An Oregon reporter named David Sarasohn has written a funny piece for the LA Times about Oregon's potential natural advantage in adapting to climate change. He makes the mistake of claiming that a coming Dust Bowl is about to unfold in California and tens of millions of people will migrate away in search of water. Instead, a micro economist would say that the price of water will rise for agriculture. California agriculture will cut back on growing water intensive crops. California suburbanites will rip out their grass and will recycle water and the "crisis" will vanish. What I do like about his piece is his thinking through that people in the USA do have a choice where they live their lives and millions of people may head to the Northwest. This will create new opportunities for real estate developers and will shape and shift the culture of areas such as Oregon and Washington. This is adaptation. For a more nuanced discussion of the urban economics of climate change read my NBER piece titled "Climate Change Adaptation: Lessons from Urban Economics".
One of the themes of my work on climate change is that different geographic areas offer different delineated attributes (such as winter temperature, summer temperature, rainfall, natural disaster risk). Some of these attributes are God Given (i.e due to geography and topography) while others are an emergent property of what types of policies are adopted by local governments (i.e investments in Sea Walls and wetlands, water pricing that reflects scarcity ). Together these endowments and policy choices determine the ability of different cities to cope with climate change. Those cities that are unable to adapt will suffer a brain drain, and an out-migration of people, and declining local real estate prices this potential "voting with your feet" creates a strong incentive for politicians to address climate change adaptation. Competition between cities to attract and retain the skilled helps to protect urbanites. Doom and gloomers who focus on the fate of specific places ignore this point.