Comment by cj | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cj | Hacker News Reader

Side note: I think it's going to be really interesting how governments decide to respond to rising oceans / temps (think places like Miami, Manhattan, any coastal city at sea level).

Seems like there's 2 options:

1) Encourage people to migrate to other cities and essentially "give up" on saving the city

2) Spend a lot of money trying to fortify existing cities

I'm guessing it will start with #2 (technically it's already happening) and then eventually we'll get to #1 but only when the situation is truly dire after which it becomes a politically favorable philosophy.

And then the question is how long do we think it will take for #1 to happen (assuming it will happen in the first place). 1-2 decades? Half a century? Multiple centuries?

There must be some contrarian billionaires out there buying up tons of land in undeveloped areas with a multi-decade idea that the land will 100x in value if/when mass migrations occur. That said, I would guess that most easily habitable areas of the US are already pretty well built up. Maybe what's more likely to happen to migration to suburbs and eventually to rural areas, until those areas are in such demand that the suburbs become metros and rural becomes suburbs.

/end of armchair science ramblings

If we were smart we'd at least stop using tax payer money to pay for fixing all the damage done in places where flooding is routine. People will probably need the government to pay them to move though since no one is buying a house that floods every single year.

What we should be doing is locating rural areas expected to be least hit by climate change and building them up to accommodate the people who will be displaced including climate refugees from elsewhere. We could even be requiring refugees and certain immigrants to move into and live in certain areas of the country (for some number of years at least) to help get those places started. Sadly, immigration policy isn't being enforced much these days at all and it's kind of scary to think of what will happen when people start to become really desperate. When they're not just looking for better paying jobs and instead don't have clean water or homes to go back to.

In any case, it's going to get a lot hotter and a lot more crowded in the near future, and it'll be a balancing act to get more and more people packed into spaces without it becoming more people than a given area can sustainably support. High population density is never good for the local environment and we don't want to make a bad situation worse by creating or allowing slums.

> We could even be requiring refugees and certain immigrants to move into and live in certain areas of the country (for some number of years at least) to help get those places started.

Yeah! These places will start out as camps, of course, but we'll later give them the resources to become cities. It certainly makes sense to concentrate immigrants and refugees in them.

This is an honest representation of our values and in all sincerity I do predict more of it in the future.

Ideally we'd build out infrastructure and make them into nice places to live before anyone moves there, but very few people are looking to move to a ghost town and without a population there'd be little to no local economy to start with. The new cities would mean a lot of new jobs though and with people being able to work remotely our new countrymen should be able to settle in quickly. I know Americans aren't at all used to the idea of being told where they can live (even if only for a few years), but careful planning could help distribute our quickly growing population a bit and help protect the environment while resources grow increasingly scarce all without creating ghettos.

Sadly, I don't think we can avoid creating heavily segregated areas while unprecedented numbers of immigrants and refugees are coming in who'll need time to get acclimated and recover from the loss of their homes and previous lives, but we could still provide the areas with diversity (there'll be people from all over coming in) and hopefully they wouldn't stay filled with mostly just immigrants and refugees for long. The new cities, built in safe areas with all new infrastructure using what we've learned from our past mistakes and from the successes of others, could become very attractive for all kinds of people. Today there's an embarrassing number of places in the US full of crumbling infrastructure. Places where people don't have clean drinking water, broadband, or reliable electricity.

They will be ghettoes in something much closer to the original sense of the word than the current vernacular one.

I simply do not trust the motivations, commitment, and competence of anyone who would try to accomplish this.

I don't know what a better alternative would be when 1 billion people show up demanding clean water, food, medical care, and housing. We're either going to need to manage our resources and help each other or we get overrun, waste or destroy what few resources we have left, and eventually start having wars over access to food and water because it's a total free for all.

I get that there'd be a lot of potential for abuses and corruption and that traditionally that has totally been our MO as a country, but if we're smart about it I do believe that it's possible to save ourselves, maintain a high standard of living, and help as many climate refugees as we can while providing them with a higher standard of living than many of them were used to.

