Our understanding of climate change and what we can do about it never stops evolving. This is true globally—as scientists, policy experts, and others continually gather new evidence and refine our knowledge of the problem and key solution areas—and here at Terra.do, where we stay busy updating our classes to include the latest.
The team that works on this doesn’t mind; we love learning new things and sharing our discoveries. Here we’ll round up a few from working on those updates.
Adapting by ‘daylighting’ waterways
A hotter planet is also, in places, a wetter one. That’s due partly to melting ice elevating sea levels—and because warmer air can hold more moisture. The idea of adapting for this reality might conjure massive concrete infrastructure projects like floodwalls to protect coastal cities.
But some adaptation projects involve less concrete, not more. Consider Cheonggyecheon, a stream in the South Korean metropolis of Seoul. Amid industrialization after the Korean War, this creek had come to resemble an open sewer, and decades ago it was covered over to build an elevated highway. This seemed like progress until it didn’t. By the 1990s, the expressway had become an unhappy hub of noise and congestion.
In the early 2000s, Seoul elected a mayor who promised to remove the highway and restore the creek. This was not a light lift; many thousands of people drove along that corridor each day. So to make it a political win, the project came packaged alongside a major expansion to bus rapid transit service. As a result, people came to drive less and rely more on buses and the subway. And other co-benefits also came into focus, Andrew Revkin observed in the Times:
“Open watercourses handle flooding rains better than buried sewers do, a big consideration as global warming leads to heavier downpours. The streams also tend to cool areas overheated by sun-baked asphalt and to nourish greenery that lures wildlife as well as pedestrians.”
For biodiversity, indeed, fish, birds, and insect species all increased markedly. Not that the endeavor was perfect—it was expensive and relies in no small part on pumped water, for starters. But improved mass transit, resilience to flooding, and urban cooling effects are all upsides you’d like to see in cities facing a warming world.
An excellent explainer on when warming will stop
A crucial question about global heating is when it will stop. This is an area where many people—even some folks who care deeply about the climate—are uncertain or have misconceptions. Among these misconceptions is the idea that the planet will keep getting hotter for many years no matter what we do at this late hour.
Fortunately, the latest science tells us this is not true. Rather, the answer depends mainly on how soon we quit burning fossil fuels. Warming will stop when we stop emitting greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane into the air.
That’s good news—it means our fate is still in our hands. But the idea of “committed warming” remains stuck in many minds.
We mention it here because over at The Climate Brink, Texas climate scientist Andrew Dessler does the best job we’ve seen yet of contextualizing “committed warming,” which was once a legitimate scientific debate, and explains why it’s much less of a concern than it appeared to be two decades ago.
We won’t try to condense Dessler’s great work in full here—though his chart distinguishing between a zero emissions scenario and a constant centration scenario is worth filing away to show your friends.
But while we can still stop the planet from getting hotter, here we’re obliged to note that some amount of sea level rise will likely continue for many years afterward. This underscores the importance of fighting to halt emissions rapidly, not by some distant deadline—and of preparing for a world that’s not just hotter but also potentially wetter.