Climate Change: What are we going to do?
Floods, erosion, wildfires, sea level rise, desertification, oddball storms. How is a person supposed to grow crops, sustain livelihood, keep safe in her home? What will these changes mean for the 2 (or more) billion people who live in coastal towns and whose food and livelihoods depend on the sea? What will this mean for urban dwellers who are likely to see more days with hot weather and experience adverse health effects? With both weather and climate changing, humans are facing choices at personal, local, national and international levels: prevent further warming and mitigate damage or adapt our farming, housing, transportation, our whole towns and cities to the coming reality. There is the real possibility that thousands of people will become climate migrants having to move when their city becomes uninhabitable or farming becomes impossible. In all likelihood, given the IPCCs prediction that we will not be able to hold warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, we will need to both mitigation AND adaptation.
Mitigation or Adaptation
Mitigation for climate change involves one basic key idea: slow down the rate of average global temperature increase by reducing the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. One key idea, but no easy solution. Cutting carbon emissions is likely to be a multi-point effort: lower fossil fuel consumption, increase renewable sources, reform agricultural practices. Another mitigation option is to somehow capture the carbon we create. Carbon sequestration is the process of capturing carbon so that it cannot become a greenhouse gas. Carbon would have to be “sunk” or sequestered somewhere so that it would not release back into the atmosphere over short time spans. If fossil fuels were buried deep beneath the surface of the Earth or the ocean, then that is potentially a good place to put it back.
Adaptation involves recognizing the coming effects of climate change and engineering solutions to solve the problem. Addressing sea level rise? Maybe shore houses need to be put on stilts, sea walls built and sand dunes and wetlands strengthened. Addressing rising temperatures? Sunlight can be reflected with light colors. Maybe roofs can be painted white or silver? Some people even suggest sending large solar reflectors to space to reflect sunlight.
Mitigation and adaptation to climate change are vast, vast topics. You could read endlessly online about it. Nobody has an easy or one size fits all solution, and every locality demands a different response. It is beyond the purview of this paper to discuss more than a fraction of those solutions, and they will vary quite widely according to geography, population and existing climate. Teachers should check local municipal websites and utilities for local initiatives surrounding climate change. Ideas and conditions change constantly. For that purpose, I have also tried to use sources as current as possible. The basic science and concerns around climate change are stable, but the solutions are evolving and endless. In addition, while I have based this unit on mitigation and adaptations solutions for Philadelphia, it should be easily implemented in other parts of the country. Local municipalities, environmental organizations and museum websites often have information regarding local impacts and solutions to climate change.
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