Daily Dot: Can Humans Adapt to Climate Change?
Dear Reader,
Dot’s back with another Mythbuster Monday.
A lot of climate misinformation contains a grain of truth — and few phrases illustrate this better than the three-word shrug Dot recently encountered: “Humans can adapt.”
It’s the kind of response that radiates a “why should I care?” attitude. And here’s the frustrating part: it’s not entirely wrong. Over the roughly 200,000 years that homo sapiens have been lumbering around, we’ve undergone real physical adaptation — lighter builds, larger brains, smaller teeth, less body hair. We no doubt will adapt further. But when that fact is used to justify abandoning efforts to stop, slow, or mitigate planetary warming, Dot’s response is a hard no.
Jeff Goodell, author of The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet, wrote in Time Magazine in 2023 that “the last time Earth was hotter than it is today was at least 125,000 years ago, long before anything that resembled human civilization appeared. Since 1970, the Earth’s temperature has spiked faster than in any comparable forty-year period in recorded history. The eight years between 2015 and 2022 were the hottest on record.” The World Meteorological Organization has since declared 2015 to 2025 the eleven hottest years on record.
The key point, as Goodell makes clear, is that this rate of warming is unlike anything humanity has ever faced. So yes — we’ll adapt. But when? And how much suffering will people endure in the meantime, particularly those in the Global South who are already bearing the brunt of more intense storms, worsening wildfires, deeper droughts, catastrophic flooding, and record-breaking heat? We’re already seeing a global surge in demand for air conditioning — which some argue should be recognized as a human right.
Adapting to this rapid, never-before-experienced rise in heat will require what Goodell calls an “evolutionary hurdle.” Walking us through millennia of adaptation among warm-blooded animals, he observes that “heat management is a survival tool for all life on Earth, and the strategies to deal with it are as diverse and colorful as the animal kingdom itself.” For humans, that strategy — primarily our sweat glands — has been optimized for what Goodell calls “the Goldilocks Zone we have been living in for the last 10,000 years or so. Now, as we move out of that world, the job of managing heat gets much more complicated — and much more dangerous.”
Much of that danger isn’t just the heat itself. It’s found in the fault lines of injustice and inequity that already exist — and will widen. Much of the developing world lacks air conditioning. Even in North America, wealthier neighborhoods have significantly more tree cover than poorer ones — a quiet, persistent form of shade segregation.
We’re already seeing fierce resistance to migration. Now consider that an estimated 44 to 216 million people may be forced to relocate because climate change has made their communities unlivable.
Heather McTeer Toney, mayor of Greenville, Mississippi, put it plainly when testifying before the U.S. Congress: “We’re all in the storm, but we’re not in the same boat.”
And finally, the “we’ll adapt” argument ignores the economic costs associated with runaway climate change. Each tenth of a degree increases crop failures, the sea level rise swallowing coastal communities, and wildfires, and addressing the damage caused by these phenomena costs money. A lot of it.
“Humans can adapt.” Perhaps. Dot’s verdict: Partly True — but it’s absolutely not a justification for slowing, stopping, or compromising progress on climate action.
Truthfully,
Dot
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