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Comment by jfengel | Hacker News Reader

If you live anywhere in the US you're probably ok. The southwest droughts are bad but the rivers were overused even before climate change. We'll build more air conditioners and more levees. Those rich enough to move to Vermont will be fine anywhere.

The billions living in already marginal places near the equator will die or leave. That's where the real humanitarian disaster will be, and it will be far beyond precedent.

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“Probably ok” doesn’t seem adequate to cover wildfires, large scale storm flooding in areas which weren’t previously prone to it, tropical diseases becoming endemic, etc. We probably won’t have massive famines but we’re definitely going to have cost increases and reduced availability which a lot of people are going to have a hard time with. People who aren’t rich are going to struggle with all of this at the same time, especially when homeowners insurance starts meaning you can’t get a mortgage (or sell your home to someone who’ll need one).

“Probably ok” means there will be trains to drive and almost everyone lives.

But yeah, lots of stuff will be worse.

But definitely more careers than “climate refugee.”

Yeah, I don’t think the U.S. is turning into Sarajevo during the 90s but I think there will be more disruption than we expect and probably actual refugee camps sooner than we like to think.

We have refugee camps now. FEMA trailers and whatnot for hurricanes and earthquakes and for the Mexican border.

So I expect we’ll continue to have them.

But we won’t have the kind of camps they had in Jordan that had millions of refugees from Syria or something.

So I think we’ll have “normal” refugee camps that help place thousands of people. But not “end of the world” style camps with the population of Mississippi.

People seem to be catastrophizing what’s going to be a different future into something much worse than it likely will be.

I don't like the idea of living someplace where if the air conditioning fails, I die. I don't know where the wet bulb temp is hitting/will hit 35/95, but those places are off my list of places to live.

Sure. The great thing about living in a rich country is that people have that option. The real problem is those without options.

As human being have been doing since the dawn of history.

If you learn more about history, note how much suffering was caused by famine, disease, and the ensuing warfare, too. One of the hallmarks of modern civilization is that we were less callous about shrugging off deaths & lowered quality of life. Thanks to those advances we have a much larger population than in the past which means each failure will impact numbers of people which would have been hard to reach in most of human history.

Back then we could not prevent or ameliorate such disasters. This is equivalent to arguing we should not invest in sanitation because humans have been dying of cholera since ever.

This is the equivalent of arguing that we instead invented sanitation to adapt to reality instead of sitting in our own shit and dying of cholera and opining about sanitation refugees.

It would have been nice to think that we could have improved since the dawn of history. Or at least not actively do it to ourselves.

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