In this interesting Bloomberg article ‘New Climate Debate: How to Adapt to the End of the World‘ we can measure how the debate has shifted from avoiding climate change to adapting to it, because it appears to be inevitable.
As mentioned in the Fourth Revolution book, I expect there might still be another step which is how to engineer climate, but that’s probably still far away. Anyway, the interesting part here is that we are now to the point where adapting is becoming the mainstream approach – and avoiding social collapse at the same occasion: “Can modern society prepare for a world in which global warming threatens large-scale social, economic, and political upheaval? What are the policy and social implications of rapid, and mostly unpleasant, climate disruption?”
The question is now whether climate change will be sudden and disruptive, or sufficiently progressive to allow for adaptation of current infrastructure. The question is open for the scientists, but it is quite possible, as is the case in natural phenomena, that the extreme events will drive any adaptation.
