As climate change continuee, people in untenable (no food, water, flood-prone, etc.) environments will attempt to move. However, migrations by foot will initially have to cross even less friendly regions. Unless 'have' nations are willing to beggar themselves (how many shipwreck survivors can be dragged into the lifeboat before it swamps itself?) vast multitudes will perish. But, let's not confuse our ability to deal with this by feeling guilty: without the technical advances of the modern world, most of these impacted would not have been born, or survived into adulthood.

It's my belief that with the Earth at, near, or above its rational carrying power, saving lives directly impairs civilization's ability to sustain itself. I invite readers to suggest adverse social conditions ( with the possible exception of effects of Radical Islamism ) that are not made worse by too many people competing for available resources, and that would not be relieved if there were fewer people .

And let's not lay off on the military protecting us and Western Civilization, by expecting them to machine-gun hordes of starving women and children.

You know my background JPWREL, I am an iyeska, a mixed-blood. I have no faith the World can look to the greatest nation on earth for leadership in conservation and on climate change, let alone addressing future epic disasters with our military, when it wasn’t that long ago that U.S. policy lead to the greatest destruction of warm blooded animals in human history, the decimation of the buffalo in America?

If this was the same nation you and I grew up in with only 160,000,000 others, I'd for sure try the political process. But seriously . . .

....restore a functioning democracy and a civil, reasonable society. Only in then will we be able to muster up the effort to counter problems like the climate problem which Eric Hammel brings up. Efforts by the military and para-military organizations will just be band-aids after the catastrophe hits.

Maybe in a reasonable world, FG42, but once the functional illiterates you wish on us get into power, they will never leave. Are you tracking "Republican" governers and legislatures as they rush to cut voting rolls?

The religious crazies look at this threat--and all threats--as a step on the road to The Rapture.

I hear you, and often share this sentiment. But when you write, "maybe we should let the Tea Party crazies, the big business and wealthy interests who refuse to pay a bit more taxes for the good of the country, the religious extremists, and other factions represented by the Republican Party, win and run the country..." I can't help but think we've already "been there, done that" in 2000, 2004 (save for the Tea Party part). And here we are, with pols all a-twitter over the debt ceiling, an indignation I liken to refusing to pick up the tab after you thought it a great idea to treat the entire neighborhood to an all you can eat buffet, hog trough-style, at the local Golden Corral. You scarfed it, you bought it. But when your waitress drops the check you grow alligator arms?!? "I'm sorry sir, you said the mongolian beef was too cold? But that didn't stop you from polishing it off..."

Desperate, indeed. At least, in the insipid, immortal words of Rebecca Black, it's Friday.

Strange but refreshing to see such honesty about the religious right. If they took the time to read the Bible and understand it they would not have the world view they do. Most of them think the Rapture is in the Bible. It is not. It is some 19th century preacher's interpretation of a couple of verses. If they weren't so dangerous one could feel sorry for them.

I live a mile =west= on the San Andreas Fault, which goes offshore two miles north of my house. After I saw in Katrina what I could expect from FEMA in the wake of a regional emergency, such as a major earthquake, I wanted to see if I'd missed anything essential on a shopping list I made of emergency supplies and tools I didn't have. I called the "local emergency manager" listed in my phonebook. He was a deskbound small-town police sergeant whose plan was (and presumably remains) an empty three-ring binder with "Emergency Plan" on the cover. The local emergency planning board had and has zero members for this man to advise., (BTW, I found him by calling the local police non-emergency line. The dispatcher who answered the call--she was also the 911 dispatcher--thought there was no emergency manager until we both learned that there was one by asking the only sergeant in the station, who happened to remember it was him.)

I called locally because, in a pinch, I could probably walk to the police station on the good bet the phones would be out. But I'm also friends with the county emergency liaison, the chief of police of a major local city, who lives even closer to me than the local police station. Her response to my inquiry, the one I made after the local call, was that a citizen's list of emergency supplies and tools was a good idea she would add to her to-do list as well as bring up at her next regional meeting.

This was all while Katrina was still hot in the news, so you can perhaps see why checking the FEMA website wasn't at the top of my list. Besides, I expect the electricity and phones to go bye-bye if there's a big enough earthquake to force me to rely on my own supplies of water and toilet paper, etc.

