Portland's resilience to many climate change challenges will make it a magnet for climate refugees from other, harder-hit areas of the west. Within a relatively short time (the next 20-30 years, the forces unleashed by climate change will begin to make extreme weather events daily events, raise sea levels, disrupt or obliterate agricultural and daily-needs economic production, and drmatically reduce rainfall in the west (by 2050), amoung other things.
In short, life and survival will become much harder, shorter, and brutish to paraphrase Hobbs' characterization of a different era.
Yet, hope springs eternal as people substitute the mantra of climate adaptation for humanity's failure over the past 20 years, really 40 years, to make any hopeful and substantial progress on reversing climate change, establishing a new ecologically-based economy, prosperity, and security orchestrated via a soft, short-as-possible, multi-century reversal of climate to pre-1990 conditoins.
Read the article on climate refugee planning in the Portland Tribune's Daily Sustainable Life Section (Portland should brace for ‘climate refugees’. Eco Thoughts: Climate disruption could be defining issue of the century, By Kat West, Pamplin Media Group, Jun 9, 2011).