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Adapt to Global Warming!
28/Sep/2006: With climate change induced by global warming wrecking havoc all over the world, researchers are calling for ‘adaptation’ to global warming to minimize the damage it could cause in future.
Building steel barriers around cities like New York to protect its residents from storm surges, cultivating heat-friendly corn instead of heat-sensitive wheat, enacting new laws that prevent construction of buildings near the seashores, air-conditioning closely packed apartments and public buildings to prevent heat-related deaths etc., could help us to adapt to climate change.
Jay Gulledge, a senior researcher at the Pew Center on Global Climate Change in Arlington, Virginia, said that the humans have already induced a significant change in the climate through their activities and adaptation to climate change and global warming is essential to the minimize their effects, in future.
A recent report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has warned that the consequences of global warming could be terrible, if we fail to adapt to it.
Adapting to global warming may not be a solution to it, as we would still continue to release greenhouse gasses in to the atmosphere, which could warm this planet up by 3 to 5 degree Celsius, by the end of this century.
Robert Mendelsohn, an environmental scientist at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies in New Haven, Connecticut, said that the climate-change policies should address both, adaptation to global warming and reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, simultaneously, to tackle the consequences of global warming more effectively.
Gulledge predicts that more and more people will migrate northwards from United States in the years to come, to escape from rising temperatures in U.S and Canada could become more populous because of this migration in the next 500 years.
Animals, plants and insects are migrating towards cooler regions and an estimate suggests that 1,700 biological species have been moving towards the poles at an average speed of 25 miles per year, since 1975.
Mendelsohn feels that there will be winners and losers in this race to adaptation to a warmer world, with farmers around the world benefiting from the higher carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, which could boost productivity.
On the other hand people living in low-lying regions like Bangladesh, French Polynesia and other pacific islands, might suffer from the rising sea levels, which would inundate these areas in future.
K Siva
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