Mitigate or adapt: the climate challenge

"each person in low income countries":

Chinese outnumber Australians 50 to 1.
Emissions 10 to 15 tonnes per person.

Adaption makes complete sense. We can work to reduce emissions here, which is all great, but important to plan in case others don't. My understanding is the climate is warming anyway, so more reason to adapt.
Not building on low lying coastal areas is an example of adapting. Given the climate is warming anyway, we should avoid such building if everyone hit net zero tomorrow. Given some countries are increasing emissions, that makes such building more important to avoid.
We should still take action, because while we can plan, plants and animals can't. If we can slow the rate of change, that gives more time for plants and animals, and us, to adapt.

Imagine you’re on a plane, and someone notices smoke coming from the engine. The crew asks passengers to help by shifting luggage to balance weight and reduce stress on the failing engine. You could say, “Well, my suitcase is tiny, so moving it won’t make any difference.” If everyone thinks that way, the plane goes down. But if each person does their small part, the collective action keeps the plane aloft.

The argument that Australia’s emissions cuts are meaningless is like refusing to move your bag on the grounds that it’s too light to matter, while still expecting the plane not to crash.

It is really tiring in 2025 to hear the same tired, boomer-centric argument. It assumes Australia’s contribution is meaningless because our share of global emissions is small in absolute terms. This overlooks the way collective action problems work. Climate change is a textbook example of a “tragedy of the commons”: if every country adopted the logic of “we’re too small to matter,” then no one would act, and global emissions would never decline. The success of mitigation rests not on the impact of any one country in isolation, but on the cumulative effect of all countries fulfilling their commitments. Moreover, being seen to lead or even simply participate builds diplomatic credibility, strengthens pressure on laggards, and helps drive investment and innovation in technologies that become cheaper and more widely available for others.

And this view ignores that Australia’s emissions, while a small share globally, still rank among the highest per capita................

Ultimately, every fraction of a degree of warming avoided makes a tangible difference to the severity of its impacts. A world that warms by 2.0°C is vastly safer than one that warms by 2.7°C, and each incremental reduction in emissions contributes to lowering the risks of extreme weather, biodiversity loss, and economic disruption, etc, etc, etc.......

With this in mind, mitigation and adaptation are not competing strategies-they are complementary. If we neglect mitigation, the scale of adaptation required will become overwhelming and, in some cases, impossible. If we neglect adaptation, we leave ourselves exposed to harms already locked in. The logical path forward is therefore a balanced strategy: invest in cutting emissions today to slow the crisis, while also preparing our society to withstand the impacts that are no longer preventable.

This whole article is premised on a false binary.

Hi John,

I was determined to make the point that our emissions are small “in a world where emissions continue to rise”, “when forces are working against emissions reduction globally”.

Your analogy isn’t really analogous to the global emissions situation because it’s not possible to add more luggage to the plane while in flight. So of course it makes sense that moving your “tiny suitcase” could make a difference. Not so though with a tiny emitter reducing its emissions only to have that reduction swamped by countries increasing their emissions.

And how can this article be “premised on a false binary” when I state “This mitigation/adaptation imbalance needs correcting.”? I’m not saying it’s one or the other.

Sorry, your final statement (and the premise on which your entire comment is based) is wrong, The article specifically acknowledges that it is a question of balance: "If we can’t influence the global climate mathematically, we should focus as much, if not more, on preparing for climate change compared to attempting to alter its trajectory. This mitigation/adaptation imbalance needs correcting."

Sorry John, your analogy breaks down when there a number of big people with big luggage who either refuse or barely participate in the luggage shifting process. Plane goes down anyway.
Further, the biggest person with the most bagage decides to only move their handbag, not their suitcase.

Suggest you read a little wider. Excellent, very well researched article by Chris Uhlman in The Australian, titled "No happily ever after in Australia's green energy fairytale" Sat 19th July (try library on line archives).

