Comments on: Climate Change: The Resilience Option (far better than climate stasis)

By: Derek D

Derek D — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 20:56:08 +0000

Wow, can it be? A THIRD option. What is the world coming to?

So instead of stopping progress, and mandating that we live off of less energy generated by less efficient means, you are suggesting innovation and the creation of new markets geared at ADAPTING to any predicted or UNFORSEEN changes in the Climate? Brilliant. Your IQ must be at least 90.

I mean thank you very much for saying what needed to be said. You are absolutely right. But this isn’t exacty a Unified String Theory, its just the simplest most logically obvious answer. And its truly sad that in this whole debate, these very rational, very sensible ideas are lost amidst calls alternating between moving back into caves, and just ignoring the issue altogether.

I’ll let you and Roger battle over who came up with this second, but I had these exact same ideas roughly THREE SECONDS AFTER THE FIRST TIME THE ISSUE OF CLIMATE CHANGE WAS EXPLAINED TO ME. Its just common sense.

But surprisingly uncommon at the same time…

By: Andrew

Andrew — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 23:39:41 +0000

Link is dead, just wanted to point out someone else with a similar idea, though.

By: kgreen

kgreen — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 17:47:41 +0000

Interesting comment, thanks. But I got to this one before Roger, I first wrote about a resilience-based strategy for climate change in 1998! (http://reason.org/files/aa5a24e414006db8c7afd83a6e17bcff.pdf)

By: Andrew

Andrew — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 13:38:18 +0000

What you are talking about is essentially what Roger Pielke Senior calls the “vulnerability paradigm”:

http://pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com/2009/09/21/the-vulnerability-perspective/

And speaking of infrastructure, apparently about twenty some years ago, James Hansen made an interesting prediction about NY 9A, the West Side Highway, looking out his window aboves “Monk’s” (from Seinfeld-the Goddard institute is really right above it!):

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/10/22/a-little-known-but-failed-20-year-old-climate-change-prediction-by-dr-james-hansen/