John Vidal writes at the Guardian:
4 Grow your own
More heat and a longer growing season should make it easier to grow some crops in northern countries such as Britain, Russia and Canada, and more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere theoretically should increase plant growth. But don’t expect climate change to feed the world. You are likely to have to change diets because bigger droughts, flash floods, heatwaves and storms may devastate harvests and reduce the amount of foods available. Countries such as Britain, which depend heavily on food grown abroad, may be able to grow fruit that farmers only ever dreamed about, but there will be less land on which to grow and imported grub will be much more expensive because other climate-affected countries will keep their smaller harvests for themselves. If coral reefs vanish there will be fewer fish in the sea and if the oceans continue to soak up CO2 they will become more acidic. That would be very, very bad, but the scientists say this won’t impact heavily in the next few lifetimes.
5 Take a shower
Don’t take fresh water for granted. Longer droughts are likely to dry up large parts of southern and eastern England, and underground water suplies will be more stressed. We’ve always muddled through heatwaves and droughts, but as temperatures climb, a run of dry winters becomes more and more likely. So prepare for droughts not just once a decade but perhaps every other year. Get used to yellow lawns, taking showers with chums and watering your garden with waste water.
6 Be charitable
Humanitarian groups such as Oxfam expect many more food shortages and natural disasters in countries where even a small shift in the rainfall pattern or increase in temperature is enough to reduce harvests and leave millions more hungry. Worst-case scenarios? A shift in the Asian monsoons is expected to reduce the amount of water in rivers coming off the Himalayas, and because this is needed for nearly a third of the world’s population, there could be disastrous food shortages. Further drying out of the Sahel and African rangelands will force millions of people to move.
The sea rise thing is crazy. Over 18000 years the sea has risen an average of 26 inches per century, we are now on track for 1/2 that rate. If you know that the sea more or less rises 13 inches per century then isn’t it better to take steps, like build your building 26 inches higher if you want it safe for two centuries, or add two rows of bricks every 100 years to the dyke rather than fallaciously blaming your woes on global warming and then sulking because “there isn’t much you can do.”