Clintel.org has just issued a nice press release about the idea of preparing to adapt to climate changes, rather than the more controversial idea of destroying the fossil fuel industry in the hope that reducing CO2 emissions will somehow make the climate better.
So far we have been unable to measure the influence of additional CO2 on the climate, although some think the impact is somewhere between 1.5 degrees and 4.5 degrees per doubling of the CO2 concentration. We cannot even be sure of that, because there are credible estimates that are less than one degree.
So, it seems reasonable to spend our hard-earned money adapting to whatever happens. Adaptation works if the changes are natural or man-made. The article is by Guus Berkhour and Marcel Crok of The Netherlands, where they understand adaptation better than most countries. Their dikes have a flooding probability of 1 time in 10,000 years.
Read the press release here.
Germany adapting.. NOT
https://notrickszone.com/2021/01/28/berlin-on-the-brink-blackouts-loom-as-coal-plants-running-at-100-capacity-struggle-to-keep-lights-on-in/
The stupidity of solar + wind UNRELIABLES combined with closure of RELIABLES, is starting to bite.
Hopefully very hard !!
Where’s the wizard of griff to tell us how well wind and solar are working? Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain stoking the coal furnaces.
I read that as “lizard” 🙂
Leftist ideology usually favors revolutionary over evolutionary.
Good sense usually favors the opposite.
Indeed.
Evolution works by trying many experiments, most of which fail and die. The very few that succeed and provide an advantage get to survive and replicate.
Free markets allow many entrepreneurs to try things. Most fail. A few succeed wildly. We all benefit hugely. Just compare your life to the lives of your ancestors.
Utopians bet the farm on one experiment. It is always guaranteed to fail.
This is so simple and so inexorable that you literally have to be crazy not to understand it. The left has a condition that very closely mimics schizophrenia.
Excellent comment, cB.
“Adaptation is more profitable than mitigation”
WR: Adaptation is the only thing that gives a direct result: safety. I lived most of my life below sea level, many years even 5 meters below and I never felt unsafe. Yearly we pay some hundreds of euros per household for a lot of safety. Every euro / dollar etc. spend on adaptation is well paid. People know what they get back for their money.
Very Gouda.
Indeed, not far away.
The model of locks used in the Netherlands works for the Netherlands. Yours is definitely an extreme environment. I was surprised to see just now that Frisland Islands still have 81,000 inhabitants; the Romans thought the Frisians were nuts. In the first Cent. AD Pliny said, “…these are the races which, if they were now conquered by the Roman nation, say that they will fall into slavery! It is only too true: Destiny saves people as a punishment.”
Some people have advocated dikes and locks for New Orleans, but Since Katrina I have wondered why the city fathers don’t just start the process of moving the entire city inland and out of its current perilous siting. But since I apparently am not God… what bucketful of political compromises provide max safety as well as maximum utility and long-term viability for that extreme? What miracles of geo-engineering would have to be employed to partially-satisfy all the stakeholders: fishermen, shippers, oil interests, environmentalists, and coastal residents who can’t afford another baptism.
Andy, nice spot. I have communicated several times with Marcel Crok after he got a copy of Blowing Smoke. Solid thinker.
The real beauty of adaptation is, that if there turns out nothing to adapt to, then there is no future adaptation cost either.
With mitigation, there is for sure a large up front cost, but maybe no future return. Backwards economics.
The result of the large up-front cost of mitigation measures can be seen in Germany and UK where governments are politically and economically forced to continue on course because of the sunk cost and that is what the rent-seeking profiteers rely on.
How true
The human race has had to adapt to climate for thousands of years. With this in mind, exactly what is the problem?
Yes. I know. Liberals are inherently incapable of adapting.
The only certainty is that Earth’s climate is thermostatically controlled within a narrow band. The lower limit for sea surface temperature at -2C where ice forms. The upper limit at 30C where heat rejection results in net loss of energy uptake.
The thermostatic control on the upper limit is precise. Some initial overshoot to 31.5C but then within a fraction of a degree of the set-point thereafter.
So adapt to what!
“Their dikes have a breach probability of 1 in 10,000 years.”
https://scholarsmine.mst.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://www.bing.com/&httpsredir=1&article=2394&context=icchge
Out of the link:
“For many years it was known that this part of dike was at risk. This was reported to the minister of Public Works in1993, but the two involved provincial authorities, the provincial government and the water board, did not take stepsuntil after the dike failure.”
So, what will you tell us ?
“Their dikes have a breach probability of 1 in 10,000 years.”
WR: Meant with ‘the 1:10,000 years’ are the dikes that protect against the sea. It was/is the norm for the so-called Delta Works. What happened in Wilnis (0.5 meter of water) in a small neighborhood wasn’t OK. It was a peat dike that dried out during a very dry summer. After this happened all peat dikes (thousands of kilometers) were controlled and a huge project was started to protect all dikes that even could give the slightest doubt. Everywhere in the surroundings, I daily observe huge projects to protect peat dikes with a layer of heavy clay against drying out. You pay a bit but you get a lot. And you know it helps.
…. amazing, and the Dutch did all this without reverting to communism, incredible!
What is a “Climate related death”?
If you die because an icicle is falling on your head.
Jeff,
There is an exact definition, but basically it is a death due to an extreme weather event, heat exposure, cold exposure, flooding, storms, etc. More here:
https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/climate-change-and-health
They try and throw in infectious diseases, it gets pretty weird.
Then that would be a weather related death, not a “climate” related death. That’s the problem with true believers … they don’t know the difference between climate and weather, so most of what they say is utter nonsense. They also count on the general public to be even more ignorant.
If one dies of exposure and hypothermia in the winter because he got drunk and fell into a snow back after leaving the bar … it is NOT “a climate related death” … regardless what the WHO says.
