I can come up with some challenges, but they all do not seem too hard to solve:
Produce food under the new conditions
More roofs and air condition to keep people protected from sun and heat
Move people away from the oceans as those rise
What else?
https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/sustainability/o...
Note that so far, politics has led them to be conservative in their predictions (no tipping points for good -- cheap renewables -- or bad) but it still makes economic sense to prevent the impacts.
> The report further identifies two types of limits to adaptation: “hard adaptation limit,” when no amount of money or technology can solve a problem, and “soft adaptation limit,” which means that the required technology or policy intervention will be too costly to realistically implement. Hard limits include irreversible, large-scale changes to the Earth system or ecosystem functions (for example, the loss of glaciers feeding major inland water systems). Soft limits include changes to local climatology. Working Group II notes, for example, at 2⁰C it is expected that some staple crops may reach soft adaptation limits to changes in temperature and precipitation across the tropics, which will make them prohibitively difficult or expensive to grow.
This alone is an incredibly difficult problem to solve, as evidenced by the fact that the entire history of our species has been spent trying to solve the food problem.
Only very recently have very wealthy western nations overcome food insecurity for most people, while the rest of the world (and poor people in wealthy nations) are already struggling with food insecurity, without adding more crop failures due to climate change on top. The Haber process was only discovered in 1909!
> Move people away from the oceans as those rise
Given that a very large percentage of the world population lives near the ocean, what makes you think relocating hundreds of millions if not billions of people and their jobs and communities is not a hard problem?
Yes, and it should be mentioned that they have managed to do so _only_ with the help of basically feeding unimaginable amounts of energy contained in fossil fuels directly to the plants in the form of nitrogen (fixed in the form of Ammonium).
> Given that a very large percentage of the world population lives near the ocean, what makes you think relocating hundreds of millions if not billions of people and their jobs and communities is not a hard problem?
IMO it really isn't that much of a problem. Sea levels will not rise suddenly but gradually. That will put (slowly) increasing economic pressure on coastal areas, which will gradually drive people from there by giving them incentive to move somewhere else.
If there were a flood instead, relocating all the people living on the coast sure would be a huge problem. But the way things are, it will IMO just be one of the minor problems humanity will face.
I did mention it, that's what the Haber process produces (and the discovery of the Haber process is what allowed us to produce ammonia on an industrial scale rather than relying on natural guano deposits).
> That will put (slowly) increasing economic pressure on coastal areas, which will gradually drive people from there by giving them incentive to move somewhere else.
Who will they sell their homes to?
Yes, and I did read it.
I was trying to put emphasis on the huge cost in the form of near endless energy.
Just mentioning the process as if it somehow miraculously solved the problems for all time is misleading, since the world is now facing the challenge to basically stop using this method. Because it wasn't sustainable.
It only worked because it relied on stored energy, which is A, going to be used up some time and B, should be left in the ground because CO2 emissions must be reduced/stopped.
As with many such large scale problems, the state will probably take care of that by bearing these costs and distributing them among the citizens.
It's not a good way, but it should work.
Do we really need to move billions of people?
We humans couldn't live under current conditions without the tech we built. Why can't we build the tech to cope with new conditions? Put roofs made from solar panels over peoples heads and air conditin below the roofs?
> a quarter of Bangladesh’s landmass, bound on the south by the northern Indian Ocean, hovers less than seven feet above sea level. And as floods grow increasingly frequent and severe, the 163 million who make their home in Bangladesh, the world’s most populous delta, know little escape from water.
https://www.nrdc.org/onearth/bangladesh-country-underwater-c...
It's not as if we lack the space to move the people living around the cost elsewhere. When you drop a refrigerator from the sky, the probability to hit someone is basically zero.
Sure there's a lot of empty space here, but places like Wellington have very little space left for development, and significant suburbs (Lyall Bay, Seatoun, Petone, Eastbourne) will likely need to have significant properties moved elsewhere, which means out of the current urban areas...
Same goes for Christchurch and Auckland...
Where exactly will new areas be created? It's not impossible, but will people want to do that? Already there are many properties on the south coast of Wellington (Owhiro Bay, Moa Point), which regularly have flood risks at least once a year with strong southerlies and high tides, and people stay there...
Given how bad the availability of property is here, I doubt it will be that easy (although that might be a way: subsidised property in a new suburb if you move?)...
- Make slight adjustments to urban and infrastructure planning to accommodate for expected changes, e.g., updating catchment forecasts and flood and tide maps are probably some of the big ones (although the former two are wildly unpredictable at the best of times).
Look at what a few million Syrian refugees has done to German and French politics during a period of relative abundance. What do you think will happen if you multiply that number by 100, and add in some economic turmoil and hyperinflation? You get some modern iteration of the Russian Revolution or Nazi Germany. But this time, everyone has nukes.
Couldn't they just vote for parties that close the borders?
Secondly, putting aside whether closed borders are in this category of things (I personally happen to believe it is), it unlikely that the economy can crash and refugees can 100x and we can get a right-wing populist who is also pro-democracy and liberal. Right-wing populists have consistently shown that they don't care about democracy -- they care about nation and empire and glory and race, not liberalism and not individuals. In fact, they hate liberalism with a passion. Look at how Orban has undermined the free press in Hungary. Look at how Trump has undermined confidence in US elections. Look at Turkey. And this is when things are prosperous. Look what happened after Russia's post-Soviet economic turmoil. We got Putin who threw away democracy the first chance he got. Hitler's popularity went up from the single digits to about 30% in 1 or 2 years into the Great Depression, mostly driven by the impoverished in rural areas. The Russian Revolution happened immediately after the extremely dire conditions post-WW1, leading the authoritarian Bolsheviks to take power. The CCP took power from the KMT in the context of poverty and humiliation resulting from British then Japanese imperialism (among other causes). It's causal, and it happens again and again.