Lots of economic activity as cities initially strive to keep out rising seawater, then move inland a little and build anew. Lots of migration as people move away from hot dry regions. It won’t be pleasant for the average person but it will be a busy time.
A lot depends upon ocean currents and rainfall patterns-if the Pacific Ocean off California were to warm up, rainfall in SoCal wold increase-this would be a good thing for farming. The American Southwest has been drying up since the 1300’s-reversing that wold open vast areas to agriculture. Similarly, a warming Mediterranean would increase rainfall in North Africa-areas the present day Leptis Magna (now in a desert) might become grain growing regions (as they were 2000 years ago). Meanwhile, reduced flow in the great rivers flowing into the Arctic Ocean will increase the salinity of the Arctic Ocean-leading to less sea ice.
The Southern Hemisphere will probably experience cooling-the Antarctic Ice shelves are growing.
Not sure that man experiences summers in Russia then..
The problem remains, one could look forward to more crop land in the future, but changes are not as gradual as many that want to ignore the issue assume, and then the weather is not bound to be as stable as it was seen before.
As I pointed before, this is not going to be the end of the world if we plan ahead, unfortunately in the USA and in other places politicians are planning on ignoring even basic adaptation needs as “it is not happening”.
So how do you explain the predominance of human beings on the planet if the mass extinctions were so bad? My point is that we don’t know for sure who or what will benefit from change - fast or slow, in the short term or in the long term - but that life on earth will continue. It may turn out that humans go extinct, or it may turn out that they thrive. The history that we can draw on doesn’t point to any one species, but to the fact that once life began on this planet, it has continued.
Therefore, those sparsely populated Northern lands will become able to support many more people. I’m sure they will welcome massive immigration from the non-Nordic nations suffering the unpleasant results of global warming…
As mentioned, Global Warming will not be an end deal for us (although the lack of preparation and sequestration will generate what I call a Dumbsday, “Gee, people emigrating are coming from nations we do not want? There is no problem, nothing will happen so lets not prepare for the coming immigration wave”, says the dumb politicians and there is a similar message from the ones that expect mostly good things from the warming)
However lets be clear about that predominance of human beings in the face of bad extinctions, it is not accurate to assume that we could survive a true mass extinction event.
Just to clarify, I’m not against immigration, only that the quantity and increase of it caused by the expected climate disruption, will not be as peaceful as it should be when you have powerful politicians telling us that the warming is not happening or that it will be good for us, “so relax and lets not spend a penny on preparations” like Senator Inhofe could say.
WWII was horrible, but it did lead to rapid improvements in medicine, electronics and aviation. My hope is that the challenge of AGW will lead to breakthroughs in science, engineering and diplomacy. Hopefully it was also get countries to focus on education as they realize that they will need engineers and scientists to solve their problems.
That’s what I hope for, but the climate of denial seems to be preventing this. The rich, powerful people want business as usual, and they tend to get what they want.
Change causes upset. The bigger and faster the change, the worse the upset. It’ll cause a huge economic dislocation, and economies will suffer dramatically, at least in the short term. Regarding long term (hundreds or thousands of years), there’s little point trying to predict, thanks to the wild card of technology.
However, on the positive side, my Lake Huron property will probably be more valuable, at least compared to the average, thanks to having a longer summer season. On the other hand, if the economy isn’t strong enough, that may not be true. It’s also possible that the lakes will dry up considerably. (The deed is written with the lake being the boundry … so I guess I could end up with a lot that’s 100 feet by several miles, most of it sand dunes!)
The bottom line is that it’s a crap shoot. Many areas will be at a serious disadvantage (under water, desertified, local ecology ruined, etc.) While some areas will see what we’d think of as an advantage, that will disturb the local ecology too. Siberian Malaria, anyone?
My guess is that the disadvantages (in the short to medium term, that is, within 100 years) would be vastly more negative than positive.
BTW, extreme events like mass extinctions are also periods of significant evolution. They’re the punctuation marks in “punctuated equilibrium”. So, our (long long) descendents may see lifeforms we could hardly imagine. Then again, the advent of humankind is an event like this anyway. Climate change just intensifies the shock.
My region of North America, along the western border of the Appalachians, has already seen changes that have significantly affected several species, most notably the hemlocks.
The amount of rain has remained, on average, the same. However, the intensity of storms has increased. This is in accordance with several climate models that take into account the increase in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Although I am not qualified to actually speak to the matter at hand, not being a climatologist (nor playing one on the Internet), it seems that we are going to have a very interesting few decades, if not centuries, ahead of us.
