From the earth’s poles to the equatorial deserts, from the oceans to the most fertile farming regions, global warming could present daunting challenges. Europe attempted to meet them last week (March 9) when 27 governments agreed to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 20 percent, and to commit the EU to generating a fifth of its energy from renewable sources by 2020.

That or any other significant lowering of emissions would be too costly, too little, and too late. Reductions in the burning of fossil fuels sufficient to have even a modest impact would trample economic growth. In any case, discernible effects on warming would be decades away. What we really need is to focus our efforts and resources on becoming more resilient and adaptive.

As pointed out recently in an insightful article in the journal Nature by University of Colorado Environmental Studies Professor Roger Pielke, Jr. and his collaborators, “vulnerability to climate-related impacts on society is increasing for reasons that have nothing to do with greenhouse-gas emissions, such as rapid population growth along coasts and in areas with limited water supplies,” which exacerbates the impacts of droughts. Nevertheless, they observe that many activists regard adaptation as being necessary only because we aren’t sufficiently aggressive in preventing greenhouse-gas emissions and that because “most projected impacts of anthropogenic climate change are marginal increases on already huge losses,” applying adaptation only to that narrow margin makes no sense.

For many climate change activists, emissions reduction has become an article of faith.

They cite the example of the Philippines, where policy-makers are wringing their hands about a possible gradual climate change-mediated rise in sea level of from 1 to 3 millimeters per year, while they ignore the primary cause of enhanced flood risk, “excessive groundwater extraction, which is lowering the land surface by several centimeters to more than a decimeter per year.” (100 millimeters equals 1 decimeter, or about 4 inches.) Perhaps more attention should be paid to ways to reduce groundwater extraction, such as desalination, wastewater treatment and recycling, collection of rainwater, and the cultivation of crop plants that require less irrigation.

In a similar vein, the researchers observe that “non-climate factors are by far the most important drivers of increased risk to tropical disease,” although such risk “is repeatedly invoked by climate-mitigation advocates as a key reason to curb emissions.” They cite a study which found that without factoring in the effects of climate change, “the global population at risk from malaria would increase by 100% by 2080, whereas the effect of climate change would increase the risk of malaria by at most 7%.”

Pielke and his colleagues criticize “the political obsession with the idea that climate risks can be reduced by cutting emissions,” because it “distracts attention” from other, more cost-effective approaches. However, for many activists, emissions reduction has become an article of faith: Al Gore dismissed adaptation as “a kind of laziness, an arrogant faith in our ability to react in time to save our skins.”

He couldn’t be more wrong. For example, a cheap, highly effective, timely—and adaptive—approach to malaria (and other mosquito-borne diseases) is available. The key is to reduce mosquito populations, but fundamental shortcomings in public policy have made unavailable the most potent weapon in our arsenal: DDT, an inexpensive and effective pesticide once widely deployed to kill disease-carrying insects. In 1972, on the basis of its toxicity to fish and migrating birds (but not to humans), the Environmental Protection Agency banned virtually all uses of DDT.

Not only did government regulators underplay scientific evidence of the effectiveness and relative safety of DDT, they also failed to appreciate the distinction between its large-scale use on farms to protect crops, and its more limited application for controlling carriers of human disease. Although DDT is a (modestly) toxic substance, there is a big difference between applying large amounts of it in the environment—as farmers did before it was banned—and applying it sparingly to fight mosquitoes and other disease-carrying insects.

Ironically, the impetus for the disastrous ban of DDT was Rachel Carson’s, “Silent Spring,” which inspired environmentalists but led to millions of excess malaria deaths. 

Doctrinaire activism and command-and-control policy-making are inimical to resilience; they jeopardize our survival as individuals and our success as a society.

Flawed public policy in the form of irrational oversight compromises resilience by making fewer options available.

The need for resilience in both the private and public sectors is not new. The buggy-whip manufacturers had to adapt and begin supplying automobile components to Henry Ford’s assembly line, or perish.  How resilient will preeminent farming areas be to a warming trend? Agriculture will adapt – for example, by adjusting what gets planted where. Crops that require cooler temperatures will increasingly be cultivated at higher elevations, on northern exposures, or closer to the coast. We have already observed a similar phenomenon in Germany, where the growers of wine grapes have begun to exploit higher temperatures: Because of the northward migration of cabernet sauvignon and merlot grapes, during the past five years the proportion of locally made red wines consumed by German consumers has increased from 17 percent to 27 percent.

Three decades ago, the U.K. constructed the Thames Barrier, a monumental system of movable flood gates that prevents the flooding of London by surge tides that occur under certain meteorological conditions and because tide levels have been rising 60 cm (two feet) per century.

Technological advances will help, too: Gene-splicing techniques already are being used to enhance the resistance to drought and other stresses of many kinds of crop plants. But here again, public policy has impeded innovation and, thereby, our ability to adapt. Gene-splicing technology, which offers markedly enhanced precision and predictability compared to its predecessors, is grossly over-regulated by USDA and EPA and by a host of United Nations agencies and programs. As a result, the additional expense to perform field trials with gene-spliced plants causes the technology to be underused by academic and industrial scientists. Worse still, in response to mendacious and irresponsible activism, some local jurisdictions have banned entirely the cultivation of plants or seeds improved with these techniques.

Flawed public policy in the form of irrational oversight compromises resilience by making fewer options available. Excessive regulation of gene-spliced plants discourages sophisticated genetic approaches to drought and to the eradication of blights such as sudden oak death, phylloxera, powdery mildew, and Pierce’s Disease, (a bacterial infestation carried by a leaf-hopping insect, the glassy-winged sharpshooter), which threatens California’s multi-billion dollar wine and table grape industries. In the face of the kinds of droughts that occurred last year in the Midwest and Southwest and in California during the early 1990s, the availability of drought-resistant crop varieties could spell the difference for farmers between merely a below-average year and a catastrophic one, but flawed, myopic public policy discourages innovation in this direction.

Resilience is in short supply these days, and there is plenty of blame to go around. Politicians tend to be short-term thinkers, their purview often limited to the next election, and many of them seem to care less about the public interest than about scoring political points. Moreover, many of them are just not very smart, and they’re often particularly challenged in science and logic.

If individually and collectively we are to meet economic, environmental, and public health challenges, we need plenty of options and opportunities for innovation—and the wealth to pursue them. In society, as in biology, survival demands adaptation. But in large and small ways, unimaginative, short-sighted politicians and benighted activists have conspired to limit our options, constrain economic growth, and make real solutions elusive.

Henry I. Miller, a physician and molecular biologist, is a fellow at the Hoover Institution. His most recent book is, "The Frankenfood Myth.”