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> relax, you'll be dead by then

This is part of the reason so little is being done to combat climate change now. If we don't act now though, the future generations will definitely drown. It will be too late for them to do anything.

> That's one of the few countries likely to benefit from climate change.

This is one of the most dangerous delusions. In our globalised interconnected world nobody will benefit. Just think about the last financial crisis. Mortgage crisis in the US caused chaos in the whole world.

Nobody is going to drown. People will do some combination of building walls, raising land, and moving. It will play out over a period of a thousands years or more. There will be a non-zero cost associated with diverting resources for these things, but that's not the end of the world. I'm not saying it's an excuse for not acting though. We have a responsibility to take care of our own mess, rather than just dump it on our children.

I still think the comparative lack of low-lying coastal land, plus ample freshwater, increased growing season, and increased arable land will be net benefit for Canada and Russia. Plus if things are as bad as you say, they'll benefit from increased demand for immigration as well (even if you don't take on more people, you can select more desirable immigrants.)

This is not a crash situation like 2008, this is more like a glacier that's flowing towards you. You have plenty of time to plan your response, like moving out of the way, but you can't stop it. Trouble in other countries will have unpredictable, but not necessarily all bad effects.

Is it now? The predictions are, as far as I understand, that a lot of coastal areas will become submerged this century, meanwhile the rising temperatures will (and already are) mess up with the food supply. As that accelerates, the world will see a migration wave like never before in history, and frankly, it sounds like straight to World War 3 from here to me.

The planet, frankly, doesn't matter. It'll be fine. The thing that matters is our technological civilization. Whether it's a gun or a glacier, our civilization is fragile, and when it fails, it's essentially game over for humanity - mass deaths followed by the remaining survivors stuck in medieval conditions for many thousands, or tens of thousands of years.

Things won't move that quickly, and hopefully they won't get that dire. We can't rule it out either though. There's plenty of good reasons to worry and take action. It is still a tragedy unfolding. But it's not necessarily as doom and gloom as many people believe.

But things do move that quickly. Current projections [1] have global sea levels rising from anything between 0.3m and 2.4m by the end of the century.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_level_rise

That's pretty slow for a change smoothed out over eighty years.

Well, (a) it's a hell of a lot faster than it has been for most of my life, and (b) it means that in my lifetime, a lot of the places I know & love will be seriously affected by - if not completely lost to - sea level rise.

I get the sense you don't live anywhere near the coast.

> But it's not necessarily as doom and gloom as many people believe

It really is doom if whole cities are wiped off the map. Just because the process of that doom happens in relatively slow motion doesn't make it any less doom. Hundreds of coastal cities will be literally gone. But don't let the speed of the process trick your mind. It is actually urgent to act now. We need to decarbonize our economies within a decade or those cities are doomed. We need to motivate people, and we need less of this "meh, it'll take a while, we can sit on our hands for now, let's not get excited."

> Nobody is going to drown.

Well, they probably won't drown by the millions, but sea level rise contributes to coastal flooding in extreme weather events, such as hurricanes and typhoons, and most people who die in those events die due to flooding. So it is not a stretch to stay that thousands of people--perhaps tens or even hundreds of thousands--could actually be drowned by rising sea levels.

Yes, that's true. I'm not sure why you got downvoted for saying that.

> Nobody is going to drown. People will do some combination of building walls, raising land, and moving.

What are you talking about, people are drowning now. When a big storm tears through a low lying area or there is flooding, people drown.

> People will do some combination of building walls, raising land, and moving. It will play out over a period of a thousands years or more.

If we don't get climate change under control we're not going to have thousands of years, or even a few hundred years.

Yes countries will try to mitigate the effects by building sea walls but the truth is that you can't beat mother nature if you keep raising sea level and making storms stronger.

And this idea that people can just move is simply irrational. Who is going to buy property that is in imminent danger of being underwater? Who is gonna insure that property? The only lifeline to people in flood-affected areas is government buyouts, and many governments can't afford to do that even now, much less in the future when it gets much worse.

And then what, where will all of these displaced people go? Particularly people from island nations?

> There will be a non-zero cost associated with diverting resources for these things, but that's not the end of the world.

There will be an enormous and potentially impossible cost with trying to build and move fast enough to beat climate change in coastal areas.

> This is not a crash situation like 2008, this is more like a glacier that's flowing towards you. You have plenty of time to plan your response, like moving out of the way, but you can't stop it. Trouble in other countries will have unpredictable, but not necessarily all bad effects.

It's like an iceberg heading towards a massive boat that takes a long time to turn. If we make a hard turn now, we might only graze the iceberg, but if we wait to make our turn, it'll be too late to avoid impact.

> I still think the comparative lack of low-lying coastal land, plus ample freshwater, increased growing season, and increased arable land will be net benefit for Canada and Russia.

No it won't. First, even if new areas are warm enough to support crops, crop yields are heavily dependent on soil and rainfall. Those newly warm soils are simply not going to be as fertile as current growing regions. Secondly, if global economies are wrecked, being able to crow crops in Siberia is not going to be a net benefit. People think that climate change means that there'll be an orderly shift in temperatures, but it will be chaotic and unpredictable. And climates near the poles are warming that much, that is going to come with the positive feedback loop of methane released from permafrost which will accelerate warming.

