Katrina was a mere taste of what is in the future. The combined threats of more powerful storms and rising oceans will make some of the best places to live impossible places to live. The insurance industry may be able to price a small percentage of people out of places like Miami or Amsterdam, but insurance folks are like all of us: they make their decisions based on past experience. With a world shifting to something outside of human history, how will they know how to price flood insurance?

It will be easy to distance ourselves in the West from events like a flooded Bangladesh. Perhaps also a flooded Calcutta or Beijing. But a flooded Houston? or Manhattan? Where will those people go?

It is worth playing ‘predict the impossible’ with these scenarios. If you live in Australia, where can you even go? If you live in Den Haag, do you have to move to Scandanavia, France, or Germany? If you live in Manhattan, do you move to the Alleghenies or to northern Ontario?

Unfortunately in Vietnam or Bangladesh, there really isn’t anywhere you can move — without creating stupendous problems.