Fifty years from now we'll be fighting over potable water and access to the new shorelines.

Yes, at first, but then you will gain power over the weather and control it with increased capabilities in simulation and geo engineering..this will be possible with replicating robotics that aid in construction, denoting your transition to type I. you will also adapt on the ground by encasing arable land under huge domes that might very well..resemble buckminster fuller's fullerenes. Unfortunately he was ahead of his time. Huge migrations will ensue as certain populated areas are inundated and cities are engulfed by the sea. Some of these areas might be reclaimed with underwater cities, with parts of old new York rediscovered later on, perhaps centuries later. You will simply adapt, youve done it before. Your most pressing concern in the future will be the issue of individual privacy, nuclear weapons, and engineered viruses, both artificial natural. You will see AI coming andhave plenty of time to adapt to it. There will be however much social strife in the west as Asia slowly becomes the dominant diplomatic and economic center of the planet. The USA will still be the superpower for many years to come, but it will be weakened and less influential than it was before. Given asiaa shielded nature toward multiculturalism,immigrants to these nations will not be able to shift power or enact disruptive social change from the native elites, Who will remain Asian..there is too much of a starkness in culture and cohesion amongst asians being asians to allow for any confusion, not to mention Asian nations have no illusions of multiculturalism. They will have the benefit of democracy but will retain closed societies due to cultural and racial insularity. the west will become increasingly rightest and will experience a resurgence by partnering with souh America for competition. South America will also become very powerful in the years to come and a partnership will allow cheap labour and the economies of scale necessary to compete with Asia as well as extra revenue to hire people i the states as overhead..the main muscle coming from s a, and the excess profits ring out toward employment in the states and social security. Politics will be more consevative going forward due to the collapse of man gov programs but due to persistent high unemployment, selective taxation on certainhigh profit entities in partnerships with he state, such as oil companies and banks, will allow for progressive policies while retaining relatively low taxation although higher than now. Many programs relied today will not exist...and states will by such a void take more responsibility in those matters. Unions will suffer severely but but due to advances in nanotech and the void and destruction of an inefficient system,nthe death will give birth to efficiet and less costly systems that are impossible to comprehend today. Fort example, early detection of diseases due to cent cheap nanotech in bathrooms, fast genome sequencing and organ bio printing. The disparity between rind and poor will increase but due to such advances and things like the Internet charity basic needs will more and more through the market system be satisfies. Due to personal responsibility and a work ethic as well as the discipline of civi duty and sacrifice gathered throuh resource wars and not social engineering, the us, due to it's stable legal system, emerges a power once again in he secondhalf of he 21st century with AI robotics...by then a global culture ensues, a mixture of pragmatism, functionalism and cultural east and west, with east having more clout by then, and tech and the virtue of personal responsibility and civic cooperation between civil societies and not formalgovernmentz, which increasingly meld into a collage of global agreements ratherthan defined nationalities, leads to solving most of the worlds problems. Climate change being one of them. hard choices are made and sacrifice a given. Places of plenty turn to deserts and other places become lavish landscapes...the next generation degenerates in a similar fashion as seen in something like the animatrix,ncivil societies becoming dysfunctional due to robotics and a tech ecosystem..think o a cross between blade runner, ghost in the shell, animatrix and star wars...then a great awakening ensues..you become fully type I and an equilibrium is achieved...

That's but one future...in another one you go extinct...

But one thing is for certain, humanity will adapt, and eventually transcend the climate change problem.. Controlling the weather. Whether humanity survives or goes extinct....is anyones guess.

It really is ip to you. I would avoid the hard blacks or whites and think of grays. Take notethat something like cap and trade might be irrelevant Due to tech...electric cars will become competitive with it's combustion engine counterpart this decade. It would just mean lost economic activity and other countries in this new transparent world are unlikely to stop heir industrialization..giving no advantageto the us or it's elites..it will be a time of great turmoil and power shifts like times of past. A d hence,. There will be plenty of wheeling and dealing, anxiety, and despair at the decline of a great power..the most altruistic in he worlds history..others in the future, at least in your midterm...may not be so kind..especiall in a sharply politically divided world.

ong term genetic engineering and enhancements will change the human form to adapt to all forms of environments, climate change being no different.

Of course climate changes...just like the mountains, the forests, the rivers... nothing on this planet is static and unchanging. And of course we will adapt. Now, as far as the seas rising... really?? According to the USGS and other sources, it has risen about 1mm/year and the temperature has risen just under 2 degrees since the Little Ice Age... of course it will RISE after an ice age... get real... changes will occur up, down, wet, dry... forever...

Now it's climate CHANGE... where did WARMING go??? Even this article is talking about climate changes BSUV. That's Before Sport Utility Vehicles for those not in the know....

Jezz's I don't know where these people went to school but I learned this crap in the 5th grade in Colo. My God people have to change with the weather, if you don't like snow move to Southern Calif. If you like snow move to upper New York. Who pays for these studies and who benefits from this info, the crap they are talking about took thousands of years to come about, so what does this have to do with life today, except keep the unemployable employed.

Culturally, Climate change in the shorter term will separate societies more than unite them. The perceived beneft of carbon cuts will be perceived small by some compared to the economic loss in a competitive world..the rationale being that the small increases do relatively nothing to put a dent and countries will cheat so why am I going to get the short end of the stick while my small cuts do relatively little to combat the whole problem? Due to th destabilization of western gobs this decade which is highly certain, sharp divisions emerge where once there was agreement..climate change a couple decades later is seen less as a cco2 problem, having been solved or on the wu of being solved, and rather aonething to simply be deal with cope with and adapt to...this will create two seemingly powerful but opposite forces..the first I'd a sense or global responsibilit along with the sense of a global culture which will reach agreements on things as ocean conservation and draconian measures...such as shooting down and sinking..fishing vessels since by then the main concern will be the ocean, overfishing leading to mass starvation on th order of hundreds of millions...due to tech,. Meat will be grown invats and the sea farmssuh as the current ones in argentina, just more advanced using bio engineering, etc this will reverse this starvation process but it will take a while to get the oceans back againto the way they are today, for example. The second force will be one of resistance to dictation out of fear of a global elite taking over through a global government, and the practical sideto it, it's favoring of certain parties in resource disputes...sat India and Pakistan. Due to the enormous tragedy of mass migrations govs will be overwhelmed and paradoxically will be given more power by it's people, leading to knew jerk reactions to preserve safety and economic security for it's people..even to the extent of nuclear conflict if necessary...this fear paranoia and nationalistic tendency will often come in direct and very clear conflict with the opposite tendency for international arbitration. Nothin is going to be lost on matrix level realism and 1000 terabit bandwidth..it will get ugly and very direct. many nations, armed with advanced robotics, usually the advanced developed and rich countries in Asia, will take advantage of situations through the hissing international cooperation and arbitration to serve it's interests in a new order after the conflicts. The reasoning makingit a deterrent fr such nations to engage in such paranoid conflicts to begin with and to ensure the continued global economy growth that complements the then "Asian nexus" or Asian "cooperative"...so these two forces are not bad orgood..the nationalistic tendencies will often not be without good reason...

See the world will not have a coherent international community..it will just be a sherade with various different interests vying for control..some may even be corporations or criminal networks...whose ancestors resemble th current Wikileaks, they it's progeny. They will have a vested interest in exposing the interests vying for power...selectively..to it's advantage in a HIgh tech version of information warfare...interests under it's patronage spared..the ones with he greater networks winning the war, but only long enough for the powerful interests to dictate the fault lines because due to the lightning speed pace of the future relative to today, everything will come out in a matter of hours..no on the contrary,. The criminal networks and heir information warfare will engage in selective revealment only to allow their interests to take precedent long enough (hours) to dictate the terms o a truce..before everything is exposed..

Govs will gAin more power in nuclear conflicts..there will be many spheres of influence...one, America, which will become increasingly isolationist and protectionist, in a sort of reversal to it's role in early ww2..most likely future btw, and then the Asian nexus, who wields influence through economic and tech power. Wars waged through high tech warfare and economic attacks through the markets. Prefering to hire or rent military forces and operate them like pawns to achieve their ends. Then he industrial union which is basically a set of multinational corporations who use their power with economic resources and massive networks to either partner or destabilize govs as they see fit..these really had no nationality. Another are a set of community actinides that engage in high tech warfare as well as criminal networks who profit off conflicts and secrets for their own advantage..there is also south america which partners with the us most often yet can go with middle east or Asian Partners as it sees fit. The middle east which has largely been controlled by then by Saudi Arabia and Israel, partnering with Asia, America, SA, or Russia depending on how liberal it feels in the morning..Russia which slowly becomes co opted and a satellite of china through buying of officials and corruption and finally and least, Europe, which by then has largely collapsed and lives off the charity and aid, and hence the power,. Of the Asian nexus...through Russia, and the united states, on the political level, Africa becomes more affluen due to decades of investment by china, increasing standard of living and increasing global production of raw materials, but the African union is highly corrupt and they answer directly to the Asian nations which they have selective deals with. Freedom is limited and highly statist..

