Emergency management is short-term in its focus on immediate disasters and measures to clean up the damage.
But climate change, the catalyst for droughts, forest fires, violent storms and extreme weather demands a long term response.
Canadian environmental policy analyst Robert Paehlke estimates, for instance, that the developed countries which are pumping out the majority of fossil fuel emissions per capita into the atmosphere must reduce them in the range of 30 to 50 per cent by 2050 to avoid the worst effects of climate change.
It is a do-able exercise technically but only over a forty year time frame, he told me in a recent interview.
Paehlke says this is a challenge for politicians who generally are elected for four or five year terms and are experiencing pressure from powerful oil and coal producing interests that have more clout than the new green industries pushing solar and wind.
"It takes real leadership to say, look, 'we have got a problem; [but] it may be 30 years off [to solve it]," says Paelkle, professor emeritus in environmental studies at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario and the founding editor of Alternatives Journal.
Some problems such as a serious shortage of water is threatening both the viability of agriculture and communities in the US southwest, although that concern has not filtered down to the Americans who are still headed in that direction to live.
Meanwhile, rising ocean levels, a century from now, may overwhelm the low lying coastal communities of California including the San Francisco Bay Area. Local scientists are anticipating that Silicon Valley could be underwater by then.
"Sea level changes are now in the matter of centimeters, not meters, not enough to make a dramatic [change] but it is mercifully slow so that you can anticipate it."
The scariest scenario for Paelkle is the melting of glaciers, the source of fresh water for many areas in the developing countries including India and Pakistan.
"The only hope is desalinization of sea water or long pipelines somewhere else, unless you are going to try to move. But it is not easy to move tens of millions of people."
We all know the solution to climate change -- a combination of carbon taxes and cap & trade to reduce the reliance on fossil fuel to slow down the planet's overheating. But, achieving a global agreement with each country signing on looks like an almost insurmountable task -- as witnessed by the low expectations surrounding the upcoming Copenhagen conference.
Another obstacle is that climate change denial has jumped in the US population from 57 to 71 percent in 18 months, according to a recent poll. One columnist George Monbiot in the UK Guardian has written that it is the older portions of the population who still adhere to the notion that climate change is all a hoax - in some quarters it is a left-wing conspiracy to install state ownership.
Paehlke attributes the highs and lows in public support for action on climate change to the changes in the weather.
Two years ago, the winters were getting warmer and there was extreme heat in Europe killing people. Plus, Hurricane Katrina, spurred on by warmer oceans, had slammed into New Orleans the year earlier. That was when climate change topped the charts in terms of general concerns. But as temperatures have tapered off, personal priorities have shifted.
What is misunderstood is that scientists never stated that climate change meant that each year would be hotter than the next, says Paehlke.
Climate change, he explains, is a subtle and incremental process occurring over a number of decades. That is, temperatures may vary annually but the long term trend is still a hotter planet if humanity stays the course in terms of fossil fuel usage - i.e. way beyond two degrees Centigrade minimum for a tolerable world temperature.
What does that mean for emergency managers? It has been premature to talk about mitigation strategies for climate change since the aim of the environmentalists has been to avoid the phenomenon altogether, says Paehlke.
"In some cases it is pretty hard to mitigate because you can't mitigate a tornado. I mean you don't know where it is going to be. All you can guess is that there might be a slightly higher rate of them."
Nevertheless, he adds, New Orleans' existing vulnerability has forced local authorities to forestall further hurricane related damages with the raising of the height of the levies, as well as close consultation with experts in the Netherlands where there is a history of withstanding the incursion of an expanded North Sea.
Photo by Roberto Rizzato. CC Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0 Generic
