Editor's Note: This is part two of a two-partseries.

Last month this column cited a Smithsonianarticle about a 13th century village in Greenland that wasabandoned when the village's primary source of trade, walrus tusks,lost market value to African elephant tusks. The same situation isnow happening in the Appalachian coal country as alternate forms ofenergy replace much of the world's need for coal.

A few, as cited in J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy, moved to theindustrial north, but then foreign steel and other cheap laborproducts from Asia and Latin America made those jobs obsolete. Whatwere the former coal miners to do? Unfortunately, the answer was toturn to opioids, and the Midwest is now bogged down in anopium/heroin epidemic.

So where do unemployable drug addicts go? Some avoided thatproblem and learned new trades, often in the growing technologyarena. But for every 10 new tech start-ups, eight or nine fail andgo bankrupt. Farming, another skill the miners may have had, isalso a dead-end, as farming is now a corporate industry. The familyfarm died in the last century. Hence the move to welfare andhomelessness – and drugs. Narcotics is a booming business, whetheror not Mexico pays for building a $25 billion wall.

There is, to a very minor degree, still some coal mining, some for U.S. powerplants and some for foreign export, but it is a shadow industry.Oil is booming, but after the wells are drilled and the pumpingbecomes mechanized, there is not much call for “roustabouts.” Thereare plenty of jobs for migrant agricultural or domestic workers,but Americans won't take those jobs. Hence unemployment is stucksomewhere between four and five percent. (The actual numbers aregreater than in the Great Depression!)

An iconoclastic prediction

In mid-2017, a chunk of Antarctician ice the size of Delawarebroke off and floated in the South Atlantic as an iceberg. As 80%of any iceberg is below the surface and full of air bubbles, thisalone won't add much to the oceanic sea levels. But what is meltingfrom Antarctica's glaciers, as well as those glaciers on Greenland,Alaska, Canada, and even Glacier National Park, add to the sealevel – and it may rise by 13 feet or more by the end of thecurrent century.

How are these factors connected and how do they relate to claimadjusting? The answer is already evident as property adjusters arewriting checks for total losses of homes burned by wildfires  across theAmerican West. As sea levels rise, they'll also be writing checks(at least to those who purchased federal flood insurance, if it isstill available,) to residents of the Gulf and Atlantic Coast astheir homes wash away in the rising surf.

But what about the unemployed? The global warming that evenskeptics now seem to accept as reality has a lining, perhaps notsilver, but we'll have to do with brass or tin for a while.Technology is not going to provide a solution for the forest firesor the rising ocean, but there may still be opportunity in thoseareas for others besides adjusters.

If a young person were to ask what field they should enter, Iwould suggest hydrology. Water is scarce and precious, and needs tobe controlled. Hydrology could provide employment for hundreds ofthousands of workers, building levees or dams, laying pipeline totransport excess fresh water from where it isn't wanted to where itis needed, providing home restoration for flood victims who, likethe characters in Vance's Elegy, won't move, or trimming brush inpotential wildfire areas before some careless smoker starts anotherblaze.

There is no end to the number of new fields of endeavor(including claims adjusting) that the new reality ofglobal warming will bring. Unlike the 13th century Greenlanders whojust picked up their valuables and moved, we don't all need tobecome migrants.

Ken Brownlee, CPCU, ([email protected]) is a formeradjuster and risk manager based in Atlanta, Ga. He now authors andedits claims-adjusting textbooks. Opinions expressed are theauthor's own.