I’ve been seeing the word mitigate being used more and more as we expand the dialogue regarding what we can actually do about climate change. For example today, in an article about a UN report on the melting of ice all over the world from the BBC there is this statement:

“Without taking measures to mitigate sea level rise, an estimated 145 million people, primarily in Asia, would be exposed to the risk of flooding.”

Just what exactly do they think this means? With one sentence there is the implication that there are solutions to these kinds of catastrophic changes. We can’t ‘mitigate’ the effects of glaciers melting in the Himalaya. Millions of people will lose their only sources of water. We can’t mitigate the effects of the Greenland icecap melting and raising sea levels several feet. We simply cannot ward off these types of changes. They are too global and too irreversible.
The problem here is political. Saying things like mitigate avoids discussion of the very real and hard choices we will face in the next 40-50 years.
And that’s a conservative estimate. Ask the Alaskan villagers whose towns have been destroyed by melting permafrost about ‘mitigation’. There isn’t any. The ground was solid and now it’s not. How do you mitigate that?