Welcome to the
CAKE Advice Column

24 Aug 10
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Building a house without a plan

Dear Adaptation Mavens, Read more »

14 Jul 10
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We Adapt, Therefore We Are

Dear Adaptation Mavens,

I’m pretty sure I believe climate change is happening and that I should be doing something about it. I manage a boreal forest reserve and things sure seem different. But then I read the polls that say that some people aren’t sure it’s real and maybe it’s all the talk of dishonest scientists. Am I a dupe to believe its real? Should I actually do anything or wait to see how it pans out?

Sincerely,

Idle Hands

 

Dear Idling,

There are so many uncertainties in life. It starts at conception—will you be a boy or a girl? Your chromosomes know but your parents don’t. Then it plagues you through grade school (Will you get picked for the kick-ball team?) and high school (Will you get a prom date?). Every day decisions are rife with uncertainty (Should you bring a raincoat? Will the neighbor’s dog attack you as you begin biking to work?), as are bigger life decisions (Should you marry that person? Buy a house?). Rene Descartes famously struggled with his uncertainty about so grand an issue as the existence of God. He built a logic diagram that went roughly like this:

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26 Apr 10
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Paper or Plastic?

Dear Adaptation Mavens,

I have finally come to accept that climate change is altering the bog in which I work, but I have no idea what to do about it.  Some people I know are telling me to start measuring how much carbon my bog sequesters and selling offsets to raise money for my work. Read more »

15 Mar 10
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Adaptation: Now more than ever

Ah, Copenhagen. We pinned our hopes and dreams on that Scandinavian city, and our hearts have been broken. They were not broken by the Danes mind you, but by all the people of the world who could not come to an agreement and save their own ship. Fingers crossed for better luck at the next meeting in Cancun later this year.

In the meantime we should not sit on our collective hands and wait. Rather we should take up the cause as a personal (or organizational, or national) matter and change our own actions to match our now committed climate changed reality.

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1 Mar 10
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Adaptation:What do we need?

Most fields develop organically. A few people become interested in a common problem or idea, and gradually more and more people begin to play with ideas and approaches until the topic grows into a “discipline.” Generally there is no mandate to create a new field, rather individuals start working in an unilluminated corner of an existing field until suddenly one day there are a lot of people working in that corner and it’s taken on a life of its own. Conservation biology started this way. Conservation practitioners were just regular biologists and ecologists who started noticing that there were anthropogenic threats to the species or ecosystems they were studying. This began to worry them—either for moral reasons (“Oh this is not good for the planet”) or personal (“Oh this is not good for the future of my research”). Whatever the reason these scientists started thinking about how to ameliorate these threats and voilà, conservation biology was born.
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