutch thinking and doing about the prospect of sea level rise, their being below sea level already? This animation illustrates one scenario of how bad the flooding could get.

The Dutch skeptics say, Do nothing; there's no evidence that the sea is rising at all, much less at an accelerating rate. They believe an investment in improving the sea barrier would be wasted, based on bad science and hysteria.

I ran across these expressions in the comments following an article titled The Dutch experience of sea level rise on the Climate Audit site. As one fellow posted:

One of the features of the proponents of the doomsday is that they heavily underestimate the natural variations of everything. They say that the world is living on the edge, and if you change the sea level by half a meter or the temperature by 1 degree, everything collapses. They have not looked at these graphs - especially the more historical ones. The biosphere was very happy 3 million years ago when the temperature was 2-3 degrees higher...

But a February 7 AP article in the International Herald Tribune, titled Dutch may build offshore breaker islands in response to global warming indicates that some serious scientists and politicians there are thinking hard about the consequences of guessing wrong and being unprepared. Dutch policy.

More than two-thirds of the Netherlands' 16 million population lives below sea level, and Dutch policy makers are counting on a rise in sea level of around 80 centimeters (30 inches) in the coming century regardless of the ongoing scientific debate on the causes and likely impact of global warming.

This is Climate Frog behavior. The Hell with the debate, the risk is too great to be complacent. Let's do something now and start designing a defense.


The Dutch stand as perhaps the greatest cultural example of hard work and intelligent planning in preserving a land base and a way of life. Check out this promotional video of their current defenses against the sea and inland flooding. But even these monumental works will fail when the sea level rises.

Their solution for that eventuality is creative in that it leverages natural processes to do much of the building. By pumping sand into the right place, they can count on the ocean to bulk up the wall of dunes along the coastline. An alternate (or perhaps complementary) plan would build a line of barrier islands off the coast to serve as breakwaters when North Sea storms threaten to send a surge over the dikes.

The Dutch aren't just talking a good game, their government approved an increase of $18.5 billion in spending on water defenses over the next 20 years. Not surprisingly, Hurricane Katrina was seen as a "wake up call" for anyone in the Netherlands who thought that catastrophic flooding could only occur in developing countries.

Yet, not even a raising of the coastal defense levees is counted on for full confidence. There are also plans for evacuation drills and contingency plans for fullblown flooding of the low countries. At some point, many locations around the world had better get on that page.

Inuit Adaptation

If you live, like the Inuit people, near the Arctic Circle, and have for countless generations, global warming threatens every aspect of your life and culture. As winter ice disappears, permafrost melts, wildlife changes and the climate you've known seems to have disappeared, you can bet that it's stressful and disorienting.

The International Institute for Sustainable Development has created a new project called Community Adaptation and Sustainable Livelihoods - a site I'm including in this blog's links section.

A report on a year-long project to examine the adaptation needs of the Inuit describes the new environment:

New species of birds such as barn swallows and robins are arriving on the island. In the nearby waters, salmon have been caught for the first time. On the land, an influx of flies and mosquitoes are making life difficult for humans and animals.

The Inuit are among the vanguard cultures facing up to dramatic change with only the hope that global action can make that change temporary. The outlook isn't good, though. Several generation may have to leave tradition - and maybe location - behind as desperate adaptation measures. Some future generation my have to re-learn the Inuit ways when the ice cap and permafrost are restored. As to the polar bear and the rest of Arctic wildlife...just save that DNA, OK?