Now, I'm talking about an earthquake because earthquakes are never far from mind where I live. But it could be a tsunami from someone else's earthquake. Or it could be the slow onset of a permanent sea-level rise that knocks out the only way out of town, a mostly sea-level coastal road. Or I might have to leave town with everyone else for other reasons. I might be a weather refugee with everyone else now living in sea-level megalopolises centered on San Francisco, LA, San Diego, New York, New Orleans, Boston, Philadelphia, Boston, DC, and on and on, just in the U.S.

What do you think, Anon? That the government has a plan to rescue me, make me whole on the value of my house or the life I've built? Move me in with relatives I don't have in Alberta?

I'm not even talking about =us= in this piece. I'm only talking about THEM. But "them" includes the places from which we acquire most of the carbon-based products we're manifestly strangling on.

And I didn't put in the part about the heat-induced release of methane from permafrost or cold ocean beds.

Anon wrote: "Remember, the only components of the Katrina effort that worked at all were the military responses, beginning with Coast Guard helicopters.)"

While I agree with your concern regarding an all-military approach to these crises and the lack of serious thinking and planning, the above statement is simply incorrect. You are ignoring the efforts of thousands of local, state, and federal law enforcement, fire and natural resource workers. Who had the airboats? Who knew how to use them? Who had the chainsaws? Who knew how to use them?

If you want an example of large-scale, non-military response efforts to disasters, take a look at the multi-agency federal incident management teams. Most commonly used for large wildfires, they are also brought in to manage other natural disasters. Such a team, one from the southwest, was largely responsible for coordinating the recovery and clean-up efforts in the aftermath of 9/11 - a behind-the-scenes role that was downplayed for many reasons, some of them not so encouraging. A couple of years later, federal firefighters were used again, in recovering shuttle Columbia.

I apologize to Eric, I jumped on him in my frustration at those who just say "throw DoD at the problem." In fact, Eric identified a lot of the most important issues.
1. Do local governments really have the organization to respond to such large events? Do they have their local plan? Are they tied into higher state government resources and the State Emergency Management? Are they prepared through their State to accept Federal resources in response?
2. Do local governments have a plan for recovery, or maybe better at least an accelerated process? What is it that makes a community whole? Returning to the same tax base? Population returns? Jobs? Community infrastructure? What is it? Do people really expect to go back to the same job, in the same house, go to the same stores and worship in the same church in 1 year? 2 years? 5? 10?

It's people like Eric that ask those questions of local government that will get answers to those questions or begin to get answers to them. None of them are easy. And of course there is the whole other exercise in linking the Federal government's resources and capabilities to the State and locals (and tribes) to help them rebuild in the image they choose.

I agree with Huckleberry, and an even better example of multi-agency disaster preparedness is what's going on here in Zion, where at the state and local government levels everybody has rucked up and is ready for the big earthquake, which is a matter of when not if.

Oh and BTW, two days after Katrina I was humping all the wet, ruined carpet and furniture out of my late mother's home on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, when to my pleasant surprise a deuce-and-a-half from the Mississippi National Guard drove down the street tossing cases of bottled water and MRE's to anybody who needed them. The city of New Orleans may not have been prepared for the aftermath, but that does not mean every affected municipality wasn't as well.

Is projected to peak at 9.5 billion somewhere around 2050, and that projection has been pretty stable for a long time. Before you panic unnecessarily consider that there has never, not ever, been a Malthusian disaster prediction that has come true. Also consider that it is a small step from predicting population induced disasters to promoting policies that control population, by whatever means necessary. What gets me about the population debate, as well as the AGW debate, is the tendency for people to mindlessly regurgitate whatever they hear. In both cases the resulting policy prescriptions can be dangerous in the exteme, but proponents never think about that. Too much trouble I suppose.

The first time I even thought of the military's capability to respond to crises like I've brought up here came a few years ago, maybe 2006, when I was a guest lecturer for a week at Marine Corps University. Somehow, when I was talking to the =staff= of the Staff and Command College, the trainers, I managed to turn myself into the whole red team when I suggested that our over-stretched forces couldn't be counted on to handle a third big effort after Iraq and Afghanistan. I was quickly challenged: Such as?

I think there was a proximate kerfuffle with North Korea that week, and probably something dire going on in or near Israel. But the fact is that I have a first cousin whose parents ended up in Mexico in the late 1930s, and he had, within the week, been describing to me the pressures on a weak government there. So I was inspired to blurt out something like "a famine in Mexico, or the collapse of the Mexican national government, might send millions of refugees toward our southern border. Are we ready for that?"

