Your question raises a number of thoughts.
First, why are you so focused on the US? It's called "global" change for a reason. If behaviors in the US are responsible in large part for damages elsewhere, do you think the US should take its fair share of responsibility?
Also, do you consider Alaska to be part of the US for the purposes of your question? Alaska has several problems that are already attributable to climate change, notably infrastructure repairs due to no-longer-perma permafrost, and loss of vast tracts of forest due to the advance of an insect species that formerly was unable to survive the midwinter cold. (spruce beetles, to be specific, on the Kenai Peninsula) See http://amap.no/acia/
Events such as heat waves, severe storms, intense tropical storms, and droughts are likely to be increasingly common in the US mainland as time progresses. It will be problematic for a long time to say that any individual one of these events would never happen in the absence of anthropogenic climate change, but it is plausible that the frequency of such events will increase enough for unambiguous attribution of the change in *likelihood*. I realize that is quite a mouthful, but that, I think, is the right way to look at it.
For instance, it's not fair to say that global warming "caused" Katrina, only that it loaded the dice in her favor.
New Orleans may be long remembered as the first example of something that we will see more of, but it was ahead of its time, and something of a special case. No other US city has sunk below sea level, and the incompetence of the political system that had responsibility for maintaining the levees was also, I think, above and beyond even the shoddy norms of our time.
In short, it doesn't seem likely that anything that spectacular will come up soon. More typical, I will venture, will be an array of slow decays in prosperity in many regions and sectors. As things change more quickly, such stresses will become more widespread, but it's very hard to know whose turn is next.
mt
On 10/8/06, Tom Adams <[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
I am trying to better understand climate impact prediction.
Sea level rise get lots of press, but it seem to be far off in the
future, at least the dire consequences for the US.
Isn't drought one of the bigger threats to the US in the next 30 years?
What are the biggest threats in that time-frame.
Does the US have a good adaptation plans against sustained drought?
Pretty much come down to migration, right?
If not drought, what do you think the next big AGW induced
disaster/migration will be in the US, assuming New Orleans was the
first.
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