Sample extracts:

"Despite the endlessly hyped record levels of investment in wind, solar and batteries, coal still
dominates China’s electricity sector, accounting for 58 per cent of its generation in 2024. Eightysix
per cent of China’s primary energy comes from coal, oil and gas. That number will not change
in a hurry because China is building new coal-fired power plants at the rate of one a week.

China remains the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, accounting for about a third of the
global total. Along with India, it contributed 62 per cent of the increase in global emissions last
year.

Australian politicians usually like to focus on Beijing’s green credentials, but on a diplomatic tour
through the Pacific Foreign Minister Penny Wong offered a rare moment of candour. When
pressed by journalists about pursuing even more extreme emissions targets than those Labor has
already signed up to, Wong pointed the finger at Beijing.

“China is the world’s largest emitter. Its actions will determine whether we can achieve our
target,” the Foreign Minister said.

Australia accounts for just more than 1 per cent of global carbon emissions. We could unplug the
nation and China would replace our yearly carbon footprint in a fortnight.

Pretending that our share of emissions will decide the fate of the Great Barrier Reef, save a
seahorse or alter global weather patterns is not just a fantasy, it’s a lie.

In February, Reuters reported: “India has the second-largest clean power capacity development
pipeline globally after China, with nearly 56,000 megawatts of new renewables, hydro and
nuclear capacity under construction.”

Read on and you learn: “However, the country is also building 30,000MW of new coal-fired
capacity, which will preserve coal’s status as India’s primary power source even after the
construction boom.”

The short story is India is in the process of building four times the total coal generation on
Australia’s eastern grid. Those new coal-fired plants will be generating near capacity 24/7, while
the new wind or solar developments will deliver well less than half their claimed capacity when
averaged over a year."

Read the whole article if you can get hold of it!

Nothing Australia does will move the dial. Meanwhile we're on the road to bankruptcy and unreliable energy and further industry loss. Yet we continue to hypocritically export coal to other nations that make products we buy in abundance, yet due to pathetic virtue signalling won't use that coal ourselves. New HELE coal power stations built on existing sites would no doubt be cheaper than what we are attempting now, if all the extra transmission costs and replacement of renewables is factored in, let alone the additional cost of firming capacity! Australia, the dumb country and getting stupider by the moment!

I agree entirely. Unfortunately, those making the decisions have no interest in common sense but are more interested in personal grandstanding and in doing so cement the view of their inadequacies.

James#, Chris Uhlmann had another climate change article in the Australian just yesterday, and interestingly, he mentions adaptation vs mitigation.

He said, “This column’s position is that climate change is a problem but not an existential threat. Rich countries will manage adaptation better than poor ones, and adaptation is where this lands because global emissions keep rising. The world is not serious about net zero so over-investing in mitigation is a mug’s game if many are cheating.”

He’s about the best in the business.

Wow, so nice to read a commonsense overview on how Australia might most sensibly and cost effectively respond to climate change expectations. Sadly I seem to interact with a number of well educated and well placed (financially) Australians who are unable or unwilling to see let alone accept this perspective. As for a large number of the general population they seem to me to have been brainwashed over the past 20 years by schools, political groups and others and now have closed minds. At some point it seems the subsidy funds must run out or become prohibitively expensive. I find the current situation quite depressing.

Excellent well researched article that makes so many valid points that are blatantly obvious yet which are so often overlooked or at least totally ignored by Chris Bowen and co. I totally agree with your analogy of using a teacup to bail out water of a sinking ship. Common sense tells us we always need to both mitigate and adapt in a proportionally balanced way; not going flat out with a tea cup while the ship sinks. How is that helping anything/anyone?

