Mitigation or adaptation? Which is the better response to climate change?

OPINION:

What’s the wiser policy in response to man-made climate change? Mitigation (slow or stop it) or adaptation (learn to live with it)?

Which better maximizes benefits while minimizing costs? Which is better for human flourishing and the planet?

The 16 authors of the 2024 Amazon bestseller “Climate and Energy: The Case for Realism,” organized by the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, offer a strong case for adaptation over mitigation.

The gist? Man-made global warming is not, and is not likely to become, catastrophic. Its benefits likely equal or exceed its costs; mitigation’s costs likely exceed its benefits; the benefits of energy from hydrocarbon fuels exceed the harms of that warming; and the benefits of the fertilizing effect of increased atmospheric carbon dioxide, making food more abundant and affordable, also exceed the harms of the warming.

Since about 1850, global average surface temperature (GAST) has risen about 1.01.2C (1.82.16F). Human population and life expectancy have risen substantially, in part because people do better in warmth than in cold. For example, human mortality rates from cold snaps range from about 10 to about 20 times the rates from heat waves. Therefore, even if heat waves increased as much as cold snaps decreased (they don’t), human mortality from temperature extremes would fall sharply.

Warming driven by greenhouse gas (GHG) happens mostly toward the poles, in winter, at night, raising low temperatures significantly but raising high temperatures little or not at all. Consequently, plants’ geographic ranges expand, while growing seasons lengthen, expanding food supply.

So, the warming so far has likely been more helpful than harmful. What about the future?

GHGs’ warming effects are logarithmic. Each gas absorbs heat (infrared) only within certain bands of the spectrum. As the concentration of a GHG rises, the amount of unabsorbed infrared in each band diminishes. The spectra in which carbon dioxide (CO2), the main human-emitted GHG, absorbs are nearly “saturated,” so we could continue adding CO2 to the atmosphere indefinitely with little added warming effect.

Even the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicted, in its 2018 Special Report: Global Warming of 1.5C (p. 256) that if we did nothing to reduce GHG emissions, GAST would rise by only about 3.66C by 2100, and that the economic impact would be to reduce gross world product (GWP) in 2100 by 2.6%. Meanwhile, annual growth of about 3.1% would raise GWP to over nine times its present level.

Adjusting for population growth, the result would be a GWP per capita about 8.8 times what it was in 2018. Since poverty is a greater threat to human health and life than climate and weather, this is good news.

What about the economics of reducing our use of hydrocarbon fuels?

As Danish economist Bjrn Lomborg points out, roughly half the world’s population depends on nitrogenous fertilizers made from natural gas for all its food. Stop using natural gas, and about 4 billion starve. Additional billions of people depend on hydrocarbons for heat, steel, cement, plastics and transportation. Lomborg concludes that eliminating hydrocarbons would cost about 6 billion deaths far outweighing any benefits of mitigating global warming. I’d call that human destruction, not human flourishing.

Human flourishing depends tremendously on abundant, affordable, reliable energy. Hydrocarbon and nuclear fuels because of their high energy density (per unit of weight or volume), power density (flow per unit of time) and dispatchability (energy from them can be increased and decreased quickly and predictably) are much more abundant, affordable and reliable than low-density, intermittent, non-dispatchable wind and solar. Consequently, trading hydrocarbons for wind and solar will reduce our ability to produce everything that depends on energy, impoverishing everyone.

Hydrocarbons coal, oil and natural gas moved humanity from a very low-density, nature-dependent, carbohydrate-based energy order (vegetation feeding people and animals) to a high-density, predictable energy order. The result? Population multiplied over eight times, life expectancy over two times and income per capita 13 times simultaneous with, and despite, pollution from such fuels. Clearly, their benefits outweigh their costs.

Similarly, increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide has more benefits than harms.

Far from a pollutant, CO2, the basis of photosynthesis, is indispensable to all biological life. On average, every doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere in which plants grow results in a 35% increase in plant growth efficiency. Plants grow better in warmer and cooler temperatures and in wetter and drier soils, make better use of soil nutrients, resist diseases and pests better, and improve fruit-to-fiber ratios. So, they increase their ranges (and the ranges of animals that depend on them, reducing extinction), and more food is available for everything that eats plants, directly or indirectly. NASA estimates that CO2 added to the atmosphere in recent decades has increased global leaf area by the equivalent of twice the vegetative cover in the continental United States.

Clearly, adaptation is a better response to man-made climate change and leads to more human flourishing than mitigation.

• E. Calvin Beisner, Ph.D., is president of the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, a Christian think tank focused on environmental stewardship and economic development for the poor. He is the author of “Prosperity and Poverty: The Compassionate Use of Resources in a World of Scarcity” (1988), “Prospects for Growth: A Biblical View of Population, Resources, and the Future” (1990), and “Is Capitalism Bad for the Environment?” (2017), among other books and articles.