> Fairly soon, estimated climate change refugees in one of the most prosperous and advanced areas of the world is going to be at one order of magnitude more[0], i.e. about 1 person in 10 in Europe will have been fleeing death.
I initially read this wrong and tried to find where in the report they said that 1 in 10 Europeans would be fleeing due to climate change.
The claim is that 10-20 million will be fleeing draught or extreme weather events in Africa and they will tend to flee North not South. I’m seeing a quote from a US General but not a link to an actual study.
Longer term, over the next 40 years, they have this to say;
> There is no clear global dataset on displacement by slow-onset climate extremes such as sea level rise and desertification; often this migration is classed as economic or other planned migration, failing to acknowledge fully the ‘push’ resulting from climate change impacts. This leaves the full human impact of climate change unknown and depends not only on the magnitude of the event, but also on the vulnerability of the area and the society it impacts. Communities from Alaska to Fiji and Kiribati have already been relocated, or are making plans to do so
because rising sea levels threaten their lands. Developing countries - that have contributed least to climate change - are experiencing the strongest negative impacts, with increasing frequency and magnitude of extreme weather events that pose potentially disastrous consequences for agriculture and food security.
> According to a recent study, 1.4 billion people could be forced to leave their homes by 2060 and this number could rise to two billion by 2100. This estimate is based on combined projections of population growth, submerging coastal zones, exhausted natural resources, declining net primary production, desertification and urban sprawl.
It’s not much of an analysis, but it’s rooted in something real. Coastal populations number about 600 million, maybe up to 1 billion this century. SLR (sea level rise) has been 0.4m since 1900 and estimated to be between an additional 0.4-2.5m this century. “As a result, SLR is anticipated to be one of the most expensive and irreversible future consequences of global climate change.”
I liked this Nature article for a more balanced review of the literature;
It looks at various estimates ranging from 80 million to 1.4 billion people displaced by the end of this century based on SLR and the various assumptions being made by the respective models. For example, looking at areas which lie in 100-year floodplains assuming they’re were all inhabitable, that would impact an estimated 444 million people by 2100 factoring in population growth.
> However, ...residence in the 100-year floodplain may not necessarily result in migration responses to SLR. Indeed, many low-lying areas in the 100-year floodplain, such as Asia’s densely populated ‘mega-deltas’, possess fertile soil and ample water, which is ideal for farming and fishing. Floodplains thus attract large numbers of migrants from other areas, notwithstanding the presence of coastal hazards. Simple residency in the 100-year floodplain does not, therefore, result in migration; it is only when the costs of increasing exposure to SLR hazards exceed the benefits of coastal environments that migration may occur.
If you look at just areas that would become permanently inundated, it is a much smaller land area and estimated to impact 88 million people by 2100.
SLR may be among the greatest/costliest threat of climate change, but SLR models have a huge variance of outcomes, and fairly long time horizons.
This is my point. We already have major immigration/refugee issues all over the world. Even if we are 100% certain climate change will result in more farm land for humanity, the issue is where are the people now and where will that farm land be then? Do you think Russia (or any other country) will be happy to take in a billion people from South-East Asia? Legal immigration is an issue now. This will be a humanitarian catastrophe larger than any war humanity has ever faced by orders of magnitude.
>> Estimates of sea level rise are very difficult and always changing.
Trust me, I'm pretty sure the people in the pacific islands are going to be a bit more paranoid about these changes than we are. And yet, some of the predictions have been wildly off the mark. Remember the United Nations Environment Programme who said in 2005:
Imminent sea-level rises, increased hurricanes, and desertification caused by “man-made global warming” would lead to massive population disruptions. In a handy map, the organization highlighted areas that were supposed to be particularly vulnerable in terms of producing “climate refugees.” Especially at risk were regions such as the Caribbean and low-lying Pacific islands, along with coastal areas.
The 2005 UNEP predictions claimed that, by 2010, some 50 million “climate refugees” would be frantically fleeing from those regions of the globe. However, not only did the areas in question fail to produce a single “climate refugee, by 2010, population levels for those regions were actually still soaring. In many cases, the areas that were supposed to be producing waves of “climate refugees” and becoming uninhabitable turned out to be some of the fastest-growing places on Earth.”
Whoops.
When I read stuff like this, it makes hard for objective people like myself to determine where the hype ends the facts start.
> Likely, climate change will cause 1-2B people to flee to temperate areas
Rationally, that is the thing to do.
All predictive models agree that temperatures are not going to decrease during the following decades. We should be organizing the largest human migration in history, and instead we are wasting time on comfort solutions that give people the illusion to do something while accomplishing exactly nothing.
> How do you know all that will happen in your second paragraph?
