According to Wired’s Spencer Reiss, Copenhagen is too little too late:
The really inconvenient truth: We’re toast. Fried. Steamed. Poached. More so than even many hand-wringing carbonistas admit. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, C02 that’s already in the air or in the pipeline will stoke “irreversible” warming for the next 1,000 years. Any scheme cobbled together in Copenhagen for slowing—forget reversing—the growth of greenhouse gases will be way too little, way too late. In the apt jargon of industry, a hotter planet is already “baked in.”
But fear not — technology will save us!
Coastal communities, for example, will survive not because the world will somehow unite to stop sea levels from rising (it won’t). They’ll survive because they’ll learn to adapt—much as the Dutch have done since the Middle Ages.
I’ve got one word for you, Spencer: Katrina.
I don’t know how anyone could see how our country abandoned our poor brothers and sisters during & after Katrina and think technology will save us. Maybe it’s the “us” where Spencer is having trouble opening his imagination; guys like him don’t worry that our government would abandon them.
But it wasn’t just poor folks of color our country abandoned. Here’s how well we’ve “adapted” to Katrina’s lessons:
Three days before the 4th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina (August 29), a coalition of 17 advocacy groups today urged the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to honor President Obama’s priority in his budget and campaign “to restore nature’s barriers – the wetlands, marshes and barrier islands that can take the first blows and protect the people of the Gulf Coast.”…The severity of Katrina’s damage in Louisiana was caused, in part, by the fact that the state has lost 1/3 of its original wetlands – about 2,000 square miles — an area larger than Delaware.
“Scientists agree that these lost wetlands could have helped reduce Katrina’s storm surge,” said Charles Allen, assistant director of the Center for Bioenvironmental Research at Tulane and Xavier Universities and co-director of the Lower 9th Ward Center for Sustainable Engagement and Development. “Wetlands are ‘horizontal levees’ that in many cases are more economical and effective at damage prevention than man-made vertical levees because they absorb storm energy, slow incoming waves, wind, and surge waters. It is widely recognized that we urgently need to restore these wetlands and coastal forests to prevent similar or worse storm damage in the future.”
Despite these facts, four years after Katrina, Congress has been unable to fund major coastal restoration projects it authorized in the 2007 Water Resources Development Act because the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has not completed the projects’ design and engineering.
In the face of these facts, how can Spencer write:
Ditto the other supposed horsemen of the climate apocalypse. Drought? Check out Perth, on the edge of the Great Australian Desert, where more than a million people keep hydrated with seawater that’s been desalinated by wind power.
Who does he think is going to pay for building a system like this for Africa?
Spencer isn’t completely clueless. At one point he hints at the bigger issue:
But won’t the transition to a warmer world be painful? The honest answer is that we don’t know. It depends on the resources we can bring to bear, technological and otherwise.
But that’s about it.
Look, I love Wired as much as the next geek. But it’s stunning that after decades of political deadlock over stopping global warming, Wired assumes politics will disappear when we try to cope with global warming’s aftermath.
Spencer’s article appeared in the same issue as Wired’s holiday gift guide; here’s my recommendation for Spencer.