Australia has a National Adaptation Plan developed by the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water. Strategies for adapting to climate change include infrastructure upgrades (e.g., flood defences), nature-based solutions (e.g., tree planting, mangrove restoration), early warning systems, and agricultural adjustments such as using drought-resistant crops. These strategies are effective, with early warning systems demonstrating significant cost-effectiveness, saving lives, and preventing billions in losses. Nature-based solutions are also proving effective by simultaneously building resilience and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The current government is working on both mitigation and adaptation which is both responsible and viable,

'Australia's innovations and deployment of photovoltaic (PV) energy generation have significantly contributed to reducing global carbon emissions, primarily by displacing fossil fuels in its own grid and through the global adoption of key Australian technologies like the PERC solar cell. The widespread installation of rooftop solar and large-scale renewable projects in Australia has resulted in substantial avoided emissions, and the global adoption of PERC technology alone was projected to mitigate a significant percentage of global emissions by the mid-2020s.'

Encore: Australia must act to save the World yet again?

One adaptation strategy I've had to implement was when I rebuilt my beachfront holiday home. Because of government guidelines about the potential for "coastal inundation" in the next 10-20 years I had to concrete steel screwpiles to a depth of 8 metres to support the house and use steel posts on top as part of the frame. This added about $30k to the cost of the rebuild. The fact that the tide has never come nearer than 40 metres away from the mythical 2015 line of inundation hasn't led to any review of the 2030 and 2050 lines. Still, Ive got a very solid set of bones in my new house.

Gee Tony, brave of you to try but honestly it would be easier to convince a born-again missionary that their newfound beliefs may be misguided (ie Australia by these actions can stop future warming because our 1% is special?). Because climate change is not a policy problem, it is a religion. Just as with religion, logic and common sense have no place. Chris Bowen is the high priest and our children are being brainwashed just as in any good old cult. What I think is the other issue is that adaption requires a certain level of economic strength to pay for any changes needed. The economic vandalism we are seeing from the green machine means that once we work out Australia actually cannot save the world, we will have foregone the means to adapt and live within whatever climate we face in 50 years time; we'll be broke. And I expect the rest of the world won't be too bothered about saving us.

Tony Dillon is spot on. We need to adapt to the warming climate. Why do councils allow people to build houses in flood zones and in high-risk fire zones? Where is the sense in that? There are signs that the globe is warming but is it due to man-made carbon dioxide? That is the widespread assumption held by nearly everybody. In fact it has all the signs of groupthink. Everybody believes it for no other reason that everybody else believes it. In politics the majority wins, but that is not the way science works. One person can be right where the vast majority can be wrong. There was a famous book written about 100 years ago called One hundred scientists against Einstein. We now know who was right. Many geologists have a different view of global warming. They tell us that the Earth has been far, far warmer than now, well before mankind ever inhabited the planet. The Earth was free of ice and Antartica or Gondwana was covered in forest. They also tell us that in other periods the Earth was much colder with thick ice covering where New York exists now and many other cities. And during those cold periods the level of carbon dioxide was several times higher than now. There is obviously a lot of information about our planet that the media is not telling the public. It is about time journalists started telling the other side of the story. Because there is another side.

The media seems to be only interested in scare stories as they believe this is what sells. It is well known the evening news is full of "bad news", deaths, calamities, disasters etc. The blind repetition of the government line is quite disappointing. As for the scientists, try asking for funding to look at the other side of the argument - two very strong vested interests are against you, the overseers who hand out the money and all the other scientists who have tied themselves to the climate change wagon and would have serious egg on their faces and reputational damage they won't easily forget or forgive. Look at the more recent example of the food industry where Ancel Keys pushed fat intake as the cause of heart disease with his famous 7 countries study which showed a correlation. But the study specifically excluded countries that didn't fit the curve (a bit like today's modelling, only include things that give the desired answer). He also pilloried a British scientist (John Yudkin) who showed high sugar intake was a primary cause of cardiovascular disease. Even today the "food pyramid" with processed carbs forming the bulk of government recommended nutrition shows how slow the scientific community are at modifying historical errors.

"during those cold periods the level of carbon dioxide was several times higher than now."