We have barely reached 1.5° C and people are already dying by the thousands, people are already fleeing by thousands more—and people are already not accepted as refugees. There are entire areas which are become more and more inhospitably which are experiencing disproportionately more famines, coups, and even wars (namely the Sahel region in Africa).
Yes I am a climate doomer, but I believe doomerism is the reasonable reaction to our climate reality.
The Arctic has a huge influence on the climate of Europe and NA. Also the warming will trigger climatic feedbacks (arctic ice, methane, etc) if that hasn't happened already. There's no human way to stop feedbacks. It's like trying to stop an earthquake.
Citation needed. Many (also old) people died in the European heat waves of the last summer. And every year these summers are getting hotter.
Once crops closer to the already dry and hot areas of the globe stop to yield, and people migrate away from those areas — how many people die in the resulting conflicts, how much human suffering will be produced there?
What impact will the usage of resources we use to safeguard costal cities against rising waters have on other areas that prevent human suffering?
Answering the possible fallout from even a moderate change in global climate is nowhere near as clear cut as you make it out to be.
On top of that: the ddcisions we take now could potentially be multiplied by the next 1000 human generations, only idiots would take that risk lightly.
> As the article says, climate change won't destroy human civilization.
I think most reasonable people agree with this statement. I've personally never heard about the collapse of human civilization in the near future due to climate change. Having said that, this article sounds a bit too optimistic.
Some people attribute the Syrian civil war to long droughts and climate change [1]. The science is disputed but regardless of the cause, we can all see the backlash against the flood of refuges in Europe. Now imagine the scale of mass migration is one or two orders of magnitude larger; do you really believe you can persuade voters by saying that the solution is less expensive than WWII?
I think the real danger of climate change will be political. Who is going to pay for it? The countries which are most affected don't necessarily have the resources to manage it and the countries which have the resources might have a hard time convincing their citizens to bear the cost of it. This requires a coordinated international effort.
> into accepting the mass arrival of "climate refugees" that's going to happen no matter what.
So, either climate change exists, and this will cause refugees (as will anything that causes a place to become unsupporting of human life, war, famine etc. etc.)
Or, climate change doesn't exist, or does but is exaggerated, and the "climate refugees" are going to be forced on us by some unmentioned power with climate change being used as the excuse.
If do belive in climate change but don't particularly like immigrants then your only real option is to prevent climate change. People will leave their homes when the place they live becomes unlivable (for instance, in the case of Bangladesh, underwater). This is a hard fact, it's not something unique to these people, it's what everyone would do. Only the insane would stay behind railing against the encroaching ocean.
If you don't believe in climate change (despite the overwhelming evidence that it exists) then you're left with some sort of conspiracy theory that refugees are somehow being sent to punish you and climate change is being used as an excuse. This is fantasy, and there's not much that can be done to help you in this situation because what you're taking part in at this point is a religious belief (the evidence points to X but you're going to believe Y).
The opening sentence shows a deep misunderstanding of climate change.
> FOR HUMANS, adapting to climate change will mostly be a matter of technology. More air conditioning, better-designed houses and bigger flood defences may help ameliorate the effects of a warmer world.
When millions of Bangladeshis are flooded from their homes, a/c and sandbags won't help, nor when malaria-bearing mosquitos reach Europe, etc.
> Yes society will survive. No, climate change does not mean that things are getting worse.
Either you are insanely optimistic (to a point where it is actually ridiculous), or you lack information.
You do realize that climate change is, right now, going to make entire parts of Earth unlivable (the most humid ones, around the equator), right? As in "human beings won't be able to survive outdoors on their own because it is too warm"?
You do realize that this means billions of climate refugees, which in turn means global instability, wars and famines, right?
>> BUT rising sea levels could wipe out coastal cities everywhere. Still, this would be a gradual process, and one which we can plan for.
If we can't muster the political will to take even token action on climate change, what makes you think we could effect the forced resettlement of the majority of the world's population, who live on the coast? Or would even want to? Not to mention the devastating cultural loss of every major coastal city being underwater.
Sorry, but that throwaway statement is so colossally misinformed, it's hard to take you seriously.
> Almost all countries have ample space that will still be habitable for their entire population in 2100, even if climate change is left unchecked
That's a really dubious one. There's multiple issues with global warming, drought and desertification being one of them (and it probably will not affect a whole country) but the second one is just the max temperature the human body can, withstand especially with high humidity. When this threshold is passed, you can have thousands of people dying at the same time in your country. When every summer, heatwaves take a few of your neighbours you start reconsidering how nice your country is.
