Adaptation at a national level is impossible. Individuals or small groups of individuals can, as best they can.
We won't be adapting, there will be lots of kicking the can down the road though, which can be confused for adaptation... I guess.
I feel like this post is going to be interpreted very differently depending on what the audience is.
For left-of-centrists, this seems like a decent wake-up call. Stop being depressed about there being no solutions in your narrow overton window, and embrace the necessity that society adapts to reality.
For conservatives, "pessimism" is an odd phrase, but they'll be glad to hear you're warming up to signing up for lifeboat defense duty - maybe if you work hard you can get to be in it.
For realists, "abandon" is an worrisome phrase. It has always obviously been about both. Is this another excuse to keep consumption high?
whether the focus should shift from prevention to adaptation.
Why the arbitrary binary? You do both, all the time. We can't stop preventing. What, are we just going to be like, oh well, we tried for a bit but didn't get the results we hoped for, let's burn all the coal and gas from now on? No, that's idiotic.
We've got some good results already, I've been seeing headlines that we're preventing the worst climate outcomes. That will likely continue to slowly improve. Every problem that comes with every solution is being addressed. Sometimes a step is taken backwards, but two steps are eventually taken in the right direction. It's happening in one of the dumbest ways possible, but it's happening.
Right now we're clearly still making more steps in the wrong direction than the right one. Militarization, abandonment of climate research and (already too lenient) climate goals, continued investments in fossil fuels, planned obsolescence, neocolonialism, etc.
With the US turning fascist and the rest of the world massively increasing military expenditure, I'm pretty sure even the ratio between steps in the right direction and steps in the wrong direction is worse this year.
What do you gain from arguing against optimism? This is a long process and it will improve. You can't look at things now in the United States and accurately extrapolate into the future. China and Europe are stepping in the right direction.
If we do not stop emitting, we will continue to change the climate. Therefore adaption to new climate reality would have to continue forever unless we stop emitting.
That is not to say we do not also have to adapt. The rise in temperature is already at a level, where continuing as normal is no longer feasible. Those adaptions are a huge part of the cost of polluting our planet with fossil fuel emissions. Hence we have to make the polluters pay for it.
Stop looking at the numbers? No.
Yes. Long past time in fact.
People have been focused on political solutions far too much - "too much" not least because in so many cases, the final arbiters of which, if any, political solutions get adopted are a relative handful of fabulously wealthy psychopaths who are going to oppose anything that undermines their privilege, entirely regardless of the long-term consequences.
So understand - because of their control, political solutions for the most part are not going to happen. It doesn't matter how important they might be, because the systems are not rational - they're warped to the service of the privileged few.
So it's going to come down to individual action primarily.
Note though that that doesn't necessarily mean entirely self-serving action. Quite the opposite in fact - individuals will need to focus on what they can do, as individuals, to at least ease the hardship not only for themselves but for their fellow humans.
And at some point, quite likely, we'll even be able to rely on governments to fulfill their responsibilities. For the immediate future though, that's too often not the case, and we as a species need to come to terms with that and act accordingly.
If that's the case, them people are going to have to start resorting to individual political solutions as a matter of self-defense.
Individuals cannot "reduce" their way out of climate change by modifying their own behavior as long as billionaires and corporations continue to emit however much they want with impunity. Their ravenousness to consume the planet cannot be sated except by force. If that force cannot be applied legally, then the only alternative is to apply it extra-legally.
Okay - let's imagine that by this time tomorrow, you successfully eliminate every single billionaire and corporation that's a contributor to climate change.
What happens next? Do you actually think the climate is just going to spring back to what it was? If so, you're in for a rude awakening.
Climate change is a done deal already. It has far too much inertia - even a dramatic change is only going to make a notable difference somewhere far down the line.
So entirely regardless of whether and to how much of an extent we might be able to enact societal or political change, we're going to have to cope with some fairly significant climate change. And that, I believe, is where people should be putting most of their focus.
That's not to say that I disagree with you fundamentally. In fact there are very few solutions to the problem of the outsized influence of a relative few wealthy scumbags of which I wouldn't approve, or even willingly take part. But at this point, that's more just (well deserved) vengeance - it's not going to make a dramatic difference in the climate change that is already in process. It's already too late for that.
Climate change is a done deal already.
No, it's not. It's bad already and that's locked in, but it can and will continue to get even worse without limit unless pretty drastic changes are made now.
Discussion of climate, how it is changing, activism around that, the politics, and the energy systems change we need in order to stabilize things.
As a starting point, the burning of fossil fuels, and to a lesser extent deforestation and release of methane are responsible for the warming in recent decades:
How much each change to the atmosphere has warmed the world:
Recommended actions to cut greenhouse gas emissions in the near future:
Anti-science, inactivism, and unsupported conspiracy theories are not ok here.