The Age of Consequences

RealClimate blogs at the link a new report "just released by the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the Center for a New American Security" which tries to compass what exactly will happen with the climate change and all. This may help start driving some investment decisions.

History also teaches that people have a tendency to develop ways of coping with environmental fragility, by choices of individual living strategies such as the ability to migrate, or by decisions made at the societal level, such as engineered flood control measures or mobilizing assistance from outside. The report offers the idea that it takes a population a few generations to learn how to operate within the limits of its natural world. For example, the report attributes the dust bowl drought in some measure to environmental inexperience of a population who had only recently migrated from more humid regions. With our recent increased mobility, and with climate change itself, we find ourselves losing this buffer of experience and understanding.

I feel like I've been saying this, but I don't reliably communicate what I want to, so I wanted to quote somebody else. And, I've mostly been taking an agricultural perspective -- we've got to restructure the ways we think about farming and land use to let us adapt to fast changes in the climate. Never mind that the soil will never get to reach a steady state.

The report itself is here.