If you had walked into the Coping with Global Warming symposium Friday during Brian H. Hurd’s presentation, you might have thought you were in the wrong place.
Juggling three and then four balls, the associate professor of New Mexico State University used this metaphor to demonstrate the need to plan ahead ““ to know how to juggle four balls when you only have to juggle three ““ in order to deal with potential global warming scenarios.
The 2007 Frankel Symposium was centered around this idea of being proactive and the realistic goals and standards scientists and policy makers should have when dealing with the inevitable implications of global warming.
One of the main global warming issues the conference addressed was the idea of adaptation ““ the deliberate change in system design or behavior in anticipation of external changing conditions, Hurd said.
Sean Hecht, symposium director and executive director of the UCLA Environmental Law Center, said the concept of adaptation as a strategy for dealing with climate change has been what he called a “political hot potato” since policy makers are afraid to divert too much attention away from global warming prevention.
Amy Luers, California climate manager of the Global Environment Program of the Union of Concerned Scientists, said people need to start thinking about adaptation and mitigation as complementary strategies, rather than opposite ones, as they have been viewed in the past.
She spoke about what she called “the AAA of adaptation: awareness, analysis and action,” the most important elements for decision makers to consider when dealing with global warming.
Luers said California’s awareness of climate change and its effects has risen significantly in recent times, but people are still largely unaware of the local implications it could have on forms of infrastructure such as bridges and sewers.
“Awareness of global warming is important not just on a global scale, but important for California,” she said.
This is something Michael Hanemann, chancellor’s professor in the department of agriculture and resource economics at the UC Berkeley, stressed: awareness of the vulnerability of coastal infrastructure in California.
“We have a dysfunctional system for trying to identify risks,” he said. “It’s a matter of running a tight ship, getting a house in order.”
He proposed organizing and recording an inventory of coastal and at-risk structures, saying a lack of proactive planning was a major problem during climate crises such as Hurricane Katrina.
“(The response to) Katrina was a government’s failure, a failure of collective action,” he said.
Luers also stressed the reality of the need for action in California as she showed diagrams of the potential 80 percent loss of snowpacks in Northern California in a few years.
“We need to wake up the population to the fact that this is really serious,” she said. “The things we care about are leaving.”
She said various types of natural disasters such as floods, fires, droughts and heat waves are tests to California’s ability to react to stresses, but “only within a certain coping range,” based on time and temperature.
“When we go outside of it, we have a crisis. We’re trying to limit and avoid crisis management and focus on risk management,” she said.
Ann Carlson, a law professor, said one of these stresses ““ heat waves ““ will cause more problems for Californians than people think. Heat waves are the leading cause of death among all natural disasters, and they will become more intense with climate change, she said.
“Last summer, 150 people died in a week’s period of excess heat, and yet we tend to forget about these episodes and pay little attention to the fact that heat can be quite dangerous,” she said.
Carlson said decision makers need to think about the ways jurisdiction can mitigate the worst effects of heat waves, and figure out what else needs to be done.
A few speakers described themselves as neither optimists nor pessimists, but “realists.” But Daniel Cole, a law professor at Indiana University, said the conference was proof of the belief in an eventual solution to dealing with the global warming problem.
“The fact that we’re all here says we are climate optimists,” he said. “Otherwise we would just leave the conference right now and go home.”