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by mirimir 2845 days ago
What about impacts on food production? And chaos from mass migrations?
1 comments

Remember, first and foremost, the climate change isn't something that will happen, it is happening. It's not like one day everything is just dandy and the next day everything is underwater and everybody's freaking out realizing how serious an issue it was all along. It is an extremely gradual process. The characteristics, locations, and composition of food production may change but global level starvation is not a realistic concern. One of the more cynical papers of recent time proposed up to 500k deaths related to food production by 2050. Work that out in terms of net effect on the global population over 30 years. It's certainly not something that should be shrugged off, but at the same time e.g. rising obesity rates will cause magnitudes more deaths before then.

Over time, if our models hold up, we'll see the desirability of coastal areas begin to gradually decline. As sea levels gradually rise we'll probably respond with pumping systems and other technological solutions and if/when technological solutions start to lose ground we'll begin to see demand for coastal property start to decline but as there will always be people with different appetites for risk and prospecting, it'll constantly be a gradual process. We'll probably also see the rise of entrepreneurs taking advantage of the changing landscapes to offer new solutions. For instance check out the ideas for ideas being carried out by Dutch Docklands. [1] Some phenomenal stuff there. For others, we'll likely see emigrations more inland as I imagine we've already seen, at least to some degree, from places like Louisiana.

In the worst case, there may be lots of change. But change is not necessarily bad in the longrun, even if undesirable in the shortrun.

[1] - http://www.dutchdocklands.com/Development/United-States

OK, good points. I agree that it's hard to talk about such gradual changes. But what worries me is that stuff isn't always linear.
The problem is not climate change, it’s climate change acceleration.

A handful of extinctions over 10,000 years are no problem for an ecosystem to handle.

A handful of extinctions every year for 50 years can turn a forest into a wasteland.