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However to answer your question with a few examples - the total collapse of Northern hemisphere fish stocks, not enough fish in any ocean, an open arctic ocean, Venice like streets ans Amsterdam style dykes on a global scale.

And the ready answers which we've discovered in the past: 1) "Collapse" of fish stocks? Then stop fishing until the stocks recover.

2) An open Arctic Ocean? You just cut the shipping time from China to Europe in half and your boats no longer have to be small enough to fit in the Panama Canal. In addition, you have opened up the Arctic Ocean to the usual economic activities that greatly benefit us elsewhere. Make bank.

Venice like streets ans Amsterdam style dykes on a global scale.

3) A number of simple solutions present themselves. You already have two of those solutions in your post: a) move to higher ground; b) add dirt or rock to create higher ground in place; c) continue to work in flooded terrain (Venice-like solution); or d) build dykes. They all have their pluses and minuses, so which combination of solutions are best for a region will vary.

AGW is a fairly easy problem to adapt to with modest changes over long time frames (such as a two meter rise in sea level over a century).

If one looks at actual rational attempts to prioritize what global societies should be doing, then AGW barely registers at all. For example, there are only two priorities of the Copenhagen Consensus that are at all AGW-related. It turns out that treating common diseases and parasites, or providing micronutrient supplements to the poor turn out to have a lot more value than any sort of intervention or adaption to AGW (one has to go down to priority #6, "R&D to Increase Yield Enhancements, to decrease hunger, fight biodiversity destruction, and lessen the effects of climate change") .

This is the remarkable thing. There's a lot of obsession over AGW, but not a lot of reason to obsess so. There simply are far more important things with a high ROI that should be done now, even if it means making AGW slightly worse over the long term.

If you're trying to maximise the impact of your donation, you might be interested to know that a bunch of eggheads have already considered this exact point and written a report on their conclusions. It gets updated every few years.

On the upside, a fair bit of thought and research has gone into their publication. On the downside, most of the experts are economists, and I'm not actually sure if one should take an economist's word on whether the sky is blue.

Here's the website, anyway: The Copenhagen Consensus.

The Copenhagen Consensus is group of economists that grapple with this question. Where do you allocate money to have the greatest impact on human suffering?
http://www.copenhagenconsensus.com/

Apparently micro-nutrients are dollar for dollar your best bet. At least as of a few years ago.. they had a new meeting in 2011.

Very interesting.

I think it is still early in the game regarding economic analysis of global warming prevention versus mitigation.

A good start is the Copenhagen Consensus.

Here is an optimal carbon tax which costs $128 trillion and provides an estimated $271 trillion reduction in damage by limiting temp rise to 5.4 C by 2300 rather than 7.3 C.

Another paper suggests "Overall, benefits of global warming are likely to outweigh damage until the rise is greater than 2.5C, and even then the net damage would be far smaller than originally thought."

There also is the Stern Review, with the executive summary here. This report looked at stabilizing at 550ppm CO2 and a 2 C warming with costs around
1% of global GDP by 2050, with a range from -1% (net gains) to +3.5% of GDP.

Probably the LEAST explored issue is how exactly carbon taxes or emission targets are going to be effectively enforced globally. Certainly if they are as "effective" as the current global War on Drugs, it will be costly while not significantly reducing carbon emissions. The political science question is much tougher than the scientific or economic question.

My personal viewpoint is that I doubt global carbon (and methane) emission controls can truly be effective. I think, however, that most countries with well functioning economies will be able to cope with the challenges (desalination, irrigation, moving away from coasts, etc.) If we encourage the rest of the world to adopt policies that enhance wealth (such as enhancing economic freedom), then people will be able to buy their way out of many global warming challenges on a local scale, but it is really unclear if on a global basis we are ready for a Carbon Military Police state.

I think it is still early in the game regarding economic analysis of global warming prevention versus mitigation.

A good start is the Copenhagen Consensus.

Here is an optimal carbon tax which costs $128 trillion and provides an estimated $271 trillion reduction in damage by limiting temp rise to 5.4 C by 2300 rather than 7.3 C.

Another paper suggests "Overall, benefits of global warming are likely to outweigh damage until the rise is greater than 2.5C, and even then the net damage would be far smaller than originally thought."

There also is the Stern Review, with the executive summary here. This report looked at stabilizing at 550ppm CO2 and a 2 C warming with costs around
1% of global GDP by 2050, with a range from -1% (net gains) to +3.5% of GDP.

