So Climate Change Is Real, Now What? | Environment | AlterNet - 0 views
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anonymous on 20 Feb 09But basic science fails to shed light - at least directly - on daunting challenges confronting society such as how best to adapt and what stock to place in various solutions. Adapting will involve dealing with sea-level rise, upheaval in agriculture, stark changes in energy demand for heating and cooling, new water resource management regimes, and fundamental change in the world's transportation and energy infrastructure. It is a challenge of enormous scale, requiring that civilization overcome "technological, financial, cognitive and behavioral, and social and cultural constraints," as the chapter on adaptation in the IPCC's 2007 report put it. Adapting to global warming and stemming the greenhouse-gas tide will touch nearly every aspect of life, forcing climatologists, biologists and oceanographers to work with energy experts, social scientists and automotive engineers, even economists. Together, these strange bedfellows must produce recommendations useful to political leaders from presidents to planning commissioners. Those collaborations are not in place.