[jyl]

Read and cogitate

Cliff Mass Weather Blog: Will the Pacific Northwest be a Climate Refuge Under Global Warming?

The Northwest is the place to be during global warming.
Temperatures will rise more slowly than most of the nation due to the Pacific Ocean (see below)
We will have plenty of precipitation, although the amount falling as snow will decline (will fall as rain instead). But we can deal with that by building more reservoir and dam capacity (and some folks on the eastern slopes of the Cascades have proposed to do exactly that).
The Pacific Ocean will keep heat waves in check and we don't get hurricanes.
Sea level rise is less of a problem for us due to our substantial terrain and the general elevation rise of our shorelines. Furthermore, some of our land is actually RISING relatively to the sea level because we are still recovering from the last ice age (the heavy ice sheets pushed the land down and now it is still rebounding).
There is no indication that our major storms...cyclone-based winds (like the Columbus Day Storm)... will increase under global warming.
Increased precipitation may produce more flooding, but that will be limited to river valleys and can be planned for with better river management and zoning.

And we'll do a lot more farming up here too

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/western-us-could-soon-face-worst-megadrought-millennium-180954238/?no-ist

The bad droughts of the past in this region have historically been driven by persistent La Niña conditions, when there are unusually cold waters in the Pacific. But the megadroughts of the not-too-distant future will be triggered by increased greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere, the report finds. The resulting changes to the climate will make these regions warmer, so that both the Southwest and the Central Plains will experience more evaporation, which will dry out the land. The Southwest will also experience reductions in winter precipitation.

“What’s important to realize is that continued warming is pretty much a sure bet without cuts in our greenhouse gas emissions, and this warming alone will likely overwhelm any increases in precipitation to dry out and bake a large swath of our country stretching from California through Texas," says Overpeck. "Decreases in precipitation will make the pain more acute where they occur.”



The problem is that California will want to take our water, maybe even by force, so the PacNW will need to start working on its independent nuclear deterrent.