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“The human capacity for adaptation is extraordinary — not unlimited, but extraordinary,” said Greg Garrard, professor of environmental humanities at the University of British Columbia. He added, “I’m much more concerned for the future of the nonhuman than I am for the future of humans, precisely because we’re just very, very good at adaptation.”

But as the case in Bangladesh illustrates, adaptation is usually a reactive measure, not a preventive one. Adapting to climate change means envisioning bigger disasters to come — again, flipping the framing away from history and into the future.

If You Can’t See It, Is It Real?
“Humans have difficulty imagining things that we haven’t experienced yet,” said Alice Hill, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who oversaw resilience planning on the National Security Council during the Obama administration.

“After every major catastrophe, whether it’s Pearl Harbor or 9/11, people always look back and say it was a failure of imagination. That also applies to climate change,” she said. “It’s hard to visualize the entire West Coast aflame until you actually see it. And if we can’t see it, we tend to discount the risk.”

There are concrete steps that can be taken today. Consider wildfires. After a deadly spate of Western blazes in 1910, the United States government scaled up its firefighting force, committing to extinguish wildfires wherever they occurred. For decades, that worked, giving Americans confidence that they could move into forested areas and remain safe.

But that policy led to a buildup of dense vegetation in the nation’s forests, which, when combined with a warmer and drier climate means that those forests are increasingly primed to burn bigger and hotter, overwhelming the nation’s firefighting capacity.

Going forward, experts said, the country will have to shift its mentality and learn to live with fire. States and communities will need to impose tougher regulations on homes built in fire-prone areas. Federal agencies will have to focus on managing forests better, selectively thinning some areas and even preventively setting controlled fires in others to burn off excess vegetation that can fuel runaway blazes.

“There’s a lot we can do,” said Jennifer Balch, a wildfire expert at the University of Colorado at Boulder. “We’ve just been stuck in an emergency response rather than thinking and looking ahead.”

Whether Americans can adopt that mentality remains an open question.

“We’ve often heard the argument that it will be too expensive to cut emissions and it will just be easier to adapt,” said Noah Diffenbaugh, a climate scientist at Stanford University. But we’ve now had decades of warnings, he said, “and we’re not even adapted to the present climate.”

Cascading Disasters
Adaptation can quickly become bogged down in a tangle of competing motivations and unintended consequences. Proposals for stricter building codes or higher insurance premiums face opposition from builders and voters alike.

And there’s the moral hazard problem, which is when people are shielded from the costs of their decisions and thus make bad ones. For instance, local communities reap increased property taxes from allowing buildings to rise in disaster-prone areas, but they don’t pick up most of the tab for disaster recovery — the federal government does.

Another challenge to adaptation is that, as climate change intensifies, it increases the risk of “compound hazards,” when numerous disasters strike simultaneously, as well as the risk that one disaster cascades into another.

In late 2017, large wildfires scorched Santa Barbara, Calif., burning away vegetation that stabilized hillside soils. Heavy rainfall followed a month later. The result: devastating mudflows that killed 23 and injured 163.

In Houston in 2017, Hurricane Harvey shut down gasoline refineries, strained hospitals and spread toxic substances and pathogens as floodwaters swamped the city. And when the Camp Fire destroyed Paradise, Calif., in 2018, nearly 20,000 displaced people arrived in nearby Chico, which suddenly found its sewage system pushed to the limits.

“It’s really challenging to predict exactly where and how all of those cascading risks will unfold,” said Amir Aghakouchak, a climate scientist at the University of California, Irvine, who studies compound hazards.

Experts also noted that climate change is an accelerant of inequality. Those most affected, globally and in the United States, tend to be the most vulnerable populations. Many are also among the people at highest risk for Covid-19.

As thousands have fled fires in recent weeks, farmworkers have continued to pick ripe crops, sometimes in evacuation zones. “They already live in a state of crisis that has been magnified, compounded by the pandemic,” said Dr. Declet-Barreto of the Union of Concerned Scientists.

One concern is that adaptability will not be a collective effort. Wealthier people may find ways to protect themselves, while others are left fending for themselves. Even after American disasters, for example, relief is often off-limits to undocumented residents, experts said.

“Here in South Florida, people are building these amazing homes that float on the water. They can withstand Category 4 hurricanes, but they cost $6 million,” said Dr. Mach of the University of Miami. “So how do we manage these risks so that it’s not just people with resources who stay safe?”

A Lifetime of Clues
For well over a century, science has provided us with powerful clues that this was coming.

As early as the 1850s, researchers realized that greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide could trap heat on Earth. This came at the dawn of the Industrial Age, which brought fossil-fuel-burning factories that ultimately not only filled people’s lives with modern conveniences, but also filled the sky with the carbon dioxide now warming the world.

By the 1990s, scientists had a deep understanding of the future risks of a warming world. By the 2010s, researchers could show how the extreme heat waves, droughts and floods now unfolding were influenced by climate change.

Technology offered solutions as well, whether solar power or electric cars. Yet governments have been slow to rein in reliance on fossil fuels.

“I feel like the climate scientists have kind of done our job,” said Dr. Kalmus, the Los Angeles-based scientist. “We’ve laid it out pretty clearly, but nobody’s doing anything. So now it’s kind of up to the social scientists.”

Will the recent spate of disasters be enough to shock voters and politicians into action?

“We have a lot of evidence that that doesn’t happen,” said Dr. Garrard of the University of British Columbia.

One 2017 study found that people who experience extreme weather are more likely to support climate adaptation measures than before. But the effect diminished over time. It may be that people mentally adjust to unusual weather patterns, updating their perception of what they consider normal.

All of it can feel overwhelming, particularly for people wanting to make a difference. Susan Cutter, who directs the Hazards and Vulnerability Research Institute at the University of South Carolina, noted that climate change’s biggest problem may be the sense that it is beyond our control. The planet is burning, so does it really matter if I turn off the light?

“There’s too much complexity and, frankly, too much that needs to be changed, that we’re flitting from one concern to another,” she said.

Even so, some important steps are being taken. Cities like Montecito, Calif., and Austin, Texas, have pursued difficult measures to protect against future wildfires. Britain, the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, now goes coal-free for months at a time, having rapidly shifted to cleaner forms of electricity.

And if optimism springs from knowledge, the good news is that scientific research lays out what to do. It’s not a mystery, nor is it beyond the bounds of human ability.

“What’s beautiful about the human species is that we have the free will to decide our own fate,” said Ilona Otto, a climate scientist at the Wegener Center for Climate and Global Change. “We have the agency to take courageous decisions and do what’s needed,” she said. “If we choose.”