Adaptation and
mitigation are rarely considered together when people discuss a response to
climate change.
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| This book to be launched next month at the University of Melbourne helps us understand the different, unfolding world humans will have to live with. |
However, they are in fact complementary, one and the same
thing for if you apply mitigation processes correctly adaptation will follow.
Human-induced climate change has arisen, primarily, because
humanity discovered fossil fuels and worked out a way to employ them for
humanity’s benefit, but failed to recognize that in the burning they would be
dumping inordinate amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
Initially all was well for there were relatively few people
on the earth (about one billion in 1800) and aided by the fossil fuels that
brought the agricultural and industrial revolutions, along with marked
increases in public health, we began to live longer and healthier lives.
Being better fed and educated, along with becoming much
smarter, we learned how to exploit those fossil fuels and in making life far
more comfortable, our numbers began to expand and in the past 40 years our population
has more than tripled to an alarming seven billion plus.
However, those who study such things argue population growth
is slowing and although there are more people living on the earth now than in
the whole of human history, we will see fewer than 10 billion people on earth by
the end of this century.
Of course, the numbers are in a sense irrelevant to how we
adapt to a mitigate climate change.
The die, it is important to note, is already cast.
The amount of carbon dioxide dumped into out atmosphere as
an unaccounted for externality is such that what is now a nearly one degree increase
in the earth’s surface temperatures above pre-industrial times will soon become
two degrees.
Writing in the 2013 book, “Four Degrees of Global Warming:
Australia in a Hot World”, there was consensus among the many authors, the
Australians would need to learn to adapt to living all the shortcomings and
difficulties associated with a four degree increase in temperature.
The two degree increase is unavoidable and roaring down the
pipe toward us is a four degree increase and so we need not just adaptation,
but mitigation if we are to have any serious likelihood of surviving these
quite different circumstances.
People need to educate themselves, read the literature and
learn about what is ahead.
What we are facing is so different from what has existed
that it escapes the comprehension of most and the outcome is of such complexity,
that to attempt an explanation here would do a disservice to all, short to say
that the world of tomorrow will be different, damnably difficult and
effectively a step into the unknown.
Let’s talk about adaptation and mitigation – first we must
throw off the human created economic shackles and create a new life that is
people focussed rather than one the emphasises that human-created construct of money.
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| The world's population has grown exponentially since we found and understood fossil fuels. |
Work, a process that enslaves many and benefits just a few,
needs to be relegated to a position of lesser importance and so rather than be “working
for the man”, we need to be in a position of working for the greater wellbeing
of all.
Subsequently a four-hour work day would still see us produce
more than enough to ensure our comfortable survival and yet allow each of us sufficient
time in which to work with and for our respective communities.
An inherent part of such an approach would see us all
poorer, in brutal economic terms, and so less able to consume “stuff” and so
society’s use of and consumption of fossil fuel-powered energy would drop
dramatically.
Freed from the “need” to work most of our waking hours, each
of us would be in a position to use that time, energy and skill to help make
our neighbourhoods, communities, towns and cities better places in which to
live.
Places that because of the work/life balance would be less
energy intensive, more resilient in a changing world and a way of life that
would be more adaptive to the emerging difficulties associated with climate
change and actually mitigate the cause of our declining atmospheric conditions.
