Global warming: Adapting to a new reality

By Elisabeth Rosenthal

As countries across Europe reduce protection of greenhouse gases in order to fight climate change, scientists and citizens are discovering that effects of warming are already upon us. Irreversible warming is already happening, they say, and will continue for a century even if polluting emissions are controlled by the Kyoto Protocol, the international treaty aimed at limiting greenhouse gases. To this end, they say, governments and citizens must prepare for a steamier future, adapting to a climate that is hotter and stormier.

The early warning signs of global warming are apparent: an increase in summer deaths due to heat waves in Europe; the northern migration of toxic algae and tropical fish to the Mediterranean; the spread of disease-carrying ticks into previously inhospitable parts of Sweden and the Czech Republic. Scientists say that global warming may be partially responsible the rising number of powerful hurricanes, like Katrina, as well as an increase in floods.

Most scientific models predict that temperatures will rise 2 degrees 6 degrees Celsius, in Europe over the next century-slightly less elsewhere in the world. And people are largely unprepared. In response to this trend, countries and politicians are starting to think changes they will have to make:

adapting to climate change, for example, French farmers are shifting to crops that better tolerate warmer temperatures;

supplying the elderly with air-conditioners, as the Italian city of Brescia is doing.

Adapting to climate change seems to be simple. However, in some cases, adaptation would be so expensive that the authorities may opt to let nature take its course.

GLOSSARY:

ticks = pequenos insetos

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