Be pragmatic about pragmatism

Some of the stuff here is really good, some of it is almost suspiciously blase:

BJORN LOMBORG, Director, Copenhagen Consensus Center: Well, basically, Ray, the point is to say, we don't care particularly about climate change, per se. We care about, what are its impacts? We care about the people who are going to get more risk in flooding, the people who are going to get more exposed to malaria, the people who are going to die more because of heat waves. And those are the people we actually want to help.

It is, of coure, absolutely essential to prepare for the effects of climate change, but it is meaningless to prepare for climate change if we don't also stop climate change. It's a point I and many, many others have made many, many times before, but preparing for the "impacts" of global warming will be a lumbering world-wide project and, once it's complete, if we haven't sufficiently curbed, all that work will become obsolete in a blink.

If you spend millions of dollars and man-hours prepping farmers a particular lattitude for drought and millions more dollars and man-hours developing the infrastructure necessary to treat people in a different region for malaria, but don't stop the temperature from climbing, then a few years later, new parts of the planet will begin to suffer the same problems and the preparation process will have to begin anew.  We need to turn off the actual mechanism that's making the problem spread, or else we're behaving essentially like house cats chasing a laser point across the carpet. Except much less cute.

Comments

[JimPortlandOR]

It may be easier to relocate the Florida peninsula's population to TN than convince them that it is going to be too hot, and then too wet. If TN doesn't work out, a different group of folks gets to work on that problem later. All solved.