Student Reflection on Climate Mitigation and Adaptation 2025

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from Module 5 Relational Summary

Mar 24, 2026, 9:11 PM

Tyler Christian Daniels

I have lived in a lot of places. Florida, St. Maarten, and a handful of others in between. And one thing I can say from that experience is that the ability to move is itself a form of wealth. When a hurricane hits, when insurance premiums triple, when a coastline starts disappearing, the people who can afford to leave do. The people who cannot afford to leave stay and deal with whatever comes next. That distinction, between who gets to choose where they live and who gets stuck, is what sat with me the most after this week's lecture.

Dr. Culhane frames this module around the ecology of the Global North, and the central argument is one I keep coming back to throughout this course. The North built its wealth through fossil fuels, imperial expansion, and the deliberate clearing of forests and wetlands that Culhane describes as one of the first deliberate large-scale climate change projects in history. Now the North has the resources to insulate itself from the consequences of that history while the people and places most affected by it do not. Research published in The Lancet Planetary Health found that the Global North is responsible for 92% of excess global carbon emissions, with the United States alone accounting for 40% of climate breakdown (Hickel, 2020). And yet it is the Global South, contributing just 8% of those excess emissions, that bears the worst consequences. Culhane puts it bluntly when he says that climate disruption is really about environmental justice for "the other 90%." The wealthy do not suffer and die when weather becomes erratic. They have building-level climate control, imported food year-round, and the financial stability to relocate when things get bad. The rest of the world does not have that option.

The Reagan quote from the lecture stuck with me. When asked about climate change in the 1980s, Reagan said, "the scientists tell me, man will adapt." Culhane's response is that the more accurate version is "rich men will adapt." And he is right. Adaptation is not distributed equally. It never has been. The Biosphere II story from the lecture illustrates this perfectly. Texas billionaire Ed Bass spent an estimated $150 million building a sealed ecosystem in the Arizona desert that was meant to prove human beings could survive in a fully engineered environment (Nelson, 2018). It technically worked. Eight people lived inside for two years. But oxygen levels dropped from 20.9% to 14.2%, the equivalent of living at 15,000 feet, because microbes in the soil consumed oxygen faster than the plants could replace it, and the unsealed concrete absorbed the carbon dioxide that the plants needed (Severinghaus et al., as cited in Earth Magazine, 2016). Managers eventually had to pump oxygen in from outside to keep the crew alive. On top of that, nearly all insect pollinators went extinct inside the structure, crop failures forced constant intervention, and political infighting among the crew and management nearly derailed the entire project. It sustained a handful of people under ideal conditions, and it still almost failed. The idea that we will engineer our way out of climate change through Mars colonies or climate-controlled towers is the same logic scaled up. The question is always the same: save who?

I think about this from where I sit now, in South Florida. Florida is an interesting case because it has the GDP, the infrastructure, and the political influence of the Global North, but it faces the same climate exposure as the Global South. Hurricanes are intensifying. Sea levels are rising. The insurance market is in crisis. I have written about the insurance situation in earlier modules, and the pattern is the same here. The people who can afford to self-insure or relocate to lower-risk areas will do that. The people who cannot will watch their premiums climb until they are priced out of coverage entirely, and then they will be one storm away from losing everything. That is the "other 90%" playing out inside the borders of one of the wealthiest countries on the planet.

One of the more useful reframings from this lecture is the distinction between "climate change" and "climate disruption." Culhane traces the word "climate" back to the Greek word clima, meaning slope, the predictable temperature gradations that existed across latitudes and allowed ecosystems and civilizations to develop over millions of years. Past climate shifts, driven by plate tectonics and continental drift, happened gradually enough for species to adapt. Migration patterns had time to form. The Inuit settled in the Arctic Circle and built entire cultures around the predictability of their environment. What is happening now is fundamentally different. The warming is compressed into decades. And the dangerous part is that it is gradual enough that political systems do not feel the urgency, which is the boiling frog problem from the lecture, but fast enough that ecosystems and vulnerable populations cannot keep up. The political system's "nervous system," as Culhane describes it, is buffered by wealth. It does not react until a disaster forces it to. That pattern, knowing something is a problem and not acting until a crisis demands it, is the thread that has connected this entire course for me.

The solutions are not new. They are not hypothetical. Onshore wind turbines, ranked as Project Drawdown's #2 solution, can reduce emissions by 84.6 gigatons of CO2 by 2050 at a net cost of $1.23 trillion but with net savings of $7.4 trillion over three decades of operation (Project Drawdown, n.d.). Culhane personally installed wind turbines near Everest base camp in Nepal. The technology works in some of the most extreme conditions on the planet. The barrier is not engineering. It is political will and economic priorities. Peatland Protection and Restoration, Solution #13, stores an estimated 600 gigatons of carbon in just 3 to 4% of the world's land area, roughly twice as much carbon as all forest biomass combined (Project Drawdown, n.d.). But peat is still being mined for fuel in Russia and Ireland and for fertilizer in Canada. That is the North failing to clean up its own backyard. And Solar Hot Water, Solution #41, costs almost nothing relative to its impact. The moment from the lecture that captures this best is Culhane standing on a mountainside in Nepal, having just finished installing a 50-tube solar hot water system and two small wind turbines, filling a line of shivering villagers' buckets with steaming hot water on a freezing morning. No trees cut. No fossil fuels burned. A solution that directly serves the people who need it most, deployed by hand.

The way I think about it is like the oxygen mask instruction on an airplane. You put your own mask on first, and then you help the person next to you. The Global North has the mask on. It has the wind turbines, the solar technology, the peatland science, the capital to deploy all of it. But instead of turning to help, it is pretending no one else needs one. Or worse, it is parachuting into the Global South and lecturing about ecology while its own forests and wetlands continue to disappear and its own emissions keep climbing. Culhane's argument is not that the North should feel guilty. It is that the North should act first because it can, and because it created the conditions that made action necessary. Not by telling the Global South what to do, but by demonstrating at home that these solutions work, that forests and wetlands and renewable energy are worth more than short-term extraction. I have lived in places where climate is something you plan around, and places where it is something that happens to you. That difference is not geography. It is resources. The Drawdown solutions already exist. Culhane has been installing them by hand on mountaintops. What the "other 90%" need is for the people holding the oxygen mask to stop pretending the cabin pressure is fine and start helping the person in the next seat. The North has not gotten to step two yet.

References

Hickel, J. (2020). Quantifying national responsibility for climate breakdown: An equality-based attribution approach for carbon dioxide emissions in excess of the planetary boundary. The Lancet Planetary Health, 4(9), e399–e404. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5196(20)30196-0/fulltextLinks to an external site.

Nelson, M. (2018). Biosphere 2: What really happened? Dartmouth Alumni Magazine. https://dartmouthalumnimagazine.com/articles/biosphere-2-what-really-happenedLinks to an external site.

Project Drawdown. (n.d.). Onshore wind turbines. https://drawdown.org/solutions/onshore-wind-turbinesLinks to an external site.

Project Drawdown. (n.d.). Protect peatlands. https://drawdown.org/explorer/protect-peatlandsLinks to an external site.

Welch, C. (2016, September 26). Benchmarks: September 26, 1991: Crew sealed inside Biosphere 2. Earth Magazine. https://www.earthmagazine.org/article/benchmarks-september-26-1991-crew-sealed-inside-biosphere-2Links to an external site.