Don’t argue about climate change, plan for it

Internecine scientific struggles over defining and measuring global climate change are obscuring more important questions about the policy dimensions of such change. Exacerbating the problem are ostrichlike government attitudes toward climate change that fail to focus attention on the more serious challenges facing society.

Individuals, organizations and governments can deny or promote interminably the premise that humans are significantly implicated in the climate changes we are now experiencing. However, the reality is that humans will be affected by climate change in significant ways, whoever or whatever is determined to be the culprit.
The real focus of the debate, therefore, should be about its policy implications and what should be done to plan for its eventuality. With the International Polar Year just under way, desperately needed is a significant effort by policymakers to address the enormous political, economic and environmental challenges to be thrust upon governments by a melting Arctic.

Geographers have frequently pointed out that the key to planning for global climate change — or war, the economy or the environment, for that matter — is understanding its spatial dimensions. They have also demonstrated time after time that geographic ignorance about the peoples and places targeted by governmental and other policies often precipitates policy disasters.

Chicago Sun Times