> Nobody is going to drown. People will do some combination of building walls, raising land, and moving.

What are you talking about, people are drowning now. When a big storm tears through a low lying area or there is flooding, people drown.

> People will do some combination of building walls, raising land, and moving. It will play out over a period of a thousands years or more.

If we don't get climate change under control we're not going to have thousands of years, or even a few hundred years.

Yes countries will try to mitigate the effects by building sea walls but the truth is that you can't beat mother nature if you keep raising sea level and making storms stronger.

And this idea that people can just move is simply irrational. Who is going to buy property that is in imminent danger of being underwater? Who is gonna insure that property? The only lifeline to people in flood-affected areas is government buyouts, and many governments can't afford to do that even now, much less in the future when it gets much worse.

And then what, where will all of these displaced people go? Particularly people from island nations?

> There will be a non-zero cost associated with diverting resources for these things, but that's not the end of the world.

There will be an enormous and potentially impossible cost with trying to build and move fast enough to beat climate change in coastal areas.

> This is not a crash situation like 2008, this is more like a glacier that's flowing towards you. You have plenty of time to plan your response, like moving out of the way, but you can't stop it. Trouble in other countries will have unpredictable, but not necessarily all bad effects.

It's like an iceberg heading towards a massive boat that takes a long time to turn. If we make a hard turn now, we might only graze the iceberg, but if we wait to make our turn, it'll be too late to avoid impact.

> I still think the comparative lack of low-lying coastal land, plus ample freshwater, increased growing season, and increased arable land will be net benefit for Canada and Russia.

No it won't. First, even if new areas are warm enough to support crops, crop yields are heavily dependent on soil and rainfall. Those newly warm soils are simply not going to be as fertile as current growing regions. Secondly, if global economies are wrecked, being able to crow crops in Siberia is not going to be a net benefit. People think that climate change means that there'll be an orderly shift in temperatures, but it will be chaotic and unpredictable. And climates near the poles are warming that much, that is going to come with the positive feedback loop of methane released from permafrost which will accelerate warming.

Trying to passively adapt to climate change is outright foolish. There's no way human kind can build walls high enough, or somehow find a way to grow and cultivate crops, livestock, and fish at a scale that can avoid disaster and the breakdown of society. If we start shifting en masse to renewable energy and making consumption more efficient we might be able to get things to a manageable level. The earlier we make a massive shift, the better. Because later on we may be left with nothing but bad options.