It has been evident for a long time that the priority put by climate policymakers on reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions before 2050 has not been the way to go. Above all, it has led to billions of dollars being spent on technologies that were not ready for prime time. This colossal exercise in malinvestment has been made more damaging still by the slowing effect that climate regulation has had on economic growth, and all to achieve — in the unlikely event that these policies were successful — a fairly trivial reduction in global temperatures over the next three-quarters of a century.
In terms of enabling humanity to manage the impact of anthropogenic climate change it is hard to imagine a more wasteful or counterproductive approach. Climatists have been arguing that the effects of climate change are already increasing natural disasters: Yet their spending priorities—overwhelmingly focused on reining in the climate in a way that, according to their own numbers, will not have much effect on temperatures for many years — do not reflect it.
Putting greater emphasis on spending on resilience and/or adaptation not only makes more sense, but it is also a much easier sell politically. It does not require voters to buy into climatism and forecasts of long-term doom, but merely to accept that toughening areas of undeniable, existing vulnerability is worth doing. Indeed, such spending would often pay for itself. One example here in the U.S. might include burying many more electricity lines in the Northeast, another would be greater flood protection for low-lying coastal cities.
In his new, much more realistic than hitherto memorandum on climate, Bill Gates discusses the importance of adaptation, especially in poorer parts of the world. There are obvious reasons for that emphasis, partly rooted in geography (many are located in areas believed to be more vulnerable to climate change) and partly rooted in common sense. The wealthier a country, the more easily it can afford to invest in resilience and adaptation. Amsterdam is below sea level, as is most of the port city of Rotterdam. Both cities have thrived for a long time.
Climate policymakers’ fixation on GHG control has not only misdirected “climate” spending from where it can do the most good, but by slowing economic growth has made it more difficult for countries to afford the spending on adaptation they might otherwise have made.
Bill Gates has long been an important and, uh, valuable figure in climateworld. He continues to believe that climate change “is a very important problem, but his admission that (1) the “Paris” target of confining global warming above 1850 levels to 1.5°C by 2050 is not going to be met ( by “2100 the Earth’s average temperature will probably be between 2°C and 3°C higher”), and that (2) this does not represent an existential threat, will hopefully encourage more attention to be paid to the question of how people can adapt to climate change.
In discussing Gates’s memorandum the other day, I wrote that:
So far as the direction of climate change is concerned, Gates believes that there will be more “latitude creep”: “In North America, for instance, Iowa will start to feel more like Texas.”
His answer to that is, in so many words, to improve resilience:
“Every time governments rebuild, whether it’s homes in Los Angeles or highways in Delhi, they’ll have to build smarter: fire-resistant materials, rooftop sprinklers, better land management to keep flames from spreading, and infrastructure designed to withstand harsh winds and heavy rainfall. It won’t be cheap, but it will be possible in most cases.”
But he should have added that this is not solely the province of the public sector. Individuals and businesses will adapt their construction (or reconstruction) to the climate as it is, not as it was, something that humanity has been doing for millennia. And the wealthier we are, the easier it will be to do so.
What Gates may have done is make it more “respectable” to discuss adaptation. It was interesting to read a new article by Gillian Tett in the Financial Times, a house journal of the climate policy ecosystem. To be sure, it comes with irritants old — ritual condemnation of the U.S. and “the right” — and new(er) — chatter about “biodiversity.” That was to be expected, but the increased emphasis that Tett put on resilience and adaptation was perhaps not. She quotes both Gates and the U.N.’s leading apocalypse peddler, its secretary-general António Guterres. But their expectations differ in a couple of key respects.
Gates relates that “the current consensus is that by 2100 the Earth’s average temperature will probably be between 2°C and 3°C higher than it was in 1850.” Guterres, however, keeps alive the idea of net zero, the pointless target on which so much of his influence depends: “We have failed to avoid an overshooting above 1.5C in the next few years” (emphasis added). According to Guterres, the consequences will be “devastating.”
Gates, tellingly, is more measured:
We’ll see what you might call latitude creep: In North America, for instance, Iowa will start to feel more like Texas. Texas will start to feel more like northern Mexico. Although there will be climate migration, most people in countries near the equator won’t be able to relocate—they will experience more heat waves, stronger storms, and bigger fires. Some outdoor work will need to pause during the hottest hours of the day, and governments will have to invest in cooling centers and better early warning systems for extreme heat and weather events.
And, as can be seen from above, he believes that adaptation/resilience should be taken further than that.
Tett:
Green activists and investors have hitherto given surprisingly little focus to adaptation compared to mitigation. That is partly due to the Thunberg effect. But it also reflects fears that talking about adaptation might normalize global warming — and thus reduce pressure to act.
That is understandable.
It is. But not in a good way. It does not even have the questionable virtue of being a “noble” lie. This was an act of deception designed to deliver power and cash to the preachers of climate doom. However, writes Tett, “with Trump in office, more realism is needed,” a striking admission. This realism “seems to be starting to emerge. Next month McKinsey will release its first major report on adaptation strategies to determine why rollouts have been so slow.”
McKinsey! But of course.
Nevertheless, the fact that these loathsome but highly effective rent seekers believe that there is money to be made peddling PowerPoints about adaptation is a perversely encouraging sign.
And:
Allstate, the US insurance group, and the US Chamber of Commerce are calling for more infrastructure adaptation. “Each dollar not invested in disaster resilience today could result in up to $33 of lost future economic activity,” they write in a new report.
Tett notes that “Gates’ shift horrifies some green activists. But entrepreneurs are responding by launching high-tech adaptation.” If that means that more are becoming interested in this, that is great but, as mentioned above, it is nothing new. Entrepreneurs, using the high tech of their day, have been helping humanity adapt to the environment (and/or adapt the environment) for a long, long time, and with impressive results. Here we are. More than 8 billion of us.
Impossible, so environmentalists used to say.