Remember, we're going to have more than a 2°C increase in mean temperature by the end of the century, and maybe 4°C. 4°C is the difference between now and the last ice age when the whole Europe was covered by huge glaciers.
Also, many people live near shores, which will be damaged frequently as the see level rises… How would India, who have a borderline genocidal tendency (fantasised mostly at the moment buy still frightening) against Muslims nowadays, react to the massive arrival of Bengali people coming from Bangladesh after a typhoon destroyed their land?
> Italy is a tiny country in terms of land area, so why would they need to take so many?
Because that's where they arrive… I'm not speculating when I talk about Italy, this is happening right now (not 10 millions, but hundred of thousands).
> Anyways, my core point here is (a) we won't need to deal with this migration anyways, because we will solve climate change way before it becomes necessary, and (b) even if we didn't lower our emissions, I'm confident we can solve the migration problem without millions of deaths.
Action on climate change is very slow, but happening. Climate change is not going to be even remotely as close to as bad as you appear to think it will be.
>If that happens, there seems very little chance that society could survive
This statement here, while it seems correct I don't think is backed up by the article. Does anyone know of any good work examining the impact climate change will have on human society? I know there are going to be some serious problems but would like see an expert break it down.
> globally harvests will go down and we will see a lot of refugees and hunger as a result.
The science predicts these with some degree of uncertainty but surely in the past 100 years of warming we should have seen some of that already? Harvests are up lately, hunger is very much down and the regions where population growth is highest are among the hottest in the world, closest to the equator.
> the temperature increases in a few hundred years don't matter in the slightest.
There are dense locations near the equator where the wetbulb temperature has gone over 34-35 degrees celcius, which is higher than is survivable by healthy adults for more than a small handful of hours. These extreme events will keep getting worse, leading to heat stress, prolonged school closures, etc. Not all of these people have access to air conditioning because we're talking about countries with less than $6k GDP per capita. Eventually this will drive climate refugees.
I initially read this wrong and tried to find where in the report they said that 1 in 10 Europeans would be fleeing due to climate change.
The claim is that 10-20 million will be fleeing draught or extreme weather events in Africa and they will tend to flee North not South. I’m seeing a quote from a US General but not a link to an actual study.
Longer term, over the next 40 years, they have this to say;
> There is no clear global dataset on displacement by slow-onset climate extremes such as sea level rise and desertification; often this migration is classed as economic or other planned migration, failing to acknowledge fully the ‘push’ resulting from climate change impacts. This leaves the full human impact of climate change unknown and depends not only on the magnitude of the event, but also on the vulnerability of the area and the society it impacts. Communities from Alaska to Fiji and Kiribati have already been relocated, or are making plans to do so because rising sea levels threaten their lands. Developing countries - that have contributed least to climate change - are experiencing the strongest negative impacts, with increasing frequency and magnitude of extreme weather events that pose potentially disastrous consequences for agriculture and food security.
> According to a recent study, 1.4 billion people could be forced to leave their homes by 2060 and this number could rise to two billion by 2100. This estimate is based on combined projections of population growth, submerging coastal zones, exhausted natural resources, declining net primary production, desertification and urban sprawl.
The study they are referencing is this one;
https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2017/06/rising-seas-could-r...
It’s not much of an analysis, but it’s rooted in something real. Coastal populations number about 600 million, maybe up to 1 billion this century. SLR (sea level rise) has been 0.4m since 1900 and estimated to be between an additional 0.4-2.5m this century. “As a result, SLR is anticipated to be one of the most expensive and irreversible future consequences of global climate change.”
I liked this Nature article for a more balanced review of the literature;
https://www.nature.com/articles/s43017-019-0002-9
It looks at various estimates ranging from 80 million to 1.4 billion people displaced by the end of this century based on SLR and the various assumptions being made by the respective models. For example, looking at areas which lie in 100-year floodplains assuming they’re were all inhabitable, that would impact an estimated 444 million people by 2100 factoring in population growth.
> However, ...residence in the 100-year floodplain may not necessarily result in migration responses to SLR. Indeed, many low-lying areas in the 100-year floodplain, such as Asia’s densely populated ‘mega-deltas’, possess fertile soil and ample water, which is ideal for farming and fishing. Floodplains thus attract large numbers of migrants from other areas, notwithstanding the presence of coastal hazards. Simple residency in the 100-year floodplain does not, therefore, result in migration; it is only when the costs of increasing exposure to SLR hazards exceed the benefits of coastal environments that migration may occur.
If you look at just areas that would become permanently inundated, it is a much smaller land area and estimated to impact 88 million people by 2100.
SLR may be among the greatest/costliest threat of climate change, but SLR models have a huge variance of outcomes, and fairly long time horizons.
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