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Hours after watching this, I’m still thinking about Patrick T Brown’s take on the editorial policies of Nature. I’m going to hazard a guess about what might be going on.
A lot of people concerned about climate change believe that we need both mitigation and adaptation. However, there’s also the idea that if we hold out the promise of easy fixes to climate change, we lower the motivation for people and their governments to change their behaviour or regulations in ways that reduce their carbon footprint. We make it easier for companies to continue extracting fossil fuels if we buy into the idea that carbon capture, for instance, will solve the problem. Maybe this is the kind of thinking (or is it ideology?) that lead the editors and the reviewers of articles for Nature to publish what they publish.
I can see how this line of reasoning, taken too far, could take the focus off of the adaptation we obviously need to be doing. The adaptation piece is certainly slow in coming, but my guess is that it will be driven primarily by the increasing costs of climate-related disasters, to insurers, to governments and to the regular people who are adversely affected.
I think you're onto something here. It's easy to forget how recently climate change denialism was the norm, and how it still exists in certain corners. What drew me to this whole story was that it's not a clear story of right and wrong; there seems to be room for reasonable disagreement on priorities, so long as we're not ignoring adaptation altogether. And I think you're dead on that when the cost of climate change really starts hitting, adaptation measures will become more obviously urgent.
Hours after watching this, I’m still thinking about Patrick T Brown’s take on the editorial policies of Nature. I’m going to hazard a guess about what might be going on.
A lot of people concerned about climate change believe that we need both mitigation and adaptation. However, there’s also the idea that if we hold out the promise of easy fixes to climate change, we lower the motivation for people and their governments to change their behaviour or regulations in ways that reduce their carbon footprint. We make it easier for companies to continue extracting fossil fuels if we buy into the idea that carbon capture, for instance, will solve the problem. Maybe this is the kind of thinking (or is it ideology?) that lead the editors and the reviewers of articles for Nature to publish what they publish.
I can see how this line of reasoning, taken too far, could take the focus off of the adaptation we obviously need to be doing. The adaptation piece is certainly slow in coming, but my guess is that it will be driven primarily by the increasing costs of climate-related disasters, to insurers, to governments and to the regular people who are adversely affected.
I think you're onto something here. It's easy to forget how recently climate change denialism was the norm, and how it still exists in certain corners. What drew me to this whole story was that it's not a clear story of right and wrong; there seems to be room for reasonable disagreement on priorities, so long as we're not ignoring adaptation altogether. And I think you're dead on that when the cost of climate change really starts hitting, adaptation measures will become more obviously urgent.