What I got back was, "Um, er. Mexico? Oh Wow, why didn't we think of that?"

Now, I am often challenged, when I stick my neck out like I have today, to come up with the answers. I'm a guy, one little guy, who lives three thousand miles from the vast bulk of the data I hope the government has amassed to underpin such planning. Even the President once in awhile has to toss some of the heavy lifting to the herd of advisors annealed to his ass, so why should I--or you--think it all comes down to me? It's all I can do any more to think up the question. Hell, I'm too infirm any more to perform my own brain surgery. You say you live in an environment in which this topic is discussed. What do you all think?

BTW, Zathras, I completely agree with your take on what we'd have to do with respect to transforming the military. That's why I believe we're so totally screwed.

I want to assure Eric Hammel that the job of coming up with all the answers is not one that's up to just him. This is one reason, I'm sure, why we're in such trouble right now. It is not just up to me either. That is another reason.

I won't hide the fact that the steps I suggested in my post upthread are steps I believe the American military needs to take anyway (with some allowances for figurative language). The United States cannot afford to overwhelm its problems with resources anymore, nor can it flail away indefinitely trying to redeem the Bush administration's mistakes.

With that said, we must consider seriously two things. One is about climate change and its side effects. The worst case here is very bad: big changes to which we, and humankind generally, may not have very much time to adapt. The worst case is not a certainty, and we have no excuse for throwing up our hands. However, it would be wise now to accept the strong possibility that the effects of climate change may be very severe in certain vulnerable areas around the globe, and that the United States may not be able to do much about them.

The second issue Eric Hammel raised in his comments rather than in the main post. It concerns disaster preparedness in the United States. Japan suffered from the most wretched luck earlier this year when a very large earthquake struck the precise location at which it could generate a tsunami that hit the Japanese coast with very little warning, killing many thousands. Overshadowed by the disaster on the coast was the fact that the urbanized areas west and south of the area struck by the tsunami suffered modest damage and little loss of life, a product of intense Japanese efforts over many years to enforce building codes that mandated earthquake-proofing of residential and commercial structures. I am informed that if a quake of similar size struck one of California's many fault lines today, we would not be so fortunate.

This is less an issue for the military than it is for state and federal governments. It is easier, and more immediately profitable, to build in the expectation that low-probability, high-impact events like earthquakes and hurricanes will never happen. We have done this in many places around the country, leaving large areas and many millions of people hostages to fortune. I had hoped the Obama administration would take greater account of this problem than it did, beginning in 2009, but in perfect fairness it has done no differently than its most recent predecessors.

The give and take here prompted me to realize that I can point to two trends that, if I squint just right, seem to provide a little hope.

When I quit smoking in 1969, I had to do it on my own in a workplace where everyone smoked all the time. Who knew than that mores would change over forty years to have driven smoking to the deep margins of the public space--here and abroad. So, things can change if enough little guys act in concert--perhaps motivated by fear--to force government to force change.

Second, last year my town's new trash company gave me three trash bins to wheel out to my sidewalk: a big green one for compostable garbage and green waste; a big blue one for all manner of recyclables; and a puny little gray one for what's left. If I need to get a bigger gray one, my monthly garbage bill about doubles. This is my whole town, and over the past year or two, I think every town around me. Yes, I am smack in the San Francisco Bay Area, but I see a calming trend here that can only spread. Once again, through behavior modification, way less of the really surprising amount of crap my wife and I throw away weekly now goes into landfills.

So the question I have is: How many of us are investing in lowering our carbon footprint--because it lowers gas and electric bills and/or because it's the right thing to do and/or we'd like to think our grandkids will survive a more tolerable environmental catastrophe than what we see in the cards today? I have invested in double-pane glass throughout my common California ticky-tack house; all my lights are fluorescent or new LED; insulated my attic; sealed all the doorways; planted trees wherever they fit in my yard; am having an energy assessment done on Monday, after which I'll invest in a modern water heater; and so forth. I was going to install solar, but my house is so well battened down that I can't live long enough to earn back my investment from rebates and savings. I'm doing my little bit, and I'm earning back my investment by paying less than half the confiscatory utilities bill I was paying five years ago.

