Page - 181 - in Water, Energy, and Environment - A Primer

As far as adaptation is concerned, government officials inmany cities around the world are already taking steps to protect their threatened infrastructures. For thema critical question is exactly how long will it take for impacts to be felt? To quote again from theGillis article: ‘On that crucial point, alas, our science is still nearly blind. Scientists can look at the rocks and see indisputable evidence of jumps in sea level, and they can associate those with relatively modest increases in global temperature. But the nature of the evidence is such that it is hard to tell the difference between something that happened in a thousand years and something that happened in a hundred. On the human timescale, of course, that is all the difference in the world. If sea level is going to rise by say, 30 feet over several thousand years, that is quite a lot of time to adjust – to pull back from the beaches, to reinforcemajor cities and to develop technologies to help us cope. But if sea level is capable of rising several feet per century, as Dr O’Leary’s paper would seem to imply and asmany other scientists believe, then babies being born now could live to see the early stages of a global calamity.’Wesurely live in uncertain anddangerous times. Policy considerations 181