9 decades to go”:
Coping with climate, water and weather-related
hazards and disasters in the 21st century
Michael H. Glantz
University of Colorado
Boulder, Colorado
www.ccb-boulder.org
December 8, 2012
Some facts
SCEP 1970
•Focused on global Man’s Impact on the Environment
atmospheric problems
1.Global problems do
not necessarily need Study of Critical Environmental
global solutions Problems (SCEP)
Society is a part
of the climate
system and not
separate from it.
Shanghai Harbor
1988 2004
“4 Laws of Ecology”
1. Everything is connected to
everything else. Citarum River, Indonesia
2. Everything has to go
somewhere or there is no
such place as away.
3. Everything is always
changing.
Could these also be the “4 Laws of Natural Disaster” in the 21st Century?
✔
A ‘weighty’ analogy:
something to keep in mind
You can’t go home again:
• “You can’t recover the past”
Dynamite
fishing
in the
Philippines
Introducing Resilient Adaptation
(Luthar, 2003, CUP)
• A process that is a
flexible, incremental
approach
• to adjusting to
foreseeable adverse
impacts
• of an uncertain
changing climate in
the future.
What’s needed
for effective resilient adaptation
1. Early Warning
systems
2. Foreseeability
3. Expect surprises
4. Improvization
5. Precautionary
Principle
6. A focus on “Plan A”
Heightened value of
early warning systems
Foreseeability:
One form of warning
• Scientists rely on probabilities
• Use foreseeability
• Improvization
• I was “semi-surprised”
• “almost surprised”
• “hardly surprised”
• “a little surprised”
• “sort of surprised”
• “somewhat surprised” There are “foreseeable surprises”
Hurricane Katrina 2005, USA
Plan A:
“Precautionary Principle”
• “Governments should
not use the lack of full
scientific information as
a reason to postpone
action to prevent
serious irreversible
environmental damage”
» World Lake Vision
Committee
FOCUS ON MITIGATION,
REDUCE GHG EMISSIONS AND
ROLL BACK CO2 LEVELS
Planet Earth is now Global Warming’s
“Ground zero”
(b)
(c)
(a)
• Mirrors in space
• Mimic volcanoes
• Brighten clouds
• Carbon sequestration
• Iron particles in ocean
• Global tree planting
• Go nuclear
• Go renewable energy
www.lightwatcher.com/ chemtrails/smoking_gun.html
While there are
many “Plans B” …
SMIC 1971
1. “We recognize a real
problem: global Inadvertent Climate Modification
temperature increase
produced by man’s Report of the Study of Man’s
injection of heat and CO2 Impact on Climate (SMIC)
… may lead to dramatic
reduction even elimination Edited by SMIC
of Arctic sea ice.”