Climate Change is a major issue for all countries, we have to save our next generation, if it remain increasing then sorry to say we cannot guarantee even our next generation. Thanks Orchid Recovery Center Twitter

Global climate change is redistributive---drought in one place may improve rainfall in another.

There is no shortage of resources or potential resources, but substantial challenges, at local levels, of where crises will emerge, and relief needed.

The two major Droughts in Northern Iraq (late 1990s and late 2000s) posed catastrophic results, which were "effectively" managed down, including by significant farm abandonments/Urban flights, and redistributive food rationing and water relief mechanisms (buy lots of food on the foreign markets).

There are long-run consequences, despite mitigation, but they are not acute.

Interesting idea. As for proof of global warming being man made, your friend is right. But there is no proof that it isn't man made either. The jury is still out on the debate and people can scream and holler their shrill overwrought warnings till they are blue in the face, but it's not going to change that fact.

“An error does not become truth by reason of multiplied propagation, nor does truth become error because nobody sees it.” -- Ghandi

It doesn't matter one bit if global warming is or isn't anthropogenic. It's happening, and mankind can do lots to mitigate it before it mitigates all of us. It's all a matter of how much we can do, how soon we get around to doing it, and how many of us survive.

Very discouraging to read some of the comments here in response to your post. There's a lot of denial going on, stuff like "it happens; it's nature; etc." No recognition of the fact that we humans have a lot to do with causing the changing climate conditions on earth. But this is instructive, in a way, because it shows me how intelligent people still choose not to believe that there is a problem that needs to be addressed. Along with our economic problems, the dysfunction in Congress, the "buying" of the electoral process, the decline of our schools, the ever-growing chasm between rich and the poor, the polarization of the political parties, the drug-like dependence on oil, the balkanization of our nation into separate ethnic identities, the power of the finance industry and the Wall Street mathematical geniuses, etc., this makes me wonder what we're going to pass on to our grandchildren.

I'm wondering if we're arguing across a generational divide. I sense that the grandparents here are pretty united on getting things done soonest.

Hopefully you baby boomers will stop passing down bad habits and loads of debt. And, hopefully the youth will stop crying about the fact that its someone else's mess that they are cleaning up. You are the physical manifestation of you parent's rights and wrongs--only you don't remember how you got here and what you (your parents) did. The youth is like a holy reset button that has to figure out what it should be doing.

Global Warming is not a single country problem, its becoming a danger for human and all living creatures on this universe. We have to come up with solid plans to save our next generation. Its not so simple that we meet, talk and take no actions. On the other hand global warming has disturbed the ecosystem very badly. yeast intolerance
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"Hey neighbor, did you know that alcohol and tobacco are killing you and keeping us awake at night? What will you tell your children when they ask what being addicted to something feels like? Also, those carbohydrates in that pizza there and that sugar in your caffeinated soda are actually messing with your insulin and its making you think you are hungry, but at the same time you are not receiving high quality calories so your body thinks you are unable to find food and is storing fats? Also, yesterday your dog was wailing and howling all afternoon, you need to walk the dog daily. Animals are not adapted to living in cages. Why don't you put and its feces in the trash or at least put a lawn down? Oh that's right, you couldn't handle the loneliness of the barracks so you called your high school sweetheart up and got married and got a dog cause you both still felt lonely in your empty house with no furniture. I noticed that you slapped your wife. How can we work on this problem together? Hey neighbor, I am concerned about your livelihood. Also, would you mind taking some steps to help improve the environment? I notice you are reaching for your firearm there on your hip. Lets work through this. Do you need someone to tell you what to do?"

I'm saying that an argument over blame bogs us down, gets us nowhere. If your house is on fire, maybe it's not the right time to scream at Aunt Sue for smoking in bed. Put out the fire if you can, or at least exit to safety and call 911.

Mitigate: Lessen or to try to lessen the seriousness or extent of; make less severe or harsh

See WILLIEJOE's comment right above yours.

Wanting to live next to water is nothing new.

We're not talking about Santa Barbara here. These guys are not buying the land to live on it. The most charitable interpretation is that they are hedging against the possibility of future droughts.

Uncharitably, I would say they are buying it in an attempt to control watersheds (especially Pickens).

Changing Climate is a big problem for all of us and we have to take some remedial measure to control this global warming issue. http://www.birthdaywishesgreetings.com/20th-birthday-wishes/
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Certainly climate change is a danger to us all but I find more immediate dangers from cyber-terrorism for example to be more troubling.

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