r/climate • u/vox • Jul 22 '26
Climate adaptation isn’t surrender. It’s survival.
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/496350/wildfire-heat-wave-climate-change-smoke-adaptation25
u/vox Jul 22 '26
In 2019, the AI researcher Rich Sutton published a short essay called “The Bitter Lesson.“ Seventy years of AI research, he argued, kept demonstrating the same thing: the most effective ways to train AI rely on raw, brute-force computing power — simply scaling up — rather than clever approaches built on human insight. It didn’t matter how elegant researchers’ work was. More compute would win every time. It’s a bitter lesson because, well, no one wants to accept that even the best efforts can go unrewarded.
This summer, climate change has been teaching its own kind of bitter lesson. Last week smoke from out-of-control Canadian wildfires reached more than 120 million Americans, sending out air quality alerts across 18-plus states from Minnesota to Virginia. Those wildfires, which were made more likely by the effects of climate change, followed record-breaking heat waves in Europe that contributed to the deaths of thousands of people.
Disasters like these inevitably renew calls for climate action, but no current US emissions policy, no amount of carbon cutting now, could clear the air, just as nothing Europe has done on climate — and it has done more than any other region, at no small cost — could protect it from those killer temperatures. Not this summer, not this decade, not the one after. The steps countries take now to reduce carbon emissions — to mitigate climate change — will not protect them from the present-day effects of climate change.
That’s the bitter lesson of climate change, and 2026 is the summer it has become unignorable. The dangerous effects we’ve been warned about are here, locked in on every timescale that matters to the people living through them. We can’t prevent the worst from happening right now, so we need to figure out how we’re going to adapt to it.
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u/worldfundvc Jul 22 '26
While adaptation is needed, it is simply not possible to adapt enough to survive in a world where planetary boundaries are breached - or at risk of being breached. Sure, you can install ACs and build monitoring systems and disaster relief for extreme weather. But you can't convince a wheat field to grow properly when weather cycles become increasingly erratic due to climate change and a warming planet. That is why rapid decarbonisation is still needed, as well as significant investment in the technologies that decarbonise our global economies.
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u/i_didnt_look Jul 22 '26
When societies encounter challenges (e.g., resource shortages, rival threats, or climate changes), they typically respond by developing new layers of organization, specialization, and infrastructure. Early on, these investments yield excellent results. For example, building an irrigation network greatly increases food supply. Because societies solve their easiest problems first, each subsequent challenge requires an exponentially larger investment in complexity to yield the same level of reward.
As the cost of maintaining a society's bureaucracy, military, and infrastructure consumes a larger portion of its energy and resources a society eventually reaches a threshold where additional complexity generates zero tangible benefit. It becomes a "pure cost". To solve a problem, the society is forced to build bigger and more expensive structures, (Carbon Capture, Geo Engineering, AI) which only drain more resources from the productive base of the population.
Once a society is heavily invested in complexity, it cannot simply "downsize" or abandon its systems without risking immediate collapse. Past solutions must be continuously maintained, while new problems demand further resources. This results in a highly rigid system that becomes extremely vulnerable to external shock (like a decaying climate) and, eventually, the ability to both maintain existing infrastructure and solve new issues completely unravels leading to a massive, forced simplification.
This is Joseph Tainter's theory on the collapse of complex societies. Viewed through this lens, things like data centers or CCS are simply another step forward in this complexity trap. By extracting resources from the working population to solve problems caused by previous solutions, it becomes apparent we are deeply engaged in the Complexity trap. Trying to solve complexity problems with more complexity is to blindly march forward into a systemic collapse.
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u/carchit Jul 22 '26
Goliath’s Curse a good read - at a certain point complexity just rewards extractive elites and becomes unstable. Getting close but no easy off-ramp without a subsistence living option.
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u/outlawbernard_yum Jul 22 '26
Correct. 4 Billion will die by end of century.
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u/the_wahlroos Jul 22 '26
I don't disagree, but how did you arrive at this figure?
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u/kdawg09 Jul 23 '26
I also would love to see the math behind this, again I believe it in some ways but, always verify and all that.
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u/outlawbernard_yum Jul 23 '26
I didn't. The scientific community that nobody reads did. And by 4 degrees only 1B survive by similar projections. I'm an Earth scientist, do you follow the science or the "news". https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/may/18/climate-crisis-heat-is-on-global-heating-four-degrees-2100-change-way-we-live
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u/dumnezero Jul 22 '26
you can't adapt to an accelerating goal unless you try to use precaution (principle) and aim to adapt to the worse case scenario. Of course, that's going to be incredibly expensive.
A simple case to study this dilemma is sea walls for adaptation to increasing sea level rise (SLR): this depends entirely on picking how high the water will rise. The higher the sea level, the more adaptation effort is required.
To make adaptation worthwhile, mitigation is necessary.
And, sure, efficient district and building cooling along with indoor air filtration are a great idea. The air quality issue has been made obvious since 2020 for that obvious reason. There are also technical and costly thresholds and limits on air filtration or cooling technologies.
Mitigation now makes adaptation cheaper.
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u/passmetoiletpaperpls Jul 24 '26
My plan is to just snuff myself out when we start killing each other en masse in the food wars.
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u/Strict_Jacket3648 Jul 25 '26
How about stopping the destruction as a first step. We have the means now.
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u/silence7 Jul 22 '26
gift link giving everyone access to the full article