Food doesn't really scare me, though. In Europe we have plenty of know-how to produce the food we need. It may not be the most delicious, but it at least sustain us. And if all else fails, there is always genetic engineering, much as it scares people. It's nice and well to be arguing on high moral grounds, but once you've got a hungry population to feed, opinions will likely prove to be malleable. Clean fresh water will become a problem much, much earlier on.
You may think you're safe in Sweden with your increased harvests, but there are also models available which suggest that global warming will divert the Gulf Stream a few thousand kilometres south. That would plunge your warmer Sweden into a climate now found around Tromsø or thereabouts.
I, in the Netherlands, would get the climate you now have. Climate change is finicky!
The problem also is that people more or less silently assume that the climate
doesn't change, that the Earth is more or less a stationary planet, and that things like plate tectonics (with earthquakes and volcanoes), magnetic field reversals, and solar hickups simply won't affect us. The history of man is rife with examples where civilisations emerged and eventually failed because of slow climatic change spread out over hundreds of years, causing them to lose valuable plots of land for their staple crops. The problem is not so much that the climate
does change; it's that
we don't want to change with it. This didn't present much of a problem in the early history because we just gave up somewhere and started anew in a place which suited us better. Nowadays we have such rigid social structures in place, supported by very expensive infrastructure, that anything which challenges the boundary conditions will cause huge trouble in our societies: we simply traded flexibility for security and stability, and now we're expected to pay up a little.
To be honest, I'm not really sure I care much about increased temperatures, and more extremal weather any longer. The Earth has seen much, much worse in its past, and it will survive. Life will survive too---perhaps not in the forms we know and love, but it will find a way. (It is hard to say goodbye to the mighty polar bear and the adorable penguin, yes. But something else will undoubtedly fill their place once the ice returns.) Here in the Netherlands, a change of a few degrees isn't that impressive or destabilising, and that goes for much of Europe at this lattitude. Sea level change is something else, because you can't live---at least not in the current fashion---on water. Flooding results in massive population displacements, and those will create social unrest.
This site offers a tool to calculate what the world would look like with raised and lowered sea levels;
this site is a bit more static, but still very useful. I'm sure the Netherlands has the know-how to fend off a raise of something like 5 m (at great cost, and severe economic decline, no doubt, but still), but once we begin hitting numbers like 20 to 50 m, we'd better pack up and move someplace else. We are fortunate that we
have hundreds of years of experience in living near sea-level and so are a bit more resilient than, for example, the people in New Orleans or Miami---those cities will quite simply be dead if sealevels rise as predicted. (New Orleans already is a shadow of its former pre-Katrina self; another inundation will doom it.)
It's similar to living on the slopes of a volcano: you know you have terrific yields of all sorts of crops, but once the mountain blows, you know you are in deep cow excrement. The question then becomes 'how do we mitigate climate change?' with silly treaties like Kyoto; no, the question becomes 'how can we make our societies more adaptable and flexible to cope with a dynamic planet?'. And that is a question which is not yet widely heard over the ruckus.
