Climate’s Troubling Unknown Unknowns

Donald Rumsfeld famously popularized the term “unknown unknowns” in a 2002 news briefing when describing the challenges of linking Iraq to weapons of mass destruction. Troublingly, climate change may also be strewn with such unknowns, and they pose daunting tests for how we face the future.

Dirty air blanketing the New York skyline at sunset.

One is choosing among policy alternatives. Should we minimize tomorrow’s risks now by reducing greenhouse gas emissions, or save money today and spend it on adapting to the effects of planetary warming once threats emerge more fully, like rising seas or prolonged droughts? The policy debate increasingly tilts toward adaptation.

But we can’t adapt to perils from unknown unknowns. In such cases, adaptation will largely fail; only mitigation will be effective.

Read the opinion piece from The New York Times by William B. Gail - “Climate’s Troubling Unknown Unknowns.”

Political upheaval real risk of climate change

Adapting to climate change (“Climate-proofing our communities,” Opinion, March 15) is certainly necessary. It’s hard to argue with damage control, and it’s politically popular, since there are local and short-term benefits for voters.

Illustration by Globe staff.

But adaptation misses the greater concerns about climate change. The ultimate risks of climate change are not the floods in our coastal towns, or heat waves in our cities. Climate change will continue to produce global food shortages and starvation. It is already creating mass migration away from newly uninhabitable areas, and into areas where migrants are not welcome, causing political upheaval and xenophobia.

Read the letter from The Boston Globe - “Political upheaval real risk of climate change.”

How to Turn Neighborhoods Into Hubs of Resilience

Think of it as a silver lining to the gathering dark clouds. We live in an era of extraordinary disruption, from the serial crises of a changing climate to the wrenching shifts of a globalized economy. But in that disruption lies the potential for positive transformation.

PUSH Buffalo is working to transform a 25-block
area of the city into the beginning of a new
community-driven sustainable economy. 

Addressing climate change requires adapting to the impacts that are already here—heat waves, droughts, superstorms and more—while preventing and mitigating future impacts. Taking these challenges seriously calls for radical changes in the way we live. It calls us to zero out our carbon emissions, and to rethink the systems that shape our lives, including the economy, food and power. It calls us to fundamentally transition from a world of domination and extraction to a world of regeneration, resilience, and interdependence.

It’s a tall order, no doubt, but that transition is already underway. In our work with movement builders on the front lines of the transition, we’ve identified two key guideposts—connectedness and equity—that point us toward the world we want.

Read the Yes! Magazine story - “How to Turn Neighborhoods Into Hubs of Resilience.”

Vietnam delegation hosted by Monash Sustainable Institute

A

 ministerial-level delegation from Vietnam was recently hosted by the Monash Sustainable Institute.

Vietnam has many climate change impacts similar to those experienced in Australia and the ministerial deputation was eager to learn how Australia was adapting to changes being wrought by climate change.

In the story - “MSI hosts Vietnamese delegation for climate adaptation workshop” – the university said, “Vietnam is also highly exposed to climate change, with most of its population living in dense coastal cities vulnerable to sea-level rise, typhoons and floods. Its two major rivers - the Mekong and the Red River - are subject to changes in upstream countries, particularly China.”