It's clear that things will only be getting worse, and they're already intolerable for many. Many things will need redefining. What's a hundred-year flood now? Will five categories for tornado and hurricane intensity enough when they are 20% more intense than now?
I saw a guy on TV who was watching his home burn down that he had just built to replace the one that burned 2-3 years before that in the same area. He decided that where he had been living was no longer habitable. There's term now called climate migrant - somebody relocating because of long-term climate change. This may be fueling some of the northern migration from Central America to the States (I believe that Guatemala has been hit hard with climate disasters of late), although political unrest surely accounts for some of it.
The western US appears to be going not through drought, by which I mean a temporary but prolonged diminution in rainfall, but aridification/desertification, which refers to a permanent transformation from grasslands or woodlands to scrublands or desert. This is what happened in northern Africa when the North and South American continents made contact and eliminated a Pacific to Atlantic current like the gulf stream to create the Sahara and the savannas, which had been ape-inhabited jungle. The transformation brought them out of the trees, caused them to stand upright and hunt meat rather than eat leaves and nuts from the trees, and the rest is history. I'm not looking for as good a result from running western Americans out of their habitat.
And what of those living on coasts? Somebody mentioned Miami and the effects of sea-level rising there, but that is not a local phenomenon. Tampa Bay has to contend with it, as does much of southern Louisiana. People on Isle de Jean Charles in Louisiana and Tangier Island in the Chesapeake Bay are relocating people as their landscape becomes seascape. And this is before considering the hurricanes. If you have a home on the American gulf coast or much of the Atlantic seaboard, what are the chances of losing it to hurricane in the next 20 years? When will it become uninsurable and unsellable? And if you do sell while you can, where will you go? To the western fires? To the midwestern tornadoes? To the heat waves everywhere?