most of this future culture is marked by global elites who are largely above the law except for many Asian nations and the us, which obey the rule of law, Europe abandons this by trying to expunge Muslims from it's nations...most succeed but it leads to a Balkanization of Europe,. With many muslims huddling and fighting with suicide "raids" the Muslim infidels..France is the only European nation to go through the humiliation of becoming a Muslim nation, a sattelitle of Arabs, and Germany the only nation to completely expel it's muslim population from it's borders, however,. Due to the lack of population growth it becomes an insignificant power in a matter of decades..brazil surprises California in GDP and south america becomes surprisingly powerful..in this context, the two described cultural forces fight by mid century,. Both having ther valid reasons..

So add climate change to thanand u get a feel. I don't know,. Does climate change...change you? Or does it simply bring about the same spirits already inside you? It surely will change humanity, but not as much ad the confluence of forces that react to it...these possible futures described are the most likely , but they are not for certain.

You @!$%#s need to quit acting like the rulers of the universe and try to protect the planet, not pave it under and bend its forces to your will. Just because we can think in advanced frames of mind doesn't mean we are done evolving, in fact I see that we are de-evolving into pathetic little parasites instead of the forceful but beneficial beings we have the potential to be. That will be the thing that truly decides whether we evolve or not, or whether we ruin the planet to where we will not be able to survive and go extinct or figure out how to advance without destroying who we truly are: protectors of life.

And you sci-fi geeks need to @!$%#ing grow up.

Yes, and maybe in as little as 10 years food wars will start. Once the rice crops fail in Asia they will be scrambling to grow other grains but there will be a huge deficit while they ramp up that capability.

If other countries start having the crop production problems as Russia did this past year it will be mass starvation long before the climate change is extreme.

We have begun a haunting experiment and are now solidly into the 6th great die-off, the others being natural events that occurred before we humans populated the earth. We aren't just raising the temperatures of the earth by pouring about 50 billion tons of ancient carbon into the atmosphere yearly, we are well on our way to acidify our oceans through the carbonic acid produced by increasing carbon dioxide. Now we have begun responding to one natural disaster after another and will reach a point in our lifetimes where it overwhelms our abilities to manage these floods, fires and droughts. Katrina will be just a prologue. My father said that WWII was actually (w/guilt) exciting because it gave extreme purpose and meaning to life. Get ready for meaning and purpose like you can't imagine.

The tragedy of Africa in the future is that it becomes wealthier but it does not trickle down due to corruption..so all he aid and Chinese invetment basically ends up feeding an elite and greater resource production. Africans are wealthier by mid century, but much poorer than they should be..it resembles the previous current gangster state of Russia, only a due to decades of corruption. The once ruthless Putin the replaced by the degenerate proginey currently reminiscent of the Saudi royals..

This is nothing new for you..many empires and spheres have dissappeared in the past...Rome, the ottoman empire..this new migration and change of power will be no different,. It will just be a lot faster...while before such changes took place over he course of centuries, now it happens over the course of decades...due to tech..

While before the ottoman nobles could more or less not care about an ordered decline..everyone that knew it when it was once great Long dead before it's disappearance...someone alive today will experience these shifts in their lifetime..ages will pass in decades, not centuries,. Due to the speed of economic transfer, transportation and technology.

Remmember that you have gone through a relatively stable period in human history. That is usually...no the case.

So as q would say...I will see you...out there..

But without a damn iPhone or this human form. Crude. Ew, how can you stand it? Geez

I will not say man is having an effect on the atmosphere..come to your own conclusions. But man is having an effect on the planet,. That is a given. You are not going to tell me that man is not damaging the biosphere (hint) or the oceans....just look atthe rate of decline in biodiversity and the acceleration of specie extinction. It is clear man affects the planet. On the issue of climate,. The sun does affect the climate..there are things at play here than just co2..however I'm not going to dismiss that concern as much as to say that perhaps the attention ismisplaced..perhaps ocean conservation efforts and measurements of phosphorus rates in soil might be more productive...not to mention more concrete when you are dealing with a species who abhors the abstract. Go for the oceans and conservation...then grow it from there, let technology lead the way and organizations rather than specific and binding accords having to do with combustion engine emissions.

man is both more significant and insignificant than you have been lead to beleive..I think it arrogant ofmann to beleive he has yet..such influence, on the other hand it would also be blind for him to assume nothing is within his control.

