Memes in Action: Climate Mitigation vs. Climate Adaptation
28/05/09 10:32
Meme
is one of those odd
words that rarely strays from the rarefied world of
academia, especially in the humanities and social
sciences. A meme is an idea or term (or metaphor)
that, like an organism, takes on a kind of life of
its own from its creator and begins to evolve and
shift through a community of users. For instance,
the right-wing view in the US that President Obama
is a socialist is a recent meme that has been
evolving and shifting for the past few months,
accruing new layers and images on a weekly basis.
But the word occurred to me this week while I was
listening to someone at an informal scientific
meeting. The speaker was distinguishing between
climate mitigation and climate adaptation and he
used a metaphor I had invented about a year ago to
describe the difference between climate mitigation
and climate adaptation. The weird part for me was
that he had never heard me use this metaphor or
been to any of my talks, as far as either of us was
aware. Immediately, I thought: a meme in action! To
spread the meme around a little, I will provide the
image here. The metaphor goes like this:
Climate mitigation and climate adaptation are both critical but quite distinct responses to climate change, even though the terminology is confusing. To understand the relationship between the terms, imagine you’re in a car driving quickly and you realize suddenly that you’re headed towards an obstruction like a wall or a building. Your first response should be to reduce your velocity — put your brakes on hard and slow down. That’s climate mitigation. Climate mitigation focuses on greenhouse gases in the atmosphere — how they get there, how to reduce their rate of emissions, and how to remove them. You want to avoid an impact if you can, and if you’re going to hit the obstruction anyway, you’ll definitely benefit from reducing your speed before you have a collision. And you definitely need a climate mitigation strategy.
Now let’s say you can see that a collision is very likely, maybe even inevitable. To improve your changes of surviving or avoiding serious injury, you want to take evasive action and certainly to make sure your seatbelt is on. Ideally, you’re been thinking ahead and have a car with air bags and your car insurance is all paid up. That’s climate adaptation: dealing with the inevitable to reduce the negative effects. Both tactical (braking) and strategic (insurance) aspects of climate adaptation are important, especially since we know that the climate has already shifted in ways that are significant for people and species and will continue to do so for many decades even if we successfully implement stringent climate mitigation.
May the meme live on!
