Six degrees of adaptation

Originally posted by KazetNagorra
Climate change may not necessarily be something that negatively affects all areas. Some areas may, for instance, become more fertile, get more rainfall, and so on, while other areas may become arid or experience more extreme weather conditions. So what people should do is build defenses against weather events and/or move to different places to adapt.

What kind of defenses?

How might countries favoured by climate change act to accommodate the inevitable influx of climate change refugees?

Originally posted by Bosse de Nage
What kind of defenses?

How might countries favoured by climate change act to accommodate the inevitable influx of climate change refugees?

What kind of defenses?
Well, dikes, levees, improved sewer systems, and so on.

How might countries favoured by climate change act to accommodate the inevitable influx of climate change refugees?
By building homes.

Originally posted by KazetNagorra

[b]How might countries favoured by climate change act to accommodate the inevitable influx of climate change refugees?
By building homes.[/b]

- and perhaps setting up training programmes in advance so that the immigrants can be integrated as fast as possible? Super high tech industries are expected to develop in these blessed regions.

Originally posted by twhitehead
You can create a floating land mass the size of australia, but fertilizing the ocean is a problem?

I was thinking along the lines of exactly what you mention, ie ocean currents drawing nutrients from the ocean floor. We could either build current guides that cause natural currents to push nutrients to the suface (the way continents and some islands alr ...[text shortened]... y do), or we could have large tubes with pumps physically pumping ocean sediment to the surface.

I think it might be easier just to cover that ocean surface with 'floating land' and grow food on top of it. I would think that producing 'current guides' vast enough to draw-up nutrients all the way from the ocean bottom would be so expensive that the cost of that would be at least very roughly comparable to that of producing vast areas of floating land.

I neglected to mention an added benefit of having vast areas of artificial floating land; it can easily be designed to have a greater albedo than the ocean it covers
( 'easily' because oceans naturally have low albedo ) and thus cool the planet and thus can be designed to exactly counteract global warming caused by man-made CO2 emission. This would be a huge side-benefit in addition to the main purpose of the floating land which would be to provide us with much more inhabitable land.

Personally, I feel that, in the very far future, we should leave the fish for the whales.

Originally posted by KazetNagorra
Climate change may not necessarily be something that negatively affects all areas. Some areas may, for instance, become more fertile, get more rainfall, and so on, while other areas may become arid or experience more extreme weather conditions. So what people should do is build defenses against weather events and/or move to different places to adapt.

I think the biggest issue is rising oceans forcing coastal habitation to move inland. The amount of infrastructure this represents is so enormous that I believe it would be cheaper to reverse global warming, or find a way to artificially store all that water (some sort of additives on snow bound areas to reduce melt, might do the trick)

Originally posted by twhitehead
I think the biggest issue is rising oceans forcing coastal habitation to move inland. The amount of infrastructure this represents is so enormous that I believe it would be cheaper to reverse global warming, or find a way to artificially store all that water (some sort of additives on snow bound areas to reduce melt, might do the trick)

The sad part is all the nay sayers who are in the employ of companies who have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo, like BP, Exxon, and so forth, they will make certain nothing is done till the rise reaches say 4 degrees and most of Greenland starts melting. One thing that happens with temperature rise besides the melting ice, the water itself expands due to the added heat. It won't take a massive meltdown of ice to raise the water levels high enough for damage to coastal areas.

It's happening as we speak in fact:

http://edition.cnn.com/2012/12/04/world/asia/nauru-ocean-danger/index.html

Growing exoskeletons.