Chapter 11

adaptation

One often hears people say, "Oh, we'll just adapt to higher temperatures."  This might sound comforting, but in practice adaptation may be a lot harder than you might realize.  As an example, this Reuters article talks about how hard it is to protect the Houston/Galveston area from severe hurricanes and sea level rise.  See a similarly themed article in Rolling Stone about Miami.

The 10th anniversary of the landfall of Hurricane Katrina was accompanied by a lot of analysis of the climate implications of that event.  Here is a great analysis about what that event tells us about adaptation as a policy response to climate change.  

MITIGATION

In assessing our options for reducing emissions, people rarely talk about trying to regulate population because it conflicts with many social and religious conventions. However, here’s a good discussion of how we can use population to help us solve climate change.

Nuclear energy is one of the most difficult aspects of mitigation. It’s a terrific energy source that has life-cycle emissions not too different from wind and solar. It also generates power all the time, so it could help solve the problems introduced by intermittency of wind and solar. But it has a lot of disadvantages. This article published in the WSJ gives a good overview of the issues.

This short book/long paper describes how economies can decarbonize.

externalities

The U.S. National Research Council have put out a thorough assessment of the externalities of energy: The Hidden Costs of Energy: Unpriced Consequences of Energy Production and Use (2010). It’s a bit old now, but still has a lot of good info in it.

This Forbes article lists "deaths per kW-hour" of various types of fuel.  Unsurprising, coal is the most dangerous.  This article also has a good bibliography of sources for this kind of information.  

geoengineering

The U.S. National Academy of Science has put out comprehensive reports on carbon cycle engineering and on solar radiation management.  There is also a 4-page summary.  The U.K. Royal Society has written a report on geoengineering; get it here.

Nice historical perspective on geoengineering by James Fleming.  Here is a good review of how we might implement solar radiation management.

Here are two books which take the opposite views of geoengineering: