Adapting after Superstorm Sandy

To prevent or adapt to global warming is the key question we now collectively face.

Will we undertake prevention or adaption as our main defense against the increasing onslaught posed to us as a result of global warming?

In my view, the only reasoned approach with any hope for actual success is prevention -- rapidly reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Simply put, most efforts to adapt post-hoc will be overwhelmed in short order as the intensity of large-scale disasters accelerate and resources are lost or depleted along with rising atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases.

It is abundantly evident that a pound of prevention is worth a ton of adaption. But such preventive action must occur within the next few years or it will entirely fail, no matter its magnitude.

Prevention lies at the core of our current public health system, an approach which has dramatically reduced illness in the modern world.

By contrast, imagine if our preventative public health approach was replaced by an “adaption” model where we allow sewers to run in the street untreated, fail to vaccinate, and drink unsterilized water, but also increase the number of treating physicians to attend those fallen ill. That approach would surely be overwhelmed in short order and doom our highly dense human society to collapse.

Louis Pasteur ushered in a new, preventative approach, one which works remarkably well. That is the same preventive approach we must now adopt with respect to emitting greenhouse gases.

A highly influential few, principally those with immense economic interests rooted in coal, oil and natural gas, contend that it is better to continue the current path and posit that presently advanced human societies need merely continue to emit greenhouse gases -- possibly in somewhat lesser amounts -- while simultaneously “adapting,” to the inevitable adverse effects of global warming by rebuilding after each mounting phase of natural destruction. This “slow-walk” position is assured to fail, and with its failure, to tear down our current, advanced society.

The weakness in this “slow-walk” position lies in the reality that global warming presents a different face at every turn: intense drought, destructive superstorms, bizarre snow storms, unseasonable warmth followed by a cold snap, all of which relentlessly undermines the basic food, water, and shelter systems upon which civilization rests.

Adaption is not a focused effort, but a post-hoc scramble invoked when faced with new and unpredictable loci of destruction. It is too diffuse to be effective or economical.

Witness eastern states and their valiant $15.6 billion effort to dig out from Hurricane Irene in 2011, only to be met a year later by $50 billion Superstorm Sandy. And what will come in 2013? Talk about unsustainable!

Here is the stark reality: each year of delay leading to more release of greenhouse gases increases the excess energy accumulated into Earth’s oceans, ice, and atmosphere. We already have placed enough greenhouse gases into the atmosphere to produce an ever-increasing assault on our support systems for at least the next 100 years. In the next two decades we will release greenhouse gases enough to ensure 250 years of increasing instability.

Put another way, if Global Warming is personified as an enveloping military force, its Field Marshal’s overarching strategy for victory over human civilization might well be articulated as follows: “All destruction, everywhere, all the time! We will relentlessly deprive humans of food, water, shelter, warmth, and electricity by using every weapon at our disposal and at every opportunity. We will overwhelm and confound their defenses, interrupt their food supply, destroy their infrastructure, and drown their systems. We will decimate their habitats: built and wild. Our means, methods and battle lines will shift rapidly, crossing over national boundaries. And we will extinguish their joy while creating such anguish, misery, poverty and hopelessness as the world has not seen in an age.”

That is the battle plan of Global Warming.

In the face of this monumental challenge, the best approach is to deprive the “Field Marshal” of his best weapon: increasing atmospheric levels of greenhouse gases.

The simple and practical reality is that we absolutely must make a massive shift toward prevention by converting our electrical power production and transportation systems to non-carbon-based wind, geothermal and solar technologies as quickly as humanly possible, assuming war-time schedules and economies.

Pulling together, such an effort will not be as difficult as it might first appear. Note, for example, that large, multi-megawatt (utility scale) solar photovoltaic facilities can today be built in months to produce well controlled electricity from sunshine for 9 cents per kilowatt-hour ($0.09/kWhr). By contrast, individual 5-kW solar systems on residential roofs are relatively slow to deploy, produce solar power at a cost of $0.26/kWhr, and at scale increasingly risk destabilizing the electricity distribution grid upon which we all rely. Large scale deployment is the best approach overall.

Our battle plan: prevention, now!

Coffey is an attorney based in San Diego. He can be reached at daniel.coffey@sddt.com. Comments may be published as Letters to the Editor.