At a UN climate meeting in 2007, John Holdren, who would later become President Barack Obama’s chief science advisor, famously said, “We basically have three choices: mitigation, adaptation, and suffering.” Most writing about technology and climate change still concentrates on mitigation—i.e., reducing emissions, by means of clean energy sources, better batteries, sleek electric vehicles, and so on—or, if all else fails, heroic efforts like engineering the atmosphere to reflect more sunlight back into space. These technologies are often futuristic and cool, and create a comforting narrative that humanity’s scientific smarts will save it from its political stupidity.
This issue of MIT Technology Review rests on the premise that while one should never give up on mitigation, it’s time to start talking more about adaptation and suffering—about the technologies the human race will need in a catastrophically altered world, and about the economic, political, and social realities of living in it.
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We start off with some harsh truths about mitigation. The growth in renewables has made virtually no dent in the use of fossil fuels; it’s come largely at the expense of nuclear energy, another low-carbon source. But a nuclear comeback looks increasingly unlikely now that corruption scandals have sunk South Korea’s nuclear program, one of the world’s most ambitious. Even with valiant efforts to use more renewables, countries like India will drag the world’s emissions up as they strive for higher living standards.
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No less important is the work being done to understand how bad the suffering will be, and where. New predictive models, relying on masses of data, are providing a better idea of where people will be displaced. Similarly, data-intensive research is reducing the wide band of uncertainty about how much global temperatures will rise. And other modeling is making it increasingly clear that the harms will be unevenly distributed: some regions will even enjoy benefits from warmer temperatures. Meanwhile, India’s looming water crisis is a stark warning of what the rest of the world has to look forward to.
Ultimately, of course, climate change affects everyone. To grasp what that really means, read Paolo Bacigalupi’s chilling fictional depiction of a near-future America, and Roy Scranton’s essay on how living with climate change will mean ditching some of our most basic assumptions about what constitutes a normal, good life. Start preparing mentally for this new world. Because to take action on either mitigation or adaptation, one first needs to be able to visualize the suffering.