Many Innovation centers transfer to Asia, but many of the culturally distinguished institutions remain in America. Nevertheless, Asia and India experience a renesaince of innovation that competes with the still dominant central in the states by mid century.

the competition is healthy and ends up helping all nations involved prior to the full robotic renesaince even though politicially it is not projected that way,. But due to weak western governments and lightning fast tech, it bypasses the political process and allows for progress to continue.

Europe remains a fraught zone, in constant unrest in the same way the middle east is today but to a lesser level. They experience a segregated society in a similar fashion than israel, and end up adopting many of their tactics as the children of today abandon liberal ideals of democracy and focus on self preservation.

Perhaps- as it gets colder we will get to burn more fuel to stay warm, and sell more 4x4 vehicles with big tires. Huurhaaa!

The moon is claimed by china and two corporations, using American technology, prior to the global culture. Space becomes a resource haven, as the space elevator allows for cheap access to space and scramjet tech even allows bypassing of beaurocray. The moon becomes a place of helium extraction for huge fusion reactors even though most of the world gets power through decentralized nanotech. cold fusion is eve acheiced with nanotech. But the powers of scale achieved with nuclear fusion give military and economic supremacy to whatever national power that can harness the most energy to power huge industrial complexes that are largely mechanized and automated. this then gives way to an entirely nanotech distribute process and the moon reclaimed by an enlightened global community,. But not before china claims it first. Asteroids are used for resources and cooperative scientific expeditions from America and Asia are sent to Titan and mars...colonies established. These are scientific in nature mostly. Tourists and average citizens generally visit space stations hotels and moon colonies...built in the same spirit as las Vegas. Mars is mostly for space workers, and scientists, which are both described as colonists in the outer colonies. The trip to mars is comparatively linger and more complicated and hence not really practical to anyone.

Hope that gives u a picture of a likely possible future culture

Look at your own art...AI, steven Spielberg, and the animatrix and ghost in he shell for further props. It has many of the same attributes and feel of those movies, including societal decay,. Prior to type I status and an enlightened global community that resembles something like star trek and joining a galactic and universal community. But again, that's a big if,. Yo may very well never reach type I.

We are getting some of that global warming in PA tonight - probably only 1 or 2 inches but it is 23 degrees at 10:15 PM. Guess I better go start up my 2 SUV's and warm the planet around here.

Global warming can also give us colder winters in the short term. All that melting ice (the North polar ice cap will be gone in about 40 years) affects ocean and air current patterns. Bringing some of that cold our way when the northern hemisphere is tilted away from the sun (winter - for those of you who get your opinions from Fake News And Friends).

Doubtful, we'll probably just fight wars that much fiercer.

When MSNBC and it's journolists can explain why the World's 3 temperature data bases, the CRU, NASA and the NOAA, have all been COOKED we might read this stuff.

It's not like it's hidden guys, it's all over the internet! Are you afraid of numbers?

Incidentally, "active climatologists" are climatologists who are presently receiving behavior modification rewards in the form of research grants. Good ole BF Skinner was soooo right on.

BTW Climatologists not receiving behaviour mod treatment vote 2 to 1 against AGW in a yearly survey (courtesy American Meterological Society).

They got everybodies thermometers rigged to. So we just THINK we had 85 days over 90 degrees last summer in Louisville. How do they do that MAXX? And how about the links to show where you get these "facts".

Good morning everybody.

The article certainly spawned a lot of interesting discussion and fantastic speculation on the future of the planet and mankind.

Here's what I think and you can go to Vegas and place your bets kiddies. You're going to be rich but you're not going to have any place to spend it.

At some point in the next 30 years the Chinese will have surpassed the US in technical ability. They will have made friends and strong alliances in Africa.

At a date certain they will hack the computer systems in the United States and Europe taking control of our missile defense systems, satellite intelligence systems and shutting down the power grid. We will sit here in the dark OR have the power to sustain life at the pleasure of our new Chinese/African Masters.

With their missiles pointed at us and us with no effective missile defense they may "neutralize" a couple of major American and European cities just to impress on us how serious they are. We won't have much choice.

Our culture and lifestyle will be changed by the Chinese and their newly empowered African allies. The chickens will come home to roost then and all our petty internal differences will be meaningless. Our culture, our lifestyle is absolutely dependent on technology. Take away that technology and we are helpless.

Look at the whole Wikileaks debacle. Hackers on both sides of the argument have shut down web-sites, denied service and strategically interferred with internet operations. Imagine what a concerted, organized, attack by a technologically superior GOVERNMENT could do.

Global Warming? Climate Change? Gimme a break. Interesting discussion topics for high school debate but that's not what's going to shape our culture in the short term.

Welcome to our Brave New World.

What was it e.e. cummings said? The world will end, not with a bang, but with a whimper.