Weather and climate extremes: Pacemakers of adaptation?

Weather and climate extremes might propel adaptation both to a stable climate and its characteristic extremes, as well as to underlying changes, if they reveal vulnerabilities, cause damage, and make slow change more noticeable. In theory, extremes act as focusing events that overcome barriers to adaptation and accelerate policy responses. This pace-making might be attenuated by uncertainty in interpreting trends, and extremes might also miscue decision makers, perhaps pointing in the wrong direction or evoking over adaptation. Cases from a data-base of the most costly weather and climate extremes in the United States over the past three decades are employed to develop a propositional typology of such pace-making effects. Some adaptations in response to extremes result in reduced vulnerability, while other cases yield little effective adaptation or hint at mal-adaptation. Even the most-extreme events do not necessarily yield significant adaptation, despite calls for change and explicit attribution to climate change. (C) 2014 The Author. Published by Elsevier B.V.