The New York Times has devoted an entire edition of its magazine, some 30,000 words, to a terrifying piece about climate change. With 2C warming – an unlikely best-case scenario at this point, scientists were quoted as saying – the planet faces “long-term disaster”. With 3C warming, we are looking at “the loss of most coastal cities”. The possibility that the Earth might warm by 5C, wrote the author, Nathaniel Rich, had prompted some of the world’s leading scientists to warn of the end of human civilisation.

Huge rise of people at risk from wildfires as western US population grows Read more

The premise of the article was to examine the decade after 1979, when all of this might have been avoided, and there has been some discussion in the US media as to whether it downplayed the villainy of the fossil fuels industry and previous Republican administrations.

There has also been some chatter about whether its gloomy prediction that it’s all too late and we’re doomed, Captain Mainwaring, doomed, is an irresponsible piece of editorialising that will encourage already disengaged people to give up and leave the house with every light burning. (Almost certainly, personal energy consumption makes no difference at this point; on the other hand, neither do individual votes, but we still cast them.)

I was having lunch with friends in Brooklyn on Sunday, in a low-lying area that will be under water when all of this comes to pass and, political analysis aside, all we could focus on was: what on earth are we going to do? More specifically, how to ensure the survival of our children, and should it involve buying a compound in some remote part of Canada?

The difficulty is knowing how to recognise the klaxon call when it comes. Is this, the summer of forest fires and record heatwaves, the climate disaster equivalent to Kristallnacht? Or can we safely not think about it for another 10 years?

No one had any answers. One friend averred that, shabby as this line of thinking is, one had to assume that when climate change posed an imminent threat to national security, the entire US defence budget would be ploughed into technology to reverse it, and we would be saved in the nick of time.

This seems to me optimistic, like the disaster movie in which a meteorite hurtling towards Earth is blown off course by a magic missile. “Perhaps,” I countered, “the answer is to raise our children to be really likable, so they can talk their way on to the lifeboats?” (I’d had half a gin and tonic, which is when I get my best ideas.)

Eventually, we came back to the question of Canada. (Or in the UK, Scotland.) Assessments by climate scientists have suggested cities around the Great Lakes are viable – and, until everyone else panics, affordable!

Denver, for reasons I forget; the Pacific north-west, if you’re willing to take your chances with the earthquakes. Meanwhile, the property investment implications of climate change seem, obscurely, to be part of how we got here in the first place. Peter Thiel and his fellow billionaires are, of course, developing survival strategies that include the creation of manmade archipelagos in international waters. Whenever I feel lassitude about long-term planning, I picture the future of humanity in the form of Thiel, smug on his island, and am almost – but not quite – irritated into action.

• Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist