When it comes to climate change, is there a point when adaptation isn't enough?
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Hi there, it's Sasha Pfeiffer. It's been about a year since the historic vote to eliminate all federal funding for public media, and we want to say thank you for sticking with us and for choosing us to keep you informed. We take that trust seriously, and we're grateful. NPR exists because of people like you who believe the world is better with public media in it. We cannot do this without you. If you haven't given to support public media this month, it's not too late. Visit donate.npr.org and thank you. Now to today's show. It's Consider This, where every day we go deep on one big news story. Today, is climate adaptation enough? Firefighters are battling wildfires across large swaths of Europe. That's the latest weather event on a continent that has experienced a lot of heat this summer.
Scientists say that's created conditions that make wildfires more likely.
And Europe really is having a brunt of climate change impact. Scott Stevens is a professor of fire science and forest policy at UC Berkeley. He spoke to CBS News on Thursday. No doubt we've got to solve climate change. But we also know that just the gases in the atmosphere right now, even if we do a great job of reducing, it could be there for decades.
For decades. Consider this. Wildfires in Europe have caused hundreds of thousands of people to move in the span of just a few days. What happens when climate change becomes so disruptive that humans cannot adapt fast enough?
From NPR, I'm Sasha Pfeiffer.
So we said the beavers can do it probably a fraction of the cost, certainly more sustainably. Listen to State of the World every weekday on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.
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It's Consider This from NPR. All this week, we've been reporting on the catastrophic wildfires happening in Western Europe, especially France and Spain and now Greece. One line in the media coverage really stood out to me. A European scientist said all this heat and all these fires are likely to only get worse in the future to the point, he said, that we will be, quote, passing the limits of adaptation. I wondered what that looks like. So we've called him to ask. Johann Rockström is director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, and he noted that 200-some years since the Industrial Revolution, the Earth has remained fairly resilient, but that is changing.
90% of the heat caused by our fossil fuel burning is not in the atmosphere causing the temperature rise which has led us to the climate crisis we see today. It's in the ocean. 50% of the carbon dioxide from the greenhouse gases we add is not in the atmosphere trapping heat. It's actually stored, half of it in the ocean and half of it on land. So a healthy planet... has this extraordinary biophysical capacity to buffer and dampen, basically cool the planet. We're seeing, unfortunately, increasing indicators of our planet losing this capacity. Not that we've crossed the tipping point, but forest systems are getting weaker and no longer able to take up as much carbon.
What are the current European wildfires and why do they matter for climate adaptation?
The ocean is warming faster than we had expected. Ice is melting faster than we had expected. This is a stress response of a planet that is trying to do everything it can to buffer and dampen change. And when we come closer to the end of this capacity, then of course the risk is very high that the impacts hit back even harder on our societies.
And what does that look like for humans? If we reach these limits, what does it mean for people on Earth?
To begin with, what it looks like is that we will have more shocks of what we're experiencing right now in Europe. Remember that we are experiencing, in places that have never recorded it before, life-threatening temperatures above 40 degrees Celsius. So that's the first thing. The second is droughts, floods, fires that risk food security and even social stability. We are at risk of triggering more disease outbreaks, even pandemics, which then spills over into less and less stable economies and therefore also less and less stable societies, moving into situations of displacement, migration, potentially even armed conflicts.
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