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Depending on how bad it goes, it's unavoidable without upending your (current) life. Sure, let's assume things don't go too bad and you just avoid properties at

Depending on how bad it goes, it's unavoidable without upending your (current) life. Sure, let's assume things don't go too bad and you just avoid properties at close to sea level right next to the ocean. That's fine. But what if you're expecting for things go real bad? Do you rule out living in NYC completely? Do you preemptively move out of Florida leaving all your family behind? The issue is that this is not a swift "now the bad thing happened and it took us all together" crisis. For the better or worse, humans are actually reasonably ok with dealing with situations like that. This is a "your life is going to suck at some indeterminate point in the future, maybe, and depending on where your roots are, maybe you can avoid it at the cost of continuous great personal expense" crisis. No one can possibly be well prepared to deal with that and I'd wager that's where the incredible frustration around climate change comes.

WorldMaker 3y ago
Even if you are smart enough to move somewhere safer (or lucky enough to have generational wealth there), you can't avoid the effects of things like refugee crises when the worst happens. If people have to leave NYC or Florida in large mass waves, that's going to destabilize in its own ways anywhere there are escaping to in large groups. There's a perspective that "nowhere" will be safe from the effects of climate change because if you aren't the ones getting flooded out (or drought destroyed or wildfire devastated or tornado wrecked; flooding isn't the only thing that gets extra energy in global climate change) and are lucky enough to be in whatever "the nice places" will turn out to be, you get to possibly deal with everyone else. (Some will make some money on that as slum landlords, perhaps, so there's a "silver lining" for disaster capitalists, but those are the same people that will be just fine turning any "nice place to live" into a terrible place for all in its own ways by preferring money to human happiness and kindness.) America has some lovely sometimes self-delusional myths of being a shining beacon for refugees in a crisis, but anti-immigrant rhetoric is already in a bad place this decade and overall America's worst internal refugee crisis was the dust bowl of the Great Depression and it took a lot of effort and today a lot of politicians don't believe the drastic changes made to save the country from the Great Depression were good changes and have spent the last few decades rolling them back and/or destroying them and/or trying to run a Great Depression speedrun like it is a GDQ category that should have been banned pre-emptively. That probably doesn't bode well for the next crises.

WorldMaker 3y ago

Even if you are smart enough to move somewhere safer (or lucky enough to have generational wealth there), you can't avoid the effects of things like refugee crises when the worst happens. If people have to leave NYC or Florida in large mass waves, that's going to destabilize in its own ways anywhere there are escaping to in large groups. There's a perspective that "nowhere" will be safe from the effects of climate change because if you aren't the ones getting flooded out (or drought destroyed or wildfire devastated or tornado wrecked; flooding isn't the only thing that gets extra energy in global climate change) and are lucky enough to be in whatever "the nice places" will turn out to be, you get to possibly deal with everyone else. (Some will make some money on that as slum landlords, perhaps, so there's a "silver lining" for disaster capitalists, but those are the same people that will be just fine turning any "nice place to live" into a terrible place for all in its own ways by preferring money to human happiness and kindness.) America has some lovely sometimes self-delusional myths of being a shining beacon for refugees in a crisis, but anti-immigrant rhetoric is already in a bad place this decade and overall America's worst internal refugee crisis was the dust bowl of the Great Depression and it took a lot of effort and today a lot of politicians don't believe the drastic changes made to save the country from the Great Depression were good changes and have spent the last few decades rolling them back and/or destroying them and/or trying to run a Great Depression speedrun like it is a GDQ category that should have been banned pre-emptively. That probably doesn't bode well for the next crises.