GEOG 438W
Human Dimensions of Global Warming

Tradeoffs

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Ultimately, the path we take to address climate change will be characterized as emphasizing one of three frameworks for response:

  1. mitigation - where we focus on tackling those root causes of emissions;
  2. adaptation - where we focus on preparing for the changes we're committed to seeing;
  3. inaction - where we continue on our business and usual ways and respond only in reactionary ways to changes around us.

It's up to us to define our path (and be thinking about the path you want to take; you'll need that for Exam 3!!!).  And if we're being honest, neither mitigation nor adaptation alone will save us. We need to emphasize both.  If we shut down all of the power plants and took all the internal combustion engine cars off the roads today, we're still committed to a certain level of impacts from our historical emissions (see If We Stopped Emitting Greenhouse Gases Right Now Would We Stop Climate Change? over on The Conversation for a nice discussion of this by Richard Rood, 2017).  

The emphasis we choose leads to different costs and consequences.  As a society, we need to identify the tradeoffs we're willing to accept and the ones we are not. This values-based introspective will guide the path we take.  Do we want to spend aggressively on mitigation so that adaptation costs down the road are less? Or should we turn our attention to adapting to the likely future a not-so-very-well-mitigated scenario leads us to? And if we choose not to mitigate or adapt aggressively, are we willing to accept the costs of that inaction? These are the questions you'll need to help craft answers to as you venture off into the world to solve this global challenge.

IPCC triangle diagram illustrating the relative costs of mitigation, adaptation, and inaction on climate change discussed above
Relative costs of mitigation, adaptation, and inaction on climate change
Credit: Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, Chapter 18.