It will not be much problem. Global warming won’t kill humanity. We’ll adapt and move places where we can survive well. In any case, even if a lot of land is underwater, there will be a lot more land that becomes prime farmland in Canad and Siberia, for example, both of which are very big, unpopulated places. And who knows what will happen to rain patterns. Perhaps the middle of Australia will become lush.
Bill Gates is supporting research into a technical solution to global warming, and I have no doubt that one will be found—or rather, many different solutions. But I hope they aren’t found too soon. I like the movement towards renewable energy sources, and if we find a technical solution to global warming, we’ll probably get lazy again, and go back to burning hydrocarbons, which have grown so cheap and plentiful, when everyone was saying they were about to run out. Our ability to project into the long term future is notoriously underwhelming.
I hope it is clear I believe that global warming is occurring. I think we should be planning on how to relocate populations in a safe way. The current refugee crisis in Syria is showing us what we will have to face, only much bigger. It is inevitable that many lands will get swamped and many of their people will have to move (although others will raise their homes on stilts). We need to plan for those movements now. But we won’t. Everyone is still thinking that global warming is avoidable. It ain’t. It’s already here. But even those who believe in it are acting as if we can still change that fact, so our attention is on the wrong thing.