“Then that would be a weather related death, not a “climate” related death.”
That’s exactly where I was going.
We’re all on the same page … so why is it so hard for the warmist, true believers to grasp such a simple concept? Perhaps sticking fingers in the ears and chanting la la la la, isn’t the best method to learn science.
Andy
This is what I think is happening.
A. Over decades health experts have analysed individual health events such as cholera outbreak in 200x in province y.
These studies investigate actual hospital records, treatment expenses and financial loss to the families and communities.
This provides valuable information for future health planning.
The way to analyse health impacts is different for different diseases and locations.
B. Climate changes damage models estimate future health impacts using broad methodology and constants across different diseases and locations.
Not only is the amount of deaths and people impacted a guess the corresponding link to get to damages in $$ is fundamentally flawed.
C. Government organisations such as WHO then take these broad and flawed estimates to make big claims about how many people will be impacted and how much it costs
Waza,
I wonder is those who, perhaps, have a Tale of the Terrifying to tell actually bother with stages A and B of your hypothesized scenario.
Auto,
Older and, perhaps, more cynical than once I was
Mitigation is so much more fun for a top-down control freak politicians, because you can define the mitigation methods any way that helps you support your larger agenda (such as paying off friends). You get to control where and how much money is spent doing what. Adaptation limits the ways markets and people can be manipulated. Others, besides government, have more flexibility to decide for themselves how to adapt. It’s a constant battle to get funding for new adaptations rather than defined mitigation targets that have to be met many years in the future. Those goals can have defined programs with budgets ready to go for years. Centralized control. So much more satisfying, right? Who cares whether anything useful comes of it. At least the people you scared think you tried and meant well. Ha ha.
And there is no way to show your efforts were worthless at best or damaging at worst.
of course it is….but our new/present government does not care one flying fig about that
because it’s not about that at all
It has NEVER been about “that” from the very beginning. It’s about government induced fear so they can tell everyone: “We’re the government and we’re here to help you. Please have your cheque book available.”
Covid was found to be an identical opportunity to global warming. “Climate change” is just equivocation, an ambiguous term defined according to whatever the need is. At present it’s a political term unconnected to weather.
With dementia Joe shutting down oil, ..
Norway goes the other way
https://www.worldoil.com/news/2021/1/19/norway-grants-61-new-offshore-oil-and-gas-exploration-licenses
I wish people would stop pretending that Biden is doing anything at all. He’s even more of an empty suit and puppet than Obama was. He is barely able to sign the orders without supervision. The more often people blame this on Biden the easier the real culprits are getting away with it. People need to stop pretending that China Joe has any control at all.
With the USA marxist deep-state using their puppet dementia Joe Biden to shut down oil, ….
Norway goes the other way
https://www.worldoil.com/news/2021/1/19/norway-grants-61-new-offshore-oil-and-gas-exploration-licenses
Is that better ?
My comment wasn’t meant as a criticism of your post. I was confirming your sobriquet of Biden as Dementia Joe … president in name only. He deserves nothing but contempt and needs to be treated like the babbling buffoon he is. The government of Norway seems to think their citizens deserve the best standard of living circumstances are able to provide. The socialist Democrats seem to believe US citizens deserve punishment for electing Trump, so they’re being treated to a lesson like recalcitrant children.
“So, it seems reasonable to spend our hard-earned money adapting to whatever happens.”
I would say buy things which are better. Government should allow ocean settlements and people can live on the ocean.
It seems if we become a spacefaring civilization, people will live on the ocean.
And we are at least 50 years before one can begin to say we are spacefaring civilization, presently, we an get started with ocean settlements.
A key element to have low cost living area in the ocean is to have an effective and cheap
breakwater. And these would be floating breakwaters- or whatever work if it’s about $10 million dollars per km {$16 million per mile} and will work for decades.
Wasn’t there a documentary in the mid-90s which showed this suggestion just resulted in violence? I think it was called Waterworld.
I had to look up the plot of movie/documentary, because I had always refused to watch it:
“After the melting of the polar ice caps, most of the globe is underwater….”
At the moment, most of the globe is underwater.
And the melting all ice caps, would not change this, by much.
Most of Earth’s history, has not had polar ice caps- and it’s only during an Ice Age, where there is frozen ice caps.
We have been in an Ice age for millions of years, but millions of years is not long time period in terms of the history of Earth.
Once again, Hollywood writers, present further evidence that they must have been sleeping during the time period of their education.
An easy mitigation is by extensively promoting the sowing of cover crops & making roof areas grow plants; wherein those with lower chlorophyll being even better suited for mitigation. On average, cover crops reflect shortwave radiation equivalent to 0.08 – 0.22 Watts per square meter to 100 km way above them, verses bare soil/roofs which reflect shortwave radiation closer. For field grown cover crops there is also going to be internal evapo-transpiration which, in suitable conditions contribute to the formation of more clouds that then can reflect Watts of radiation energy back away from the planet.
From the press release:
“Many lives have demonstrably been saved with adaptation, while the same cannot be said for mitigation (CO2 reduction) whatsoever.”
“one dollar going to the Paris Climate Agreement (mitigation) yields only 11 cents in benefits. In other words: Mitigation yields poverty.”
Hear, hear!
I live at 40 North west of the Appalachian mountains. Right now we have swimming weather from mid May through mid September. I am ready to install a pool in my back yard if they can guarantee me that I will have swimming weather from late March through late October.
So say CC is about another degree C…..In NA and EU, that is likely the same as adapting to the climate of whatever city is a couple of hundred miles south of the one you live in now….results in you not even being able to sell one of your sweaters. Adaptation would not be so expensive.