The Disaster of Climate Tyranny

In the orthodox house of climate change advocacy, adaptation is the abused stepchild. It sleeps in the attic, is denied sunlight and proper nourishment. This ill-treatment owes largely to the mitigation brood, who have the run of the house. They ridicule and beat up on adaptation whenever he tries to sneak into the pantry for some food. Mitigation doesn't like to share. If only adaptation could somehow contact the outside world, get word to his cousin, Natural Hazards & Disasters. But I just learned from Kathleen Tierney, the Director of the National Hazards Center at the University of Colorado, that this is unlikely to happen. "The climate change community has a different terminology than [the discipline of] Natural Hazards," she explained today, at the weekly Center for Environmental Journalism seminar (where I'm a visiting Fellow). Mitigation, she said, means one thing in the climate change community and another in the ...