[beat]

Something else to consider, that the article doesn't really touch, is the pace of change. Even at global-disaster scale, climate change moves pretty slowly. The ocean may rise a couple of meters, but it's not rising a couple of meters later this afternoon.

Interesting thing to think about... in the past century, Earth's population has quadrupled, with most of that occurring along coastlines. That means we built enough housing in a century to accommodate four times as many people in those coastal cities. Why can't we just keep building? Population growth has mostly leveled off (we're looking at no more than 50% population increase over the next century, probably less), and we have much better tools now than we had then. If New Orleans floods, you don't necessarily need to move to Kansas to escape it - and the mouth of the Mississippi will continue to be a vital trade corridor even if the oceans rise.

The changes are generational in timespan. Think that way.

[godshatter]

This is what I was thinking. People seem to think of climate change as something like a tornado or something. Sea level, for example, rises so slowly that you can simply abandon the land on the coast that we start to lose and keep expanding inward. The easily flooded areas from more potent storms will probably be abandoned, too, over time. It won't be fun, for sure, but I don't see civilization falling any time soon.

It's not like an event labeled "climate change" is going to hit us next Thursday and we're suddenly going to be reduced to roving bands of survivors who will be wishing they had signed up for that survival training class yesterday.

I'd worry more about getting our government officials to put more resources into disaster preparedness than I would how to start a fire or how best to lead a band of frightened survivors.

[AstralStorm]

The most important bit will be food and water safety, parts ever father from equator will be overloaded in terms of food production. Water facilities are not prepared to deal with the magnitude of change and it will be a lot of work to bring them up.

The big problem here is that such preparations ahead of time are not exactly economically viable, and mostly impossible "just in time" as they require systemic changes.

Once these pressures are bad enough, we'll have a big problem.

[beat]

That's assuming there are mass migrations due to lack of food. Why can't they just adjust crops? We keep imagining agriculture as some sort of on-off switch - "We have crops, and then the global warming happens, and suddenly we no longer have crops". It doesn't work that way. We'll see production declines, maybe, but not sudden elimination of entire food supplies. And production declines can be dealt with intelligently - switching crops, altering harvest cycles, etc. Again, in the past century, humanity has handled a quadrupling of the population and wound up with more food surplus and lower food costs than at any point in history. And that's without whatever future the introduction of genetic engineering, internet-of-things, and other modern technologies bring to the table.

[usrusr]

Climate may change slow (by human standards, not by climate's standards), but civilization collapse can be pretty much flip-of-a-switch instantaneous.

[beat]

Right. But climate change may not be a fast enough trigger to cause an instantaneous collapse of civilization.

And at what scale are we talking? A local community, or a nation, or the world? The instantaneous collapse of global civilization, with no instantaneous trigger, seems unlikely to me. The idea that no government will be able to stand and keep order, from the UN to the US on down to every town in the world? Nah.