With the world losing the battle against global warming so far, experts are warning that humans need to follow nature's example: Adapt or die.

That means elevating buildings, making taller and stronger dams and seawalls, rerouting water systems, restricting certain developments, changing farming practices and ultimately moving people, plants and animals out of harm's way.

Adapting to rising seas and higher temperatures is expected to be a big topic at the U.N. climate-change talks in Copenhagen next week, along with the projected cost — hundreds of billions of dollars, much of it going to countries that cannot afford it.

That adaptation will be a major focus is remarkable in itself. Until the past couple of years, experts avoided talking about adjusting to global warming for fear of sounding fatalistic or causing countries to back off efforts to reduce emissions.

"It's something that's been neglected, hasn't been talked about and it's something the world will have to do," said Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. "Adaptation is going to be absolutely crucial for some societies."

Some biologists point to how nature has handled the changing climate. The rare Adonis blue butterfly of Britain looked as if it was going to disappear because it couldn't fly far and global warming was making its habitat unbearable. To biologists' surprise, it evolved longer thoraxes and wings, allowing it to fly farther to cooler locales.

"Society needs to be changing as much as wildlife is changing," said University of Texas at Austin biologist Camille Parmesan, an expert on how species change with global warming.

One difficulty is that climate change is happening rapidly.

"Adaptation will be particularly challenging because the rate of change is escalating and is moving outside the range to which society has adapted in the past" when more natural climate changes happened, U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration chief Jane Lubchenco, a marine biologist, told Congress on Wednesday.

Cities, states and countries are scrambling to adapt or are at least talking about it and setting aside money for it. Some examples:

• England is strengthening the Thames River flood control barrier at a cost of around half a billion dollars.

• The Netherlands is making its crucial flood control system stronger.

• California is redesigning the gates that move water around the agriculturally vital Sacramento River Delta so that they can work when the sea level rises dramatically there.

• Boston elevated a sewage treatment plant to keep it from being flooded when sea level rises. New York City is looking at similar maneuvers for water plants.

• Chicago has a program to promote rooftop vegetation and reflective roofs that absorb less heat. That could keep the temperature down and ease heat waves.

• Engineers are installing "thermal siphons" along the oil pipeline in Alaska, which is built on permafrost that is thawing, to draw heat away from the ground.

• Researchers are uprooting moisture-loving trees along British Columbia's coastal rainforests and dropping their seedlings in the dry ponderosa pine forests of Idaho, where they are more likely to survive.

• Singapore plans to cut its flood-prone areas in half by 2011 by widening and deepening drains and canals and completing a $226 million dam at the mouth of the city's main river.

• In Thailand, there are large-scale efforts to protect places from rising sea levels. Monks at one temple outside Bangkok had to raise the floor by more than 3 feet.

• Desperately poor Bangladesh is spending more than $50 million on adaptation. It is trying to fend off the sea with flood control and buildings on stilts.

President Barack Obama and Congress are talking about $1.2 billion a year from the U.S. for international climate aid, which includes adaptation. The U.N. climate chief, Yvo de Boer, said $10 billion to $12 billion a year is needed from developed countries through 2012 to "kick-start" things. Then it will get even more expensive.

The World Bank estimates adaptation costs will total $75 billion to $100 billion a year over the next 40 years. The International Institute for Environment and Development, a London think tank, says that number is too low.

It may even be $200 billion a year or $300 billion a year, said Chris Hope, a business school professor at the University of Cambridge and part of the IIED study.

Nevertheless, Hope said failing to adapt would be even more expensive — perhaps $6 trillion a year on average over the next 200 years. Adaptation could cut that by about $2 trillion a year, he said.

As much as three-quarters of the spending will be needed in the developing world, experts say.

"Those are not the countries that caused the problem," Hope said. "There's a pretty strong moral case for us giving them assistance for the impacts that we've largely caused."

Sending money from rich countries to poor ones raises questions of who will control the spending and whether it will be wasted or stolen.

