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Those Nice Guys at Grist

The Gristmill Blog is an interesting place, not least because of the heaps of scorn they frequently direct my way. In their latest rant Dave Roberts takes issue with a poorly-worded story by Alan Zarembo in yesterday's L.A. Times (which we've discussed and clarified here) by attacking me.

Dave now says that my views on climate change are in fact the mainstream:

In short, the solutions [Pielke] advocates are the same ones pushed by just about everyone in the climate debate: a mix of adaptation and mitigation.

Of course it was not so long ago that Dave himself said quite bluntly of adaptation in June, 2006:

There's one way to directly address climate change, and that's reducing the GHG emissions that drive it. In the context of the climate-change debate, advocating for adaptation means advocating for a non-response. It means advocating for nothing. I, for one, am not going to provide that kind of political cover for those who are protecting their corporate contributors.

Unfortunately the anti-adaptation views that Dave held in 2006 are still widely shared in the policy and advocacy communities. For example, less than a year ago Tim Flannery called adaptation "morally repugnant" and a "form of genocide."

[UPDATE: A reader suggests that a fuller quote from Tim Flannery is more appropriate. I do not disagree. Here is what the reader pointed to from Flannery: "I think that adaptation, except in the more trivial ways, is a very dangerous route to go down.... I see adaptation, if we take it too far, as really a form of genocide."]

Al Gore is notably against adaptation as well. And several of us characterized the continuing policy challenges in a Commentary in Nature last year (PDF).

So while it is good to see that Dave appears to have mostly come around on adaptation and now sees it as an essential part of responding to climate change, there still is a lot of work to do. It is pretty bizarre that he has to go on the attack when his main point seems to be that he agrees with my views. Its about time. Now if only we can get Grist's Joe Romm straight on energy policy. We'll tackle that next week;-)