Q: What kind of places are going to do the best and the worst as the climate changes?

A: I would not be buying land in Las Vegas or Phoenix right now. I think that Seattle will compete much better in the hotter future.

In Manhattan and New York City, there's ongoing talk about the potential of sea-level rise caused by climate change. An optimist would say you move Wall Street to Greenwich, Conn. But if there's abrupt climate change, then you can't really be optimistic.

So an implicit assumption in the book is that climate change will occur gradually. I'm not a climate scientist, but you have to have quite an accelerated model to believe we could wake up tomorrow and be in completely different climate conditions than we are today. We can expect a continuity to sea-level rise and temperature spikes.

Author Matthew Kahn has a strange theory. In his new book, Climatopolis: How Our Cities Will Thrive In A Hotter Future, he argues it is too late to avoid the major effects of global warming but hey, we'll be okay because people will simply move to places that are effectively adapting to the changes. It's a very positive outlook. He defends his rationale thusly: "One is our ability to form expectations of the future. There's a literature in economics on our ability to anticipate future problems and invest beforehand to reduce our exposure to them. The second piece is literature on innovation: When even just a few of us anticipate coming days of scarcity, that creates huge economic opportunities to seize the day. The third piece of my optimism is our past predilection to vote with our feet. If a city goes to hell in terms of high crime, people move to some other area. Landowners in that area suffer a land value loss. Politicians of that area are suddenly in control of a worthless area. When Detroit lost its jobs, people moved away and stopped moving there. Climate change will lower quality of life in certain cities, and that will induce migration, but also innovation." Full interview HERE.

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