Adaptation or Mitigation?

There are, broadly speaking, two kinds of responses to climate change. In the lingo of the debate, these are 'mitigation' and 'adaptation.' The former refers to reducing our emissions of greenhouse gases, on the hope of reversing the changes (until when?), the latter refers to developing new technologies and forms of social cooperation for dealing with whatever nature throws our way. Each is a theory of the best way to allocating resources. I am very partial to a version of the 'adaptation' strategy, and therefore agree, in part, with
a post by John Tierney over at his NYTimes blog.

Tierney sites a report by Indur Goklany, an analyst at the libertarian CATO Institute, which accepts the science of the International Panel on Climate Change, but argues adaptation is still the best use of resources. While I do not agree with all of the libertarian prescriptions of Goklany's report (and which Tierney supports), I agree with the basic conclusion. As Tierney puts it:

"I think [Goklany] points to a real risk in making large sacrifices today to address problems that will be easier to address when people are richer and more technologically advanced. If anything, Dr. Goklany writes, these projections underestimate the capacity of future generations to deal with these problems because they’ll have technologies we can’t imagine today..."

The proper technologies, the best way of developing them, and the process by which we produce and distribute them are all serious questions. But since resources are limited, it makes more sense to me to devote those resources to improving our ability to control nature's effects, rather than to slow down or inhibit our industrial growth. Mitigation, especially at the levels required to bring greenhouse gases down to a 'natural' level (whatever that means), would require dramatic limitations on development in industrial areas, and even more limitations on undeveloped countries. In the end, it's hard to see how this would be a humane way of setting up our relationship to nature. After all, even if we were to 'reverse' global warming, the weather would still happen. There would still be fires, hurricanes, tornadoes, tsunamis, heat waves, cold snaps and earthquakes. How they impact us depends on the technologies at our disposal, and the way we organize society.