zlacker

Do you realize how cheap sea walls are? The Dutch were building them 800 years ago with medieval technology and resources.

>>missed+(OP)
My threat model for global warming is different from most people's (hence "unpopular prediction"). I think sea-level rise is going to be a non-event: the worst models predict about 18 inches over a century, which is less than tidal variation in most places.

Changing weather and vegetation patterns is going to be a big event. We're going to see some previously fertile areas (Mesopotamia, Northern Europe, sub-Saharan Africa) suffer from decade-long droughts, while other previously uninhabitable areas (Canadian & Russian taiga and the Sahara, for example) become fertile grasslands. This will drive widespread migration, which has a tendency to destroy political stability and lead to mass wars. Nature isn't going to kill us; we're going to kill each other because some of us are going to starve and others are going to get fabulously wealthy.

>>nostra+Dc
But I think what's overlooked is that these changes will happen over a long period of time. 20, 50, 100 years. We will grow different crops 100 years hence, but we were growing different crops 100 years ago. There will be lots of immigration over the next 100 years, but there's been a lot of immigration over the past 100 years, including in my family and likely in yours.

I think the costs of a changing climate are real, but I think the benefits are too often overlooked. For instance, most landmass on earth is not at the equator, but it's in the northern hemisphere. Much of it is uninhabitable at present but will become habitable as the climate changes. Canada, Sweden, Finland, and others will become more than 100km tall. A lot of Russia, and Northern Europe, as well as Mongolia and South America will become more habitable. Further, according to Lancet, very cold weather kills more people than very hot weather, so as winters become more mild and summers become hotter, the net effect will be fewer deaths.

>>nostra+Dc
> Canadian & Russian taiga and the Sahara, for example, become fertile grasslands

It'll take a lot more than climate for those areas to become productive. Glaciers have scraped away most of the topsoil in the Canadian shield[1], for instance. The Sahara desert's sand isn't a great growing medium. And so on.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Shield

>>tricer+jy
I'm Israeli and moved to Austria and later Germany in adulthood. I now live in Berlin, which is in the middle of an area the Germans consider unsuitable to agriculture due to poor soil quality.

And yet in Israel people managed to employ advanced AgTech to grow food in areas with much worse soil than Berlin-Brandenburg & with less abundant water reserves (and they also did this back when Israel was a much poorer country than Germany). In fact aside from some grains import Israel is mostly self-sufficient in food production. Germany is not despite being less densely populated and having much better natural conditions for growing food, because it is more expensive than importing food.

If need be these areas can produce food if the climate is suitable, it will just not be as cheap as the food we can currently get elsewhere (but then again AgTech continues to advance and economies of scale kick in). Anecdotally as a consumer groceries in Israel cost about 2-3x as much as in Germany but both countries suffer a lot more from obesity than hunger.

Also as an unintended result of the above Israel is today a significant exporter of AgTech.