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Roger,

You are sounding many of the same themes as Lomborg. "If your objective is to help the most people controlling co2 is not the best way."

However, your ideas will not be well received by most true AGW believers. These true believers are not concerned about helping people they want to control how resources are distributed. They especially want the richer nations to use fewer resources per capita.

Charles- Thanks for your comments, one correction -- Lomborg is sounding many of the same themes as us, not vice versa ;-)

I don't see how mitigation and adaptation are opposed to each other. As long as the cost for adaptation is borne by emitters, then they should re-enforce each other.

For example, if you impose a global $100/ton carbon tax, then you suddenly have over half a trillion bucks to pay for disaster relief, flood prevention, population movements, and other forms of adaptation and compensation.

At the same time, the increased energy costs make efficiency more economical, and make wind and gas (and maybe nuclear) cost-competative with coal.

Who could possibly complain about that?

Many thanks for mentioning this paper; I've just blogged it.

Lab Lemming has a good point, but adaptation needs all the help it can get. Adaptation is local, and that's where the oxen can get gored. Mitigation can be done entirely on paper if it makes a paper profit. Adaptation requires real change and a vigorous constituency. Sustainability loves adaptation more than mitigation.

Thanks very much Andrew, looks like you link fell through, here it is:

http://geology.about.com/b/a/257957.htm

"If your objective is to help the most people ..."

Simplistic, or pure politics, isn't that?

Just as with costs, populations are discounted over the future -- that's how political scientists are able to argue that our grandchildren will always know more and be richer and smarter, so we shouldn't invest their inheritance now in choices that we think will improve the world they live in.

Discounting future numbers, Lomborg (or the people he's copying his ideas from :-) can't claim to know how many people there will be in that future, to count how many would benefit in total.

In practice, people burn assets madly a few times a century -- having wars, neglecting not just environmental goals but basic chemical and biological and medical common sense.

It's not always utter stupidity, by some fraction of a percent -- I recall that even through World War II, on the European front, the public health people stayed in communication regardless of whose government they worked for, for everyone's benefit addressing contagious and infectious diseases. Think typhus and influenza anda cholera and plague.

As to the WSJ editorials (sigh)

The WSJ editors are in business selling their readers to their advertisers --- both groups are from the two percent of the people who own more than half of the world's assets.

For the WSJ editors, saying 'don't spend money now on future improvements' really sums up to 'instead put it into our stock market' -- a self-serving recommendation.

Their assertion comes down to "income will get you through times of no foresight better than foresight will get you through times of no income."

Income, on an annual basis, is their index of success.

Of course they discount the future -- the people they talk to won't be IN the future, so they find no profit there.

If the oligarchic model takes over, I expect we'll see the laws changed toward preserving the person/corporation's assets longterm into the future, distributing less in the way of short term profits to today's stockholders and short term taxes to today's governments.

If corporations some day develop AI, real ongoing intelligence, they might develop foresight; they would have a longer self-interest baseline, they will 'live' in the outcome.

But "legal person" so far is a legal fiction -- corporations now are legal forms occupied by collages made of people after all, there's nothing there that lives forever but the form. Kind of like a sponge, not even brain-dead but brainless. Governments aren't much if any better.

With human lifetimes, and the low intensity and long time scale of the problem, asking political decisions to be made that are unselfish in the short term is ... perplexing.

I think political scientists are like lexicographers --- we have a descriptivist camp and a prescriptivist camp. Neither helps much :-j

-- Hank Roberts

"For example, if you impose a global $100/ton carbon tax,..."

And how does one go about that? Become "King of the World?"

"...if you impose a global $100/ton carbon tax, then you suddenly have over half a trillion bucks to pay for disaster relief, flood prevention, population movements, and other forms of adaptation and compensation."

Yes...and the proceeds from the state run lotto will go to education!

It appears that we have a large group of people who have great fear of a climate change crisis, for which there is no empirical evidence, and no fear of empowering governments; a practice that at best is usually inefficient and at worst is extraordinarily bad!

Government is, of course, extremely necessary to maintain a civilization, but the assumption that there is no danger in adding all of this additional power to our governments is amazingly unfounded and naive.

That is another reason why adaptation policy is much more attractive than CO2 mitigation policy. The former is much easier to monitor and track effectiveness. The ladder invites corruption and abuse!

Roger,

Nice paper, and some thing like this is long overdue in Nature. Congratulations.

I note, however, that the bit about malaria could be misinterpreted in that someone may conclude that the contribution of climate change to total malaria risk in 2080 would be 7%. Actually it would be 3.5% (because, as your paper notes, the malaria risk from other factors would double).

I have a longer post on the "So this is instersting thread" relevant to adaptation in general

Indur- Thanks, for the clarification. We recognized this, but since the point didn't hinge on the difference we used the integrated climate/social factor, just to take the opposite criticism off the table. So our presentation is quite conservative.

I accept the basic argument that in addition to the warming already in the pipeline from current GHG levels, political and economic realities foreclose the fantasy of reducing, much less eliminating, global GHG emissions within the next half-century, so preparing to adapt to a changing climate is essential, regardless what we do toward mitigation.

But in thinking about adaptation, it's easier to see how it might work regarding those aspects of human life and society that are amenable to technological control, such as managing flood hazards by controlling land-use and civil engineering, managing heat waves with air conditioning, or managing agriculture by growing different crops or changing irrigation practices.

I have a harder time envisioning a clear adaptation strategy for ecological goods and services, particularly where wildlife plays an important role. I'm not an ecologist, so maybe I'm missing important things, but this seems like one of the more difficult parts of the puzzle.

Just as the Nature paper points out that climate change is only one among many sources of growing flood hazards, so there are a number of threats to biodiversity apart from climate change. But the irreversibility of both climate change and species loss on the time scale at which we life our lives seems to me to make threats to biodiversity and other ecological goods & services worthy of special consideration.

I'm not aware of much literature on the subject of adaptation applied to ecological matters. The TAR assessment mostly seems to say that we're too ignorant to say much about impacts and adaptations in this area. I've recently started reading Lovejoy & Hannah's "Climate Change and Biodiversity," (Yale, 2005) which has a few papers that make stabs at managing ecosystems in a changing climate, but I'd be grateful for comments or pointers to literature to help this non-expert better understand how to think about adaptation, wildlife, and ecology.

Jonathan- Thanks ... I'll see if we can provide some sort of guide to this literature as it is important.
It is in fact a focus of our SPARC research project over the next few years:

http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/sparc/research/projects/ecosystem/index.html