Although I have always loved the ocean, I am now pleased that we chose to live on higher ground.
Where I live, the frequency of major storms has decreased-there were fewer hurricanes last year than in 1950. The dates for “freeze up” and “ice out” on the local lakes and ponds have been changing…in Thoreau’s time, Walden Pond might retain ice until early May (now, the ice is gone usually by early April). We are also losing our sugar maple trees-although it’s impossible to say if this is the result of warming or just disease. The length and severity of winters is still highly variable.
As Shakespeare said, “one swallow does not a spring make”.
I’m looking forward to a vast population decline of Homo sapiens, via mass starvation, planet-wide urban destruction through a cascade of natural catastrophes, and ever-escalating wars over food and water. This rapid depopulation will cause industrial carbon emissions to plummet, at least after the sabotaged oil fields burn themselves out, allowing the earth to restabilize itself after some undetermined number of millennia. Win!
I’m devising my ad campaign now . . . Bambi has already signed on as spokesdeer.
Good point.
There are a lot of groups who try to limit the destruction of our environment. When they come calling (asking for support), I always ask the same question: What should we be doing about population control, since that’s the primary cause of environmental problems, and will be the ultimate cause as well?
In response I only get odd looks, because they don’t understand the consequences of exponential growth.
Sigh.
Well, #1) Environmentalists also recommend dealing with population, not being aware of that is going to the other extreme of ignorance on this.
Lester Brown, Plan B, (PDF)
#2) If limiting population was the only way to avoid problems like this one problems like phosphates increasing the algae in rivers and lakes would **never **had been solved as the population increased and used more detergent and washing machines.
http://www.colorado.edu/conflict/full_text_search/AllCRCDocs/94-54.htm
Well, that issue was mostly solved with a combination of mandates and industry agreeing to remove or limit the use of Phosphates in detergents, the point here is that you may get odd looks, but not because you have a gotcha, it is more likely that the groups thought that your point was, well odd. 
That seems likely, but other areas are going to become less fertile. Nor is it simply a matter of productive land area. If it becomes feasible to farm a region due to changing weather patterns, considerable investment is required to exploit it. This can be a real problem in the poorer parts of the world. In the face of a changing climate, food production could fall even if the total biomass the planet can support remains unchanged. It’s not realistic to expect that climate change will lead to increase in global food production.
From the standpoint of the earth’s ecology, the best thing that could happen is that the human species gets knocked back. Seriously knocked back.
What’s wrecking the natural cycles is that we are not only smart enough to adapt; so far we’ve been smart enough to make the earth adapt to us. We’ve been able to figure out farming and irrigation and shelter and so on–not just how to consume what the earth gives us, but to actually completely change it. Dam rivers; pave it over; pillage the oceans and land into feeding ponds and cropland…
As a consequence, anywhere there are a predponderance of smart humans, the earth’s natural ecological cycles and natural adaptive rhythms have been disrupted. As a consequence, there are too damn many people for the earth’s good.
So the best possible “ecological” benefit, anyway, is that AGW has such dire consequences that the number of people on earth hugely diminishes. If human population doesn’t decrease substantially, it won’t matter if we solve AGW or not. It’s a complete waste of time to focus on anthropogenic climate change. If we fixed AGW tonight, but didn’t diminish our population, we’d still wreck the earth getting everyone up to decent consumption levels. With another 3 Billion people projected over 50 years, the earth’s ecology is toast with or without anthropogenic global warming. Heck; just give everyone on earth the same number of vehicles we have in the west and watch us pave it over, even if those vehicles run on magic green energy…ditto for feeding…housing…pleasuring…everyone.
As mentioned before the historical evidence is that we can solve problems that are brought thanks to our technology, as usual the point of just bringing Malthusian arguments is just a plea to not do anything about the issue.
And it also ignoring the point, once again, that population increase is taken into account as an issue to be dealt with.
Obviously, none of us will be around to see what the earth is like in 200-500 years. But building your predictions based on a very short amount of history is a recipe for failure. My point is that we don’t know what will happen. Others here seem to be sure of various scenarios. Notice roughly how many predictions for the future have been accurate and how many have tanked. Now, stretch that out over several decades and centuries and see just how accurate they are. And it’s the hand-wringers whose predictions are the most dire. I wonder why.
Not sure who are the most dire, you must confuse Malthusians with the modern environmentalists. Historically speaking it is the Malthusians who got it wrong.
I’m not a pessimist, we can have a just world with green technology and population can be controlled, education and development can be used to limit the damage we will encounter in the future, we can avoid the Dumbsday.
http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_on_global_population_growth.html