Climate change accelerates—trying to respond to its impacts fails because we won’t be able to keep up—mitigation is key
Mazo, ‘10 [2010, Jeffrey Mazo, PhD in Paleoclimatology from UCLA, Managing Editor, Survival and Research Fellow for Environmental Security and Science Policy at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, 3-2010, “Climate Conflict: How global warming threatens security and what to do about it,” pg. 29]
This latter aspect, the rate of change, is a critical factor in terms of adapting to climate change. Although some states and societies will be better able to adapt to change than others, regardless of how resilient a given society is there will always be some point at which its efforts would be overwhelmed by the pace of change. Changes in climate - long-term wind and rainfall patterns, daily and seasonal temperature variations, and so on - will produce physical effects such as droughts, floods and increasing severity of typhoons and hurricanes, and ecological effects such as changes in the geographical range of species (including disease-causing organisms, domesticated crops and crop pests). These physical changes in turn may lead to effects such as disruption of water resources, declining crop yields and food stocks, wildfires, severe disease outbreaks, and an increase in numbers of refugees and internally displaced persons.4