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Lately I have been reading (forced to, it's a required text in Environment and Ethics course) "Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World" by Danish environmentalist author Bjørn Lomborg. The book has its own set of flaws and rather debatable data presentation, analysis and conclusions. This topic came up in class discussion which I thought will be nice to post here.

We know climate is trending towards warming. I believe it's anthropogenic but even if it's not we all agree its heating. We are trying to limit the fast rise... great. Though some might argue the ways we are trying to control the heating trend will not help. Like vehicular pollution control, carbon credits etc are both hard to implement, have derogatory impact on local economy (debatable) and are a drop in the huge bucket. But undeniably they are steps in right directions which despite of the best efforts and desire ultimately might not get us there. So how about thinking and working on adapting to the changing climate phenomenon. I know there is some work being done thinking about this possibly continuous transition. Though, certainly not on the scale we talk about stopping/controlling climate change. At least not communicated on the scale which we communicate impact of climate change. Here is a thought: we increase efforts to mitigate the impacts and adapt, rather than be stiff and try to change/halt the warming trend only.

It will mean planning for people in Bangladesh who might drown. Preparing for expected rise in diseases near tropics. Planning to change and slowly moving away from reliance on glacier water in India and Peru. It's about trying to make the transition smooth and preparing the masses. Not make it like Delhi's switch to CNG from Diesel; where the day after the deadline to switch from Diesel to CNG for the public transportation system there were no buses.
The discussion question, should we concentrate on adjusting and adapting and try to find technological or other type of fixes for this accepted warming trend?

and please add Maldives in that sentence.

On your question, my answer is that, we are human beings thus, we are susceptible and adaptable to changes. I believe we can adapt to this warming trend. On how are we going to do it, is a big question. Certainly, we can do something about it, we might not entirely eliminate the use of pollutants that kept warming our planet, but we can bring down some level in use of them through technology as well.

Well there is probably one problem is this environmental too fast? How do we even measure this warming change and pace our adaptation capacity. Perhaps the fact that problems are creeping up is evidence that global warming is beating adaptation, or may be we have more gears to go faster.