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There would have to be some sort of discontinuous break for climate change to have a serious effect on human civilization.
People keep on predicting that climate change will cause more famines and storm deaths. But, over time, human deaths from famine and storms have been going down, not up. Human capacity to deal with the climate increases far faster than the climate changes. Unless the world deindustrializes, there will never be another Bhola cyclone which killed 300,000 people in 1970.
Climate change predictions often call for a 1 or 2% decrease in total global GDP due to climate change in the next 50 or 100 years. Frankly, this is small potatoes. And furthermore, it's quite easy and cheap to mitigate the worst effects of climate change if we cared to do so. (We don't).
That's not to say climate change isn't bad. It is. It will have many negative consequences for the natural environment and may cause some species to go extinct. This is bad and we should strive to prevent it.
But humans will be fine.
Yeah, climate change isn't a "threat of human extinction" type of problem (unless we're missing something big and Venusy, which is far-fetched), but I could see 1 or 2% decrease in total global GDP being a serious underestimate. The theme I keep seeing in climate change predictions is devaluation of land. A large number of major coastal cities having to simultaneously move inland would be pretty bad, even if it was a relatively gradual process.
It's going to be very gradual on a human time scale. How gradual? Think 1 meter of sea level rise in the next 100 years, assuming no mitigation.
The cities won't move, but lower lying areas will see marginally less development over time, so the population center of the cities will gradually shift inland. In extremely valuable areas like lower Manhattan, there won't be any retreat, just more money spent on land reclamation. Amsterdam and New Orleans are already below sea level.
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