It's now a risk management problem

I came across an article from an unusual source today. Since I'm in technology, I spend a little time on C|Net every day perusing the news. There's a global warming article there, of all places, that came up while I was looking for news about a vendor merger that might affect my workplace (let's hear it for the random results from search terms). The article is entitled Climate demands rapid energy conversion, experts say, by Martin LaMonica, a C|Net staff writer. So it didn't even creep in from AP or anything - it was written for the geeks like me who frequent C|Net.

The article describes a session held during a the Emerging Technologies Conference held at MIT, and the most striking conversation reported sums up to something like "stop wondering whether or not this is real. Treat it as real and go to the next step, which is to understand the high risk and act." My emergency management duties at work refer to this as mitigation, the most effective part of emergency management. That's the part that says if you don't build your house in a flood plain, you don't have to prepare for or respond to floods.

A lot of people might be living in new flood plains pretty soon.

On the personal side, I priced switching from my CR-V to a Prius, and in light of the cost of the energy efficient windows we're getting soon, I'm going to need another strategy for the next year or so. Besides, the Prius and a few smaller cars excepted, my car gets gas mileage roughly equivalent to a lot of the hybrids, which seem to be missing the mark on gas mileage as a key driver. Maybe walking or riding my bike to work a little more, although with winter coming maybe the bus will do some days. At least it's not far, even for those many days I have to drive to make off-site meetings and stuff.

I should have started getting serious about this a lot sooner. The more I read, the more convinced I am the speakers at the MIT conference are right - it's time to act.