For now, anyways.

EDIT: and yeah, amazing you're getting downvoted. I've been downvoted here for expressing the same sentiment before.

The reality is that the whole "climate crisis" thing is gonna require humanity in general to gang up on the problem from all angles and each contribution will help the overall situation improve to some degree. The sum of all those contributions is the solution.

The longer we keep looking to corporations, politicians, and scientists to come up with a "magic bullet" for the problem, the worse it's gonna be for everyone and the less likely any amount of human efforts will be able to improve it again.

Regarding the various aspects of the unsustainability of our society and how it is reaching its limits, this wiki subsection is a very good read (and the rest of the wiki page as well, separated into concrete sections, and links to lots of source materials):

https://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/wiki/index#wiki_what_would...

Some good info at that link. Thank you for that.

(Gonna take me a while to read through it all, but at least it gives me something to do with my time besides just storing up survival resources and stress-levels while I wait for it to happen.)

Collapse of ecology is certainly a problem. The Colorado river is not (for residents). A tiny portion of the population who farms consumes more than all of the residential use combined.

We make farmers pay for the fucking water they use and then the problem is solved. This doesn’t even require a technological breakthrough.

What BC lacks is a water storage plan; as you've mentioned, our glaciers and snow pack are no longer reliable.

And there's the impact from less water in rivers and streams to consider, and how that will effect the ecology.

That said, the recent heat wave hit the coast pretty badly, too.

We're building rain storage right now, in the form of Site C.

EDIT: It's a dam built on the Peace, which is out of the Rockies, on the other side from most of BC. And a long way from anywhere in B.C. that will be requiring drinking water or irrigation really. The farm land that would be irrigated I would imagine would be primarily on the Alberta side.

The intended use of the water is for power generation, but I think dams are clear model of how to build rain water reservoirs going forward.

Because it’s an irrational prioritization. It’s like refusing to move to a new location for your dream job because the cost of milk is a little higher.

People like yourself and OP tend to struggle with this because it’s hard to imagine water not being an unlimited free resource. Once you think of it like food or any other utility, you’ll realize there is a always a price point where you can get it and it’s just one of another many costs you analyze in a place.

So holding onto an investment property in a location where I think prices will go up in the next 20 years is irrational. I simply stated my opinion, you can disagree with it all you like.

I'm a programmer, I can do my dream job from the comfort of my home without traveling, wasting my time and gas.

Thinking that they will go up because of water is the irrational bit.

Israel is the worst case (desalination of sea water) and water is still affordable there. It’s a non-issue that would be as far down the list of considerations when choosing where to live as electricity costs.

You may have “thought about it” a lot, but even a little bit of research of what the worst case looks like would have revealed it’s a terrible reason for any investment plans.

In your other post you literally brag about how wasteful you can be with water (kids spraying hose, etc). Living without unlimited water takes an adaptation that the majority of the world deals with just fine. It’s only the people who grew up with it that have an irrational fear of the concept of it being a limited resource like any other.

An argument for moving to Florida or Louisiana, where the water will be delivered to your home for free in short order.

Dark humor, but sometimes you have to laugh to keep from crying.

Water rights are a huge mess and I see it being the thing that eventually breaks up pacts between most nations. The US and EU will cease to be and nations will go to war over it.

The legislation around these rights is a time bomb.

Honestly, I don't think we need to worry about global warming, Apple basically solved it by not including a charging brick with the iPhone12 and new watches! /s

This sums up how capitalism feels about global warming.

I don't mean to nit pick, but clarification in this context is appropriate I think.

For example, I live about 500 meters from the Pacific ocean, but my house is in absolutely no danger of flooding, because we're about 100 meters above sea level, and we are at the top of a rise. There's nothing 'above' us, so no rain flooding is possible.

Many costal areas will flood due to sea level rise; many more costal areas will flood even sooner due to increasing storms.

But it's quite possible to live safely near the ocean.

It is possible to live safely near the ocean, provided your government has the foresight to build storm barriers. At the moment, one of the only places where this is true is the Netherlands.

Also, there's a more plausible reason for river basin floods - melting glaciers and upstream floods.

I agree. The vast majority of people who live near the ocean are at risk. I was thinking in rather privileged terms as someone able to pick and choose where to live.

I chose this location, surrounded on three sides by cold Pacific water, because of the strong temperature moderating effects.

Among those within a few miles of the Pacific in a radius of 50 miles from my location, at least 95% of them will be strongly affected by sea level rise and temporary surges due to strong storms.

"... one of the only places where this is true is the Netherlands."

For the time being. :(

What might make more sense is growing more warm climate fruits and vegetables in the Great Lakes with the abundant water supplies as the climate there gets warmer, and exporting those elsewhere.

This is already happening in portions of the southern UK which are now growing champagne grapes as the traditional locations in France are getting progressively drier.

