Climate Adaptation Isn’t Optional
Adapting to climate change isn’t really a choice. We’re going to do it, either now or later.
Image: oilpainting-repro.com
The beautiful image you see above is from Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, a series of 1830s woodblock prints by the Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai. You can see iconic Mount Fuji in the background.
In the foreground is the also-beautiful Lake Suwa, which has something to tell us about climate change.
Lake Suwa is in Nagano prefecture, site of the 1998 Winter Olympics. Cold winters made this lake famous for its omiwatari (“God’s Crossing” in Japanese) ice ridges. These form when repeated freezing and thawing builds an elevated path across the water.
Local Shinto priests attributed this unusual event to a male deity crossing the lake to visit a female deity enshrined on the other side. They thought it notable and so in 1443 started keeping track of the lake’s ice conditions, inadvertently generating centuries of valuable climate data.
The records show Lake Suwa froze almost every year until about 1800. After the Industrial Revolution and growing CO2 emissions, it now freezes only about half the time. That rate is diminishing, too.
We see similar changes elsewhere, albeit without the data trail. North America’s Great Lakes ice coverage hit a record low in 2024, for example.
Japan has another handy long-run climate indicator: Cherry blossoms. The spring flowering is a major event there. Kyoto, the ancient capital city, has records of the date cherry trees blossomed going back to the 9th century. Those are the green dots in this chart. The blossoms appear sooner in warmer-than-average years.
Chart: Roger Coppock
The year-to-year variation is substantial, but the trend curve shows the blossoms appearing earlier starting around 1900.
More modern records show the same for cherry trees in both Kyoto and Washington D.C.
Chart: National Geographic
Other things like an “urban heat island” effect probably play a role in this. But it makes intuitive sense that CO2-induced warmer temperatures would mean earlier spring weather, causing plants to flower earlier in the year.
This matters because flowers are part of a complex seasonal ecosystem.
Plants, animals, insects and microbes all depend on each other to do certain things at certain times. They can evolve to changing conditions, but sudden change is harder. And on Mother Nature’s timescale, a few decades or even a century count as “sudden.”
All this came to mind when I saw this post by a meteorologist.
We can debate what is causing higher average temperatures. I think the connection to carbon emissions is pretty clear. Some people insist it’s just natural variability, solar cycles, etc. As Derek points out, we are in even more trouble if climate change isn’t man-made.
But whatever the cause, modern instruments and ancient scrolls show the atmosphere is warmer now. The effects are worsening: Wildfires, floods, hurricanes, and more.
This means even if we could somehow get to net zero today (a pipe dream), the next decade or two are still going to be rough. Emissions may be close to a peak, but they are not falling.
That means adaptation isn’t really a choice. We’re going to do it. The choice is to adapt now or later… when it will be much harder and cost much more.