The earlier post Terraforming Gap noted the bizarre anxieties from an outpost of the climate change millennial movement. Here's another.

We should fight like hell, but no matter what, we're going to have at least the consequences of a seriously altered climate to deal with. Thought that's true, I dislike the term adaptation. First, it seems to imply to me that we actually can adapt to climate change, that we can move smoothly from being people who live in this climate to people who live in that one. But we don't know what that climate will be like, or even if it will be a stable-but-different climate or an oscillating pattern of various weird climates.

We have never had a stable climate. It's an oxymoron. Climate always changes and that's a good thing since otherwise our world would be dead, a frozen clinker, a space rock. Humans have been adapting to climate change all along. In fact, some experts argue that climate change whelped humanity, providing a selection mechanism that rewarded our comparatively brainy selves and our evolved social skills that allowed us to adapt while more rigid competitors faded out.

If the nature of even non-catastrophic climate change is to make the world much more unpredictable, adaptation is impossible in a meaningful sense.

That's what the Neanderthals said. It was true for them, they are gone.

What is possible is planned resilience: we can make our own systems more rugged and distributed, our natural systems protected and managed in ways that best preserve their ability to respond to (and incorporate) disturbance while preserving ecosystem services and biodiversity. We can plan to become good at dealing with chaos. But that is quite different than adapting to a singular change, and it takes dramatically different kinds of priorities.

Planned resilience. Now there's an oxymoron. Get real. You can't plan resilience. All you can do is to stop being rigid and work on being agile. Wait, that's always been true. It is only the extinct cultures that didn't grok this, folks like the Easter Islanders and such.

Update:

I was too gentle.

Clearly, we've already entered an age of climate commitment: climate change is here, and the carbon we have already released, combined with the carbon we're already committed to releasing in the future, will together produce a pretty serious amount of climate chaos no matter what we do.

Just as clearly we want to act boldly to forestall even climate disasters by slashing climate emissions as dramatically as we can (80% by 2030 is beginning to look like realism). The difference between a hard landing and a soft landing -- between catastrophic climate chaos and serious climate effects -- may be the survival of civilization, and that's a stake worth fighting for.

Here's reality.

Industrialized countries are currently focusing on 'climate mitigation' policies that, when implemented, will result in reduced emission of greenhouse gases. It was recently proposed that by 2020 each of these countries should reduce emissions to 60–75% of the amount that they emitted in 1990; and by 2050, to 25–50% of 1990 levels2. However, no such agreement was reached at the last UN Framework Convention on Climate Change Conference of Parties, held in Bali in December 2007. Nevertheless, these proposals, if acted on soon, are good news. But, to paraphrase Neil Armstrong, that's one giant leap for policy-makers, but one small step for the global environment.

For a start, industrialized countries produce only about 50% of global greenhouse-gas emissions, and the proportion produced by industrializing countries such as China and India is growing. If it is assumed, optimistically, that industrializing countries will not increase their emission rates soon and if industrialized countries follow the above proposal, then global emissions in 2020 will be only 12–20% less than in 1990.

From a glance at the global carbon cycle, it is clear that this reduction will not come close to stabilizing the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. . .

There is, unfortunately, no mystery: to stabilize climate, the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere must be stabilized, and to do so — given the limited capacity of the natural environment to absorb these gases — anthropogenic emissions will eventually need to be reduced to zero.

Better learn to adapt in the short term, and better learn to draw down and sequester carbon in the longer term. Emissions will never be zero, but with sequestration a net negative result that reduces concentrations is more possible.

It's useful to reflect on the difference between policy and reality. Policies have only the most tenuous connection to reality, and even more tenuous effects. Policy is about policy makers, not reality. It's a low sort of entertainment at best. It's a variant of the famous for being famous trope.