Probably the LEAST explored issue is how exactly carbon taxes or emission targets are going to be effectively enforced globally. Certainly if they are as "effective" as the current global War on Drugs, it will be costly while not significantly reducing carbon emissions. The political science question is much tougher than the scientific or economic question.

My personal viewpoint is that I doubt global carbon (and methane) emission controls can truly be effective. I think, however, that most countries with well functioning economies will be able to cope with the challenges (desalination, irrigation, moving away from coasts, etc.) If we encourage the rest of the world to adopt policies that enhance wealth (such as enhancing economic freedom), then people will be able to buy their way out of many global warming challenges on a local scale, but it is really unclear if on a global basis we are ready for a Carbon Military Police state.

I think it is still early in the game regarding economic analysis of global warming prevention versus mitigation.

A good start is the Copenhagen Consensus.

Here is an optimal carbon tax which costs $128 trillion and provides an estimated $271 trillion reduction in damage by limiting temp rise to 5.4 C by 2300 rather than 7.3 C.

Another paper suggests "Overall, benefits of global warming are likely to outweigh damage until the rise is greater than 2.5C, and even then the net damage would be far smaller than originally thought."

There also is the Stern Review, with the executive summary here. This report looked at stabilizing at 550ppm CO2 and a 2 C warming with costs around
1% of global GDP by 2050, with a range from -1% (net gains) to +3.5% of GDP.

Probably the LEAST explored issue is how exactly carbon taxes or emission targets are going to be effectively enforced globally. Certainly if they are as "effective" as the current global War on Drugs, it will be costly while not significantly reducing carbon emissions. The political science question is much tougher than the scientific or economic question.

My personal viewpoint is that I doubt global carbon (and methane) emission controls can truly be effective. I think, however, that most countries with well functioning economies will be able to cope with the challenges (desalination, irrigation, moving away from coasts, etc.) If we encourage the rest of the world to adopt policies that enhance wealth (such as enhancing economic freedom), then people will be able to buy their way out of many global warming challenges on a local scale, but it is really unclear if on a global basis we are ready for a Carbon Military Police state.

For an interesting perspective, I highly suggest that everyone read Dr. Lomborg's presentation to the US Senate. (PDF)

Actually he's a statistician. It's an excellent book and I highly recommend it.

His newer stuff is also interesting http://www.copenhagenconsensus.com/

You have to give the global warming people some credit for somehow advancing their theory as fact and proclaiming such horrendous future consequences to it to get so much attention and funding. However, just as it was a consensus once that Earth was the center of the universe this may be just as wrong and the establishment has just as much a backlash to those who are skeptical of their assertion.

I think that there is consensus that there has been a slight warming (0.6 +/- 0.2 C in the past century; 0.1 C/decade over the last 30 years) but there is not a consensus of the cause, there is not a consensus that it will continue and there is not a consensus that it is serious enough for humanity ecologically and economically to put the kind of resouces that some are calling for in the order of Trillions of dollars. There certainly are many things that we are more sure of and affect us more that we can and should be focusing on instead of this.

There is a theory that the warming trend is about to reverse itself and is more tied to Pacific Decadal Oscillation than to C02 emissions. (http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2002/2002GL01519 1.shtml). There are also a theory that the warming is caused more from water vapor than CO2 and that reducing CO2 emissions will have a negligable effect on it. (http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Study/Iris/iris. html).

There is not enough certainty here for humanity to do the things that are being called for and I believe that reducing CO2 emissions to the levels and extent called for will have a disasterous effect on many of the world's economies. For example, this was a report prepared on the costs for Denmark to meet Kyoto standard(http://www.copenhagenconsensus.com/Defaul t.aspx?ID=101). When you are talking those kind of consequences and costs there better be a more definite understanding and more dire consequences than less than a degree temperature change in 100 years and a theory that points to only one main cause seems a bit simplistic anyway in an ecosystem as complicated as ours. I think our energy and money is better spent on cleaning up other kinds of pollution and fixing helping with some of humanities social problems and human suffering - many things will have a much more real and substantial impact in our lives and well-being.

you would think that even the SUGGESTION that we should be conscious over what is in our control would be an action item.

Unless focusing all our efforts on effecting a trivial dent in climate change prevents us from working on more important things like malaria or HIV, or malnutrition. All the politcally convenient sturm and drang (we get to blame America for something else!) ignores the more important problems.

The shrieking hysteria of the British press is amazing. The Independent needs to just get it over with and start running the same headline every day: "The Sky is Falling and it is all America's Fault!" It would save a whole lot of trouble.