As for helping plants and animals, British climate scientist Martin Parry said the world will have to create a triage system to figure out which living things can be saved, which can't and are effectively goners, and which don't need immediate help.

"It's a brutal way to go about things," Parry said.

And what about people?

Some islands, such as the Maldives, and some coastal cities will not be able to survive rising seas no matter what protections are put in place, said Saleemel Huq, a senior fellow at IIED who runs an adaptation center in Bangladesh. In those cases, he said, the world will need "planned relocation" of people and cities.

Parmesan said people are going to have to realize that "some areas are not going to be good enough to live in in the next 100 years."

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091204/ap_on_sc/sci_climate_adapting

it's a good thing it's not real then. Otherwise my gf's cousin may not have his apartment in 100 years.

In the other news



http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704342404574576280330992114.html?mod=googlenews_wsj








http://www.examiner.com/x-19663-LA-Legal-Examiner~y2009m12d4-Two-Academy-members-want-Al-Gore-to-give-back-his-Oscar

What does that have to do with this thread?

Them Politicians are sounding like TV Evangelists. Adapt or die! That's what's been happening since the beginning of life and they didn't need to be taxed to be told that.
This and that's gonna' happen. You let us have all yo' money and we'll send you a signed photocopied, picture of Pelosi. We promise!

Pray to Kang Hussein and Pelosi. Pray they keep the strength to keep comin' up with ways to screw us. If they weren't so pathetic, they'd be funny.

Atlantis,
Lets at least wait until the UN finishes its investigation.
It may well turn out the emails were altered by someone with ulterior motives. Maybe even some Republicans. LMAO

Either way,

The theft of the e-mails and their publication online — only weeks before the U.N. summit on global warming — has been politically explosive, even if researchers say their content has no bearing on the principles of climate change itself.

Virginia Burkett, chief scientist for global change research at the U.S. Geological Survey, told The Associated Press that, even if the data and studies mentioned in the e-mail exchanges were ignored, the evidence "is still hugely overwhelming in terms of the rates of changes that can only be attributed to the warming of the atmosphere. That includes melting Arctic sea ice, glaciers and ice sheets, decline of spring snow season, coral reef bleaching and earlier onset of spring in plants and animals," she said, referring to changing patterns of blooming, hibernation, and migration.

"They may be talking three or four datasets in the e-mail scandal, we're looking at 28,000 data sets of physical and biological systems from around the world," she said.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091204/ap_on_sc/climate_hacked_e_mails

The email fiasco still doesn't mean anything anyway.

If the earth is going through a warming cycle like it does without us being involved, we need to be proactive to upcoming problem.

The earth is going to warm and cool and it will effect us when it does.

If we are part of the cause or if we are accelerating it, that too is no biggie.

Stop polluting the planet we need to live, idiots.

I don't think anybody is opposing the stopping of pollution. It's you guys are confused what the Coppenhagen treaty is all about. Better go read it before speak anything about it. They want to impose new taxes on (fraud and falsified) data, and they are selling it to the public like it's the "solution" while these politicians are in the pocket of the biggest polluting companies in the world.

You think they represent nations and people? Give me a break. Nobody voted on the "EU president" currently sitting in Brussels, there was no vote done by anyone, they never asked several millions of people about it...All these imposters are no more than the loudspeakers of various corporate and lobby interests and on the loosing end is always the public, because they are the ones who gonna pay for anything they come up with, meanwhile these guys pocket away millions received from lobbies and companies to push their propaganda.

Sadly it costs to clean up garbage, whether it be on the ground, in the air, in the water, etc....

So naturally we will need to pay for global cleaning. Especially since we cannot get people to do it themselves.

Global poisoning has been an issue since I was little or before and people will still not do what they need to to stop it so we will have to let the government make it happen and clean the mess up.

the last computer models I saw show West Texas as becoming semi tropical. so personally I don't have a problem with global warming. it might be kinda cool

oh, well, sorry about San Francisco and New York and all that. but WE are gonna get water!

I heard that!

"They may be talking three or four datasets in the e-mail scandal, we're looking at 28,000 data sets of physical and biological systems from around the world,"