You can export water out of the watershed in containers no larger than 5.7 gallons (~21.5 liters)

Build a short loop of rail, half in the watershed and half out of it. Drive a train in a circle continuously. When you are inside the watershed, fill up the 5.7 gallon containers (just make it a continuous waterfall that you drive through or something). When you are outside the watershed, dump them into a reservoir/pumping facility. There's nothing anybody could do about it.

All the states with GL watershed agreed to the compact not-so-long ago. In a case of such egregious rule-skirting, couldn't they just agree to close the loophole?

https://www.gsgp.org/media/nvzkrpyv/great_lakes-st_lawrence_...

Obviously you can't predict too far out, but like you've said, the midwest seems likely to be a winner in the short-term. I've also seen a lot about the Russian permafrost melting, and I can't help but think they'll come out ahead as well. It makes me wonder if they've done that same mental math, because it would give them incentives that conflict with most of the rest of the world.

Whether or not we have the ability now, or will have the ability in the future, to reverse course on climate change was entirely unrelated to the point I was trying to make.

Almost certain to be true … temporarily.

I'm not sure how I want to balance the pragmatism I can execute on with this mobility to move to somewhere tolerable in the midwest (MN comes to mind), vs. a common nihilistic trend that warming will affect everyone*, might as well live where I want to live (not MN comes to mind).

I worry we're experiencing "gradually then suddenly" trend with climate developments, but I have difficulty placing if it's a me-concern, or grandkids concern.

MSPL tech is (or used to: unclear if remote work will change this) appealing b/c of the corporate cluster around there, and the city's future despite last year seems ok as it's the main eastern urban hub for all the rural farming stretching west of it. I work with a lot of remote folks from MSPL, so seems like there is a tech community.

Chicago seems interesting, but as I understand it the state finances are upside down because of pensions and the like, and it's slowly reflecting in income taxes.

The infrastructure issue is a huge problem. Municipalities are going bankrupt. They can't afford to replace these systems that were laid out decades ago. Who will pay for it when there isn't money available even to pay existing pensions on the municipality and the state level, and federal policy changes with the wind every 4 years? In the mean time while that is being debated historic storms are finding the weakest links to stress and breaking them, and compromises are being made to sustain the bare essential of infrastructure.

And that's just the public works. Homes are rotting too, and they aren't building new ones fast enough. A housing tract that was nice and new in 1995 probably needs work on the roof today, a repair bill that might be worth 10-20% the total value of the home. You won't get that nice coastal salary to make these sorts of bills worry free, either. This is the midwest where engineers are paid like 80k and that's seen as pretty good pay.

Then a few decades later, the US will have its very own Aral Sea.

That particular cynicism aside, what will probably happen is that sufficient global warming will make the desert actually uninhabitable and people will migrate to the Great Lakes.

So, whatever helps you sleep at night.

As dev with a dual citizenship and ability to work anywhere in Europe, I have pretty high mobility and I can always move.

In any case, yes it is a bet to hold property there for that reason. Good luck.

Why do you think that? They are clearly fine with the most expensive option already.

> Coastal areas will be flooded due to increasing sea levels.

No, some coastal areas will have problems with this where the inland has very little elevation gain (e.g. Florida). A house in the South Bay Area alternatively has a lower flood risk than anything near the Great Lakes (just because of the precipitation received on the eastern half of the US).

> Places with little to no rain will experience more extreme fires(happening now).

Some will. It depends on the ecology. Many of these places on fire have fire as part of biological cycle (I.e. the California forests) so if you weren’t ready for that risk you were screwed regardless of climate change.

> I'm sure Midwest will also experience more severe weather but you can make it work, living under water or without water is impossible.

And neither of those things will be feasible outcomes for those of us in the West.

Unless you’re a farmer, living near the Great Lakes for water security is pretty stupid. You have a higher chance of being killed by a tornado or a lightning strike than there being a water shortage that makes the west unlivable.

Israel desalinates ocean water and a fuckload of people still live there.

Unlivable? Probably not. But more expensive? Absolutely.

And once the agricultural economy needs to shut down due to free water not being free anymore, I'll expect ghost cities all over the West, starting with small communities not able to provide enough jobs and not attractive enough to turn into retirement places for people with money.

So far the projections on temperature and rainfall changes are in line with what we see today, but hey, the jury is still out on that. Once we know for sure in roughly 25 years, it might be too late, so I take my chances based on what I know now.

We have 6 acres of arable land a 10 minute drive from Lake Ontario and a well into the Niagara Escarpment into an underground river that I can pull dozens of gallons a minute of water from. As I write this my son is splashing in the pool and spraying the dog with a hose ;-)

The people that move west move to the cities and they are already drastically more expensive than water rich places. The cost of water tripling in LA or SF for residents would be meaningless in the grand scheme of CoL.

Just look at electricity and gas prices in CA for an example of something else people have to pay way more for that realistically doesn’t matter.

Until you’re looking at order of magnitude increases, it will just be noise. And desalination doesn’t even require a 10x increase.