Climate Adaptation

 Assembly theory is a new way of looking at the world where humans exist and how they might have come to be ( Assembly of Life ). It includes not only all the things that exist now, but everything that existed in the past. It proposes a lineage of how things came to be as a series of combinatorial steps based on existing forms, each step leading to greater complexity. Looking at the present, we envision humans as a more complex descendant of primates, which developed from some primitive first mammal, and so on back to the first life form only able to interact with it's environment in a very limited way. Meanwhile, as biological forms evolved over billions of years, the conditions under which their development occurred has altered from some rocky turbulent past to a more verdant world with an oxygen rich atmosphere. The earlier environment offered fewer combinatorial options to an emerging life entity. When the air became more populated with a variety of gases, air breathing life t...

 To all the believers and perceivers out there it is clear that the world we used to know is changing. The natural beauty and abundance that was our inheritance has been spent without restraint until much of it is nearly gone. In its place is a rapidly diminishing and threatening environment that is our children's inheritance. It will become the world they know and the world we once knew will be forgotten. There are the beginnings of gatherings of those who see the change and this can be a start towards a new world if not a recreation of the world we knew.

 Reduce - Reuse - Recycle.  Be the change you want to see. "But I'm just one person, a drop in the bucket." A million people can fill a hundred buckets. The universe is change - the result of minuscule transformations occurring over time. While we wait for governments and corporations to join the movement, we will need to change, whether we want to or not. Less water - use less. Plastic islands - reuse. Seawater rise - drive electric to higher ground. You'll have to anyway. Time to get in practice.

 

In the flow of time there are ups and downs for every species of plants and animals. When times are good for some, they flourish. When times are bad for others, they decline. It is easy to point to the giants of the earth, the great, scaly monsters known as Dinosaurs, who once ruled every corner of the world. And now, with the discovery of massive celestial impact craters, it is easy to imagine their demise, as the sky darkened and the many plants that drove the growth of these creatures wilted and died. Then came the rise of mammals as the Earth reached a new ecological equilibrium. I used to live on Earth in this current age of history, back when it was habitable. There were no super highways, no mass produced housing tracts, no green smog layers pressing down from above. Back then we went to the woods to climb mountains, not flee from them with fires licking our heels. Yeah, hurricanes came and went, but only one big one every few years, not every month. I can almost see the brontos...

Climate is not just changing. It has changed. We are already seeing the affects of rising green house gas emissions every day in every part of the world. Life changing events are occurring in weather, pollution, rising sea level, scorched earth and crop failures. Carbon reduction strategies meant to reverse global warming are being implemented, but it is clear that the recovery will take time. Meanwhile, the detrimental changes already occurring require that we develop adaptation strategies to deal with the increasing impacts climate change is having on our lives and livelihoods. Source: from OECD/IFPRI (2014). Modeling Adaptation to Climate Change in Agriculture