native brookie wrote:
Splake wrote:
Alas, I am often left with the impression that too much of the fervor around climate change is indeed spent on charging the sea with a lance rather building sea walls.
You seem to be ignoring what I was taught as "the first rule of holes"--when you are in one, quit digging. Building seawalls may be necessary because, out of ignorance, we've already caused irrevocable change. But we should also stop doing the things that will ensure our seawalls need to grow ever taller.
Well if you lived on the current bottom of the Black Sea around 5600 BC, then no, building a seawall probably wouldn't have helped much. So I completely agree that sometimes the solution will be to pack up and move.
The metaphor was meant to say a couple of things. One was that yes we need to adapt and sometimes that will mean building sea walls and sometimes that will mean moving and sometimes it will mean taking advantage of longer growing seasons in northern regions.
The other is that I see the world spending too much time, effort and money on feel good measures. Things like taking gas tax money to increase mass transit subsidies doesn't change the dependence on fossil fuels. That's about as effective as Don Quixote was at chasing back the sea. On the other hand, if gas tax money was invested in solar power it would be a real step forward to building that seawall. Even better would be for mass transit to be not only fully funded by the riders, but to invest in it's own clean power generation capacity to eliminate mass transit dependency on fossil fuels altogether.
At the end of the day, climate change happens with or without human intervention and we will always need to be willing to adapt. Evolution says that we have done a decent job of that so far. For the current case where we are trying to address human impacts on climate through the consumption of fossil fuels, then we need to replace the power source.