From the International Herald Tribune,, Al Gore reiterates that despite many efforts to characterize adaptation and mitigation as complementary, he prefers to persist in viewing them as competing:

Trying to prevent global warming is certainly worthwhile, said Roger Pielke, Jr., a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado.

But he said capable people are not adequately putting their minds to the challenge of adapting to climate change, which is inevitable in coming decades because of continuing emissions and because of the damage done already.

“If all we do is try to mitigate we’re going to miss a big part of the challenge,” Pielke said.

The world’s leaders also need to address other problems that are likely to be aggravated by global warming, such as tropical diseases, drinking water supply and increasing storm vulnerability, Pielke and several colleagues argued in the scientific journal Nature.

Many global warming activists are suspicious of such recommendations. They feel that too much reliance on adaptation will lull the world into a false sense of security, decreasing the motivation to reduce greenhouse gases.

“We really have to focus on prevention,” Al Gore said on Tuesday during a question-and-answer session at Columbia University in New York City.

He warned that if we fail to avert the worst of global warming, the dire environmental consequences will overwhelm any adaptive measures.

We’ve had a number of prominent people react in private to our recent article on adaptation in Nature (PDF) by suggesting that we really should have emphasized mitigation instead.

I wonder how many criticisms of Mr. Gore’s exclusive focus on “prevention” (sorry, prevention is not in the cards, ask the IPCC) we will hear about. My guess is not more than one — and you’re looking at it. Lots of inconvenient truths to go around, it seems.