Positive Effects Of Climate Change

To make this worthwhile from a realism standpoint, you would need a _lot_ more nuance. Sure, many plants grow faster in an environment with more carbon dioxide... but that mainly means an increase in the production of sugars. It's not really a positive effect from a nutritional standpoint (beyond mere calories, of course) - it would make it much harder to balance your diet as foods get a higher proportion of sugar. That would be interesting, but also way too expensive to model IMO. Then there's of course the problem that most plants will be really unhappy about the increased temperatures, not to mention extremes in general. So to keep this realistic, zones where particular plants grow well should shift with the temperature and humidity changing, and there should be weather effects that would be able to destroy crops even in their "good zones". That's going to annoy a lot of people, and be a lot of effort to implement. For bonus points, most plants are harmed by the double-whammy - even if more carbon dioxide alone helps their growth, the combination of more carbon dioxide and higher temperatures hinders it. It would be nice to see the world change a lot more with impacts from climate change. To see new lands open up for agriculture, while others die out, and watch as the total agricultural production drops like a stone _despite_ the (fairly small) effects boosting (some) plant growth. I'm not sure it would be much fun, though. Balancing the ecology is hard enough as is, and this is still meant to be a pretty chill game. It would be a lot harder to make people work together to avoid climate change if someone could get very rich by exploiting that for his own benefit (any resemblance to real world issues is purely coincidental, of course :P). The truth is, most of the purported advantages of climate change are completely fabricated and unrealistic. Yes, we would probably be in a returning ice age by now if carbon dioxide didn't largely counter that effect; it's nice to avoid that. But by accepting that, you should also be a lot more critical of changing the climate further from the one we're used to. In short, to give this idea justice, we'd need at the very least nutrition of foods changing with respect to their growing environment (and feed for animals), more advanced climate modelling (to change biomes, temperature, humidity...), weather events and the intersection of that with population modelling (e.g. if biomes change too fast, the plants and animals wouldn't be able to spread fast enough to "seed" them, ending with vast stretches of wasteland). Having more simulation would be great, something akin to Sim Earth; setting up different servers with very different basic conditions like incident sunlight would be a lot of fun and pose interesting challenges. Right now, the game is a bit too rigid for that, I recon. It's more about building the communities, societies and economies than planetary modelling itself. If you don't get huckleberries, they cannot be replaced in any way - and you're not going to get any alternatives. It'd be great to make the whole game more simulationist, but it would also be a _huge_ undertaking (and I suspect it's going to be difficult or impossible to mod well). Be careful around people saying climate change is a good thing. Most of the arguments are suspicious at best, even if you only look at the local picture. I mean, why would you even mention water held in the air in a discussion about rising sea levels? That's pure propaganda fuel - as important as the water in the air is, the actual mass compared to the oceans is negligible and while it will increase with warmer air, it will _still_ be entirely negligible while humans can still survive on the surface without a space suit :D Water vapour is extremely important for climate modelling, but not because it in any measurable way counters sea level increase. Referencing the carbon dioxide levels in the Carboniferous period while implying they "created the fossil fuels" is also disingenuous. Those were different plants, for one (a huge amount of modern plants couldn't survive in that environment), and just as importantly, the Carboniferous was a period with a massive _drop_ in carbon dioxide - as the plants captured that carbon and it was stored in anaerobic conditions. In fact, at the end of the period, carbon dioxide levels ended up very similar to today's. Of course, the cooling and drying caused massive ecological collapses - you shouldn't take that as "see, carbon dioxide is actually great!" but as "climate change is dangerous, no matter which way it goes". And note that that was considered _rapid_ climate change, despite taking millions of years. Most of coal we know of formed _after_ this collapse, too - there was a huge bump in coal production over a few million years which caused climate change that killed off most of the plants responsible for that bump... and then coal production continued as before, with vastly lower carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, as well as general cooling and drying of the planet. Again, the lesson from that should just be "climate change is dangerous" (and "fossil fuel apologists _really_ like to twist facts, when they're not shamelessly lying outright"). Absolute humidity doesn't have much direct effect on life either; it's another red herring (even if we assume increased humidity would be better for us in the first place, which of course isn't true). For most things directly relevant to life (as opposed to general changing weather patterns and increased radiative forcing, for example), relative humidity is the important factor. That's what determines biomes, plant success, heating and cooling etc.