We can adapt to climate change and limit the harm. Or we can fail to adapt and risk much more severe consequences. How we respond to this challenge will shape the future in important ways. The climate is already hazardous and always has been. Variations and extremes of climate disrupt our production of food and our supplies of water, reduce our incomes, damage our homes and property, impact our health, even take our lives. Humans, in an unintended revenge, are getting back at the climate by adding to heat trapping gases in the Earth’s atmosphere that are changing the climate. But the changes are amplifying the hazards to humans. We cannot in short order stop this. The physical and social processes of climate change have a momentum that will continue for decades and well beyond.
This undeniable momentum does not imply that efforts to mitigate climate change, that is to reduce or capture the emissions of greenhouse gases that drive climate change, are wasted. Nor is a call for adaptation a fatalistic surrender to this truth. The magnitude and pace of climate change will determine the severity of the stresses to which the world will be exposed. Slowing the pace of human caused climate change, with the aim of ultimately stopping it, will enable current and future generations to better cope with and adapt to the resulting hazards, thereby reducing the damages and danger. Mitigating climate change is necessary. Adapting to climate change is necessary too.
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