Word: problem
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Allen's not worried. Although the device he's launching is larger than the one he once envisioned, Allen says it packs everything business travelers want in a portable package. "I've always been captivated with problems that really need solving--what should exist and how we could create a solution." His solution works, but the real question is whether there was a problem to solve in the first place...
...community, business or country against the effects of climate change. Its complement is mitigation--any measure that will reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, such as drawing power from a wind turbine rather than a coal-fired power plant. Mitigation addresses, if you will, the front end of the global-warming problem; by cutting emissions, it aims to slow rising temperatures. Adaptation is the back end of the problem--trying to live with the changes in the environment and the economy that global warming has and will continue to generate...
Public discussion of global warming in the U.S. is years behind the rest of the world, and adaptation is no exception. "You can't adapt to a problem you don't admit exists," notes Richard Klein of the Stockholm Environment Institute, another IPCC co-author. The U.S. has only recently acknowledged global warming, while other countries are already taking concrete action to prepare for its impact. The Netherlands has some of the strongest flood defenses in the world and is making them stronger. Britain has doubled spending on flood and coastal-defense management, to about $1 billion a year. France...
...that ideal. Robert Bea, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and former oil-industry engineer, co-authored a landmark report for the National Science Foundation that analyzed why the Federal Government did such a poor job of protecting Louisiana before and after the storm. Most of the problems he identified persist, he says. And that is not Louisiana's problem alone, Bea emphasizes. The Army Corps of Engineers recently announced that 122 major levee systems are less than safe; those levees will face greater stresses with global warming. Extra-strong hurricanes will threaten cities along the entire Gulf...
...Europe, or even New Orleans. As a matter of fairness, Huq says, adaptation measures in poor countries should be subsidized by rich countries. "It is poor countries that are suffering the brunt of climate change," he says, "but it is the rich countries' greenhouse-gas emissions that caused this problem in the first place." Britain is already subsidizing a substantial program in Bangladesh that will raise roads, wells and houses above the level of the last major flood. "Bangladesh is a showcase of what will happen under climate change," says Penny Davies, a diplomat at the British High Commission...