When you imagine these scenarios, spend some time picturing yourself and your family as the climate refugees rather than the benevolently receptive natives.

It's just so very clear that your "we" is safe in your scenario. Certainly it's coming first and hardest for other parts of the world and people poorer than yourself. But there have already been surprises and there will continue to be.

Well, I'm pretty safe. I've got resources, property in the midwest far from the coasts which will have to contend with rising tides and increasingly severe storms. North enough to be spared at least most of what's coming for the western US (soon to be desert) or the southern US. Almost half the nation's population lives along the coasts. Many will be pushed inland. Maybe they'll go to new cities built in safe areas. Maybe they'll connect with family and friends in other places in which case it's going to be a squeeze. Probably some of that will be near me. There will be unique challenges and new problems for all of us. A reduction in food availability, strained services due to population expansion, culture clashes etc. I have family in places that today can't get drinkable water from their taps due to lead contamination by the city. We're starting from behind the 8 ball in a lot of ways. It's not going to be easy for anyone, but I (and likely most the people here) will have a much easier time than others.

It's not easy to imagine myself and my family as climate refugees, because I have never experienced the level of poverty many of them will have come from (and I've been homeless!), I can only try to imagine what's it's like to lose everything and have your city washed away, or be forced to leave because there's no food. What I can imagine more easily is hearing that the US will give my family a home, in a safe place to live with water and food on the condition that I move to a clean, beautiful city they just built with the only catch being that I have to live there for at least, say, 10 years.

I'd still be able to try my luck at several other countries to see what they offer, but I'm guessing I'd be thrilled! I'd get flown from the border to a city in the northern part of the country where many others around me speak my language and several of my neighbors share my culture and we can support each other while we work to adapt to our new home. There are lots of jobs because new cities need people everywhere, and so I'd have more money than I'd made before. I'd miss my home and my old life, but me and my family would be safe and cool and fed. I'd be even better off if I were someone who was already wealthy, highly educated, but suddenly lost their home due to climate change.

The US is a country that will face many problems because of climate change, but we're also one of the lucky ones because we'll have places that can still grow food at scale, provide water, and maintain livable temperatures. That gives us a responsibility to help take in the billion+ refugees from elsewhere. Somehow we have to figure out how to do that without jeopardizing what we have or hurting the very people we're trying to help. We'd better figure it out fast too. By some estimates we've got as little as 25-50 years, and some people believe that the largest mass migration of humans in Earth's history is already well underway.

You're describing the scene from a short SF story where there are people living 'low' in the flooded parts of the US and 'high' on higher ground that stayed dry. Between the two there is barbed wire and gates. Those living 'high' are living pretty much like they do today, those living low are utterly dependent for all kinds of critical resources.

The story ends on a hopeful note, I think in practice it would turn into mass murder at some point.

In this case though, it'd be American's fleeing the flooded parts of the US and squeezing into cities while the safer higher ground is settled by the influx of climate refugees we'd have to deal with somehow anyway. Zero need for barbed wire or gates. I expect most of the dying will be from people trying to make it on their own in the areas that can't sustain populations any longer and of course the massive numbers of people dying at the borders because there's literally no way we could take in everyone who will need a place to live. 1.2 billion displaced people is just too much, even if we had more than a few decades to find homes and resources for them.

In that story it's Americans against Americans because there is only so much room 'above'. So the 'low' people end up occupying the upper stories of those buildings that are still standing and are using boats rather than vehicles to get around. It's a pretty good story.

(SB Divya; Textbooks in the attic; 'The best of SF of the year 2022, vol. 6; Neil Clarke)

In the US at least, I don't trust that the government will do anything meaningful preemptively - they don't have a great track record (with regards to climate change) in recent decades.

Instead, it will likely be the insurance companies that dictate how/if things are rebuilt when catastrophes strike. Rebuilding won't be an option when no insurer will issue a policy for houses, office buildings, manufacturing, etc due to the expected future consequences of climate change. It's already starting to happen in Florida with multiple major insurance companies pulling out of the state.

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