Google AI:

'The statement that CO2 levels were "several times higher" during cold periods is incorrect; during the ice ages of the last few hundred thousand years, carbon dioxide levels were significantly lower than they are today, hovering around 200 parts per million (ppm). Warmer, interglacial periods within that time had higher CO2 levels, but even then they were below the roughly 300 ppm seen before human-induced increases. Carbon dioxide levels were indeed much higher in earlier geological periods, such as the time of the dinosaurs, but these were generally warm, not cold, periods.'

420 ppm in 2023/2024.

CO2 is a more persistent 'greenhouse gas' than the more effective water vapour.

'Water vapour produces a much larger greenhouse effect than carbon dioxide because it is significantly more abundant in the atmosphere and is the most important greenhouse gas, accounting for about half of the Earth's total greenhouse effect.'

Does rising CO2 in the atmosphere lead directly to rising temperatures of the planet? This is a key question as almost the entire effort of cutting CO2 emissions around the world is based on this assumption. However the website geocraft.com has some interesting views on the subject. It looks at the long history of the earth going back 500 million years and plots a chart of the world’s temperature relative to CO2 in the atmosphere. The temperature data is after CR Scotese and the CO2 data is after RA Berner 2001. It shows that earth cycles through warm periods and ice ages. There is a period 460 million years ago during the Ordovician period when the temperature of the earth was about 12° C but CO2 levels were far higher. The website says: “To the consternation of global warming proponents, the Late Ordovician Period was also an Ice Age while at the same time CO2 concentrations then were nearly 12 times higher than today-- 4400 ppm. According to greenhouse theory, Earth should have been exceedingly hot. Instead, global temperatures were no warmer than today. Clearly, other factors besides atmospheric carbon influence earth temperatures and global warming.”

"the Late Ordovician Period was also an Ice Age while at the same time CO2 concentrations then were nearly 12 times higher than today-- 4400 ppm":

'This ice age did not occur when CO2 was at it's peak. Rather it began at a time when the concentration was between 180 and 200 ppm.'
https://skepticalscience.com/co2-was-higher-in-late-ordovician.htm

We can all throw our hands up in the air and give up on mitigation, but adapting to a rapidly warming world is not as simple or inexpensive as not building housing on existing flood-prone or bushfire-prone areas. Hundreds of thousands of existing houses would have to be moved as those areas expand, along with the associated infrastructure. Heatwaves will make large parts of Australia uninhabitable for at least half the year. Where will we move the houses to? Where will we house all the Pacific Islanders whose islands have gone underwater? We already know that the costs of adaptation are much higher than the costs of mitigation, so what exactly is your adaptation plan, one that doesn't try to deny the scientific consequences of global warming?

SonjaD
Unfortunately, you really seem to have little understanding of the problem. What has been done is now history. Much of your article is factually wrong. The Pacific Islands are NOT going underwater. Confirmed by New Zealand scientists. Nor are the Maldives in the Indian Ocean!
Typically much of the development that has occurred, has been due to the fact that authorities, government and local government, driven by the real estate industry particularly, have opted for expediency and profit. This can be seen in just about any new, or relatively new developments where houses are built in areas prone to flooding, or in waterways. The numbers of houses per area of land is at the point where they really would be touching if they were packed any tighter. This makes both a flood or fire situation much worse when it occurs, but it has nothing at all to do with climate change. We are architects of our own demise in not planning ahead for what are perfectly normal Australian conditions. The science of global warming is far from being settled. There are less catastrophic events such as cyclones, fires and floods than in the past. FACTUALLY! Things seem worse because more people put themselves in harms way because of ignorance and greed. Huge bushfires in the 1700s and 1800s would have created very little harm, because there was no infrastructure such as we see today in place. The extent of damage has nothing to do with the size of the fire or flood! The media has a large part to play in this hysteria as well. Prior to the 1900s many large fires and floods would have gone completely unnoticed by the majority of the population. We won't have to worry about Pacific Islanders coming here. The sea level is NOT rising as can be checked from the tidal records of Fort Denison in Sydney Harbour since very early 1800s. Waterfront real estate prices are not declining. Heat events are NOT increasing!