BRING ON THE ENGINEERS

Global warming: Adapting to a new reality
(Elisabeth Rosenthal, International Herald Tribune, September 12th, 2005)

When Dr. Giancarlo Icardi, health director for the Italian city of Genoa, got a call this summer that his young nephew was ill with a fever, headache and watery eyes after a day at the beach, global warming was not the first diagnosis on his mind. He suspected an out-of-season flu.

But 128 other beachgoers turned up at Genoa hospitals with similar symptoms that July weekend, forcing the closure of area beaches in the midst of a heat wave. Even though the health problems cleared up within a day, scientists quickly announced disturbing news about the culprit: a toxic warm-water alga that now grows in an increasingly warm Mediterranean Sea and had not previously bloomed in an Italian resort so far north.

"This is the first time that we've had this problem in Liguria," Icardi said, referring to the northern Italian region that includes Genoa. But scientists "discovered what it was quickly," he said, because in recent years disease-causing algae had cropped up at beaches in the Italian regions of Tuscany and Puglia, and in Spain.

As countries across Europe reduce production 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, government and citizens must prepare for a steamier future, adapting to a climate that is hotter and stormier. [...]

Sometimes adapting to climate change is simple: The Swedish government is encouraging foresters to plant new species of trees that grow better in a slightly warmer climate, for example. In Hamburg and Rotterdam, new docks are being built to accommodate the likelihood of rising sea levels.

In other cases, adaptation would be so expensive that the authorities may opt to let nature take its course. Along the British coast in Norfolk and Essex, local governments are contemplating letting marginal coastal farmland, already beset by frequent flooding, simply sink into the sea as the water level rises.

"The most sensible thing may be for man to withdraw and change the coastline," Klein said.

"You won't have to pay subsidies. And these fields could probably become a healthy salt marsh, rather than poor farmland."

The general awareness that the climate may be warming is unlikely ever to be matched by a genuine scientific consensus as to what is causing it or, still less, what if anything could be done to reverse it. As even thoughtful leftists are coming to realize, the modern fixation with preventing any intrusion by nature into our lives has more in common with the rigid fatalism of traditional peasants who believed it was impossible to change anything for the better than with modern thinking of any stripe. Is modern Western man becoming so neurotically fragile that the very idea of losing a favourite beach resort or having to grow new crops is an unbearable trigger of mass panic and despair?