Trying to passively adapt to climate change is outright foolish. There's no way human kind can build walls high enough, or somehow find a way to grow and cultivate crops, livestock, and fish at a scale that can avoid disaster and the breakdown of society. If we start shifting en masse to renewable energy and making consumption more efficient we might be able to get things to a manageable level. The earlier we make a massive shift, the better. Because later on we may be left with nothing but bad options.

The earlier we get climate change under control the less it will cost us. Either way we have to adapt. As I pointed out there are some long term positives from a little global warming that may eventually make the cost of adapting worthwhile. We still need to act decisively and quickly to prevent things from running away on us. Nothing I said is an exhortation to do anything less.

Sea level rise under the "business as usual" RCP 8.5 scenario is 0.5 to 1 meter by 2100. Combined with increased storm intensity and existing subsidence rates, and this a very large increase that will swamp many lower lying cities, including much of the area where I work today.

"You'll long be dead" applies to the elderly politicians currently driving policies and laughing/mocking young climate activists. But the young climate activists like Greta or younger probably WILL be alive by 2100. Most of my children will still be alive by then, and when (if) I have grandchildren, they definitely will.

I think it's absurd to not give a crap about the fate of my children.

"Relax, you'll be long dead" is a statement contingent on the generation. The Boomers and older, who hold the vast majority of the world's wealth, have the least at stake while the young people currently striking have the most at stake. Climate denialism is basically an economic war on the young.

You're the only one talking about not giving a crap. Don't strawman my argument.

50-100cm of sea-level rise over a period of 100 years is a non-issue really. Most places won't be affected and those that will be have time to employ one of the three strategies mentioned. Everyone alive will be dead before it starts to really bite - that does not equate to permission "not to give a crap" to be perfectly clear. It's also not climate denialism to talk about the facts, which I shouldn't need to say.

1 meter is on top of about that much subsidence and storm surge increase. Most of Langley Air Force Base and much of adjacent NASA Langley will be below high tide level, not counting storm surge. My neighbor's house (who are trying to sell) will be under nearly a meter of water. This is not "non-issue." We're talking only about 80 years from now. Within living memory. And we're already seeing impact.

https://coast.noaa.gov/slr/#/layer/slr/6/-8502032.768614948/...

EDIT: I understood your point was about how the REAL threat is the existential threat of nonlinear feedback loops, HOWEVER, I thought your post under-played the real consequences on people alive today of even the most likely outcome. We're going to have to rebuild much of cities that have been around for 100s of years. There's an enormous amount of capital involved here. Imagine Katrina-like scenarios but for dozens of cities in the US and at regular intervals. A vast system of dikes will be needed, probably at the cost of a trillion dollars, all along the US sea coasts. In addition to on the order of trillions in real estate that will have to be abandoned (in places like Miami, Norfolk, New York City, San Fran and surrounding cities, much of the Mississippi river delta in Louisiana including New Orleans, and even Washington DC) or maybe rebuilt on stilts or vastly upgraded dike systems. This is stuff in living memory of today, and it's the result of a stay-the-course growth in fossil fuel usage.

Yes, it will be extremely expensive and it's a crime that we don't tax fossil fuels to account for those negative externalities. I don't want to downplay it too much here. It's serious business, but is not the end of civilization - unless those feedback loops kick in in a big way. I think the change in sea level will be somewhat gradual, giving time to migrate or fortify infrastructure. Keep in mind few of the roads, bridges, and skyscrapers in our current cities will still be there when the water reaches them. If we write them off and build further inland instead of trying to maintain or rebuild them in place, it will naturally shift part of our infrastructure. It will still be costly though.

The real thing I fear involving climate change is civilization collapse, or at least famine and warfare. I fear a future where there are a lot of very, very angry, hungry people, lead by governments with nuclear weapons.

This is just based on my casual reading of events and history. If anyone knows of any good articles talking about this sort of thing, link me.

People should be very worried about this. Some parts of the world are already unstable, imagine what happens when food supplies dramatically contract or areas are hit with multiple weather disasters. There is a lot of strain and turmoil over migrations as is (see Syria), imagine what that looks like when hundreds of millions of people are displaced.

What happens when millions of hungry and displaced people try to move across borders to countries that are their outright enemies? Or if an already oppressed ethnic group is hit with a water crisis? One doesn't need to look far into history to see that it could lead to mass murder

> This happened when ~5C degree warming from millions of years of the Siberian traps eruptions caused methane hydrates to be released into the atmosphere, triggering another ~5C warming and the greatest mass extinction on Earth, the End-Permian Extinction, also known as "the Great Dying" where 96% of marine species went extinct, and 70% of terrestrial species.

That's a theory for what happened, but as I understand it the cause of this extinction has not been conclusively proved.

Yes, it's the leading theory. That doesn't mean is true, just the most likely explanation for the data we have now.

Hardly anything is "conclusively proved", although theories we can design experiments for are much more robust than theories about historical or geological events where we don't have that luxury.

Or “how I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb.”