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What Happened To the Climate Refugees?
Attila Dimedici writes "In 2005 the UN said that by 2010 there would be 50 million climate refugees. They even provided a map of where they would come from. However since that original story was posted the UN has taken down that page. They apparently don't know about Google cache."
Sure, we're in an Ice Age, and in an interglacial period where we'd expect ice sheets to be retreating and temperatures warming, but give me money and power and I'll put a stop to it!
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
these people are dangerous. we must be pointing this out at every opportunity and never forget that this whole Global Warming er i mean Climate Change is nothing more then a political movement. it seeks to control, regulate and enslave everyone... all under the premise that the world needs saving and their way is the only true way. convert or die.
what should be scaring the hell out of everyone is the very 1984, Winston Smith way they went about trying to edit their propaganda. what happens when they learn from this and the collective memory forgets their false prophecies?
Did Slashdot become Fox News?
Deniers on my Slashdot?
Are facts that you don't like suddenly "Fox News"?
Let me see if I got the formula right:
Facts I don't like = Fox News
Fox News = Fake
Facts I don't like = Fake
Nice!
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
The Earth's climate has always and will always change and there's nothing we can do about it.
People have always built houses, towns and even cities in areas where environmental changes have destroyed them or forced them to adapt or move.
Deal with it.
Scientific American (irony not intended)
Okay, We Give Up
We feel so ashamed
By The Editors | Friday, April 1, 2005 | 55
There's no easy way to admit this. For years, helpful letter writers told us to stick to science. They pointed out that science and politics don't mix. They said we should be more balanced in our presentation of such issues as creationism, missile defense and global warming. We resisted their advice and pretended not to be stung by the accusations that the magazine should be renamed Unscientific American, or Scientific Unamerican, or even Unscientific Unamerican. But spring is in the air, and all of nature is turning over a new leaf, so there's no better time to say: you were right, and we were wrong.
In retrospect, this magazine's coverage of so-called evolution has been hideously one-sided. For decades, we published articles in every issue that endorsed the ideas of Charles Darwin and his cronies. True, the theory of common descent through natural selection has been called the unifying concept for all of biology and one of the greatest scientific ideas of all time, but that was no excuse to be fanatics about it. Where were the answering articles presenting the powerful case for scientific creationism? Why were we so unwilling to suggest that dinosaurs lived 6,000 years ago or that a cataclysmic flood carved the Grand Canyon? Blame the scientists. They dazzled us with their fancy fossils, their radiocarbon dating and their tens of thousands of peer-reviewed journal articles. As editors, we had no business being persuaded by mountains of evidence.
Moreover, we shamefully mistreated the Intelligent Design (ID) theorists by lumping them in with creationists. Creationists believe that God designed all life, and that's a somewhat religious idea. But ID theorists think that at unspecified times some unnamed superpowerful entity designed life, or maybe just some species, or maybe just some of the stuff in cells. That's what makes ID a superior scientific theory: it doesn't get bogged down in details.
Good journalism values balance above all else. We owe it to our readers to present everybody's ideas equally and not to ignore or discredit theories simply because they lack scientifically credible arguments or facts. Nor should we succumb to the easy mistake of thinking that scientists understand their fields better than, say, U.S. senators or best-selling novelists do. Indeed, if politicians or special-interest groups say things that seem untrue or misleading, our duty as journalists is to quote them without comment or contradiction. To do otherwise would be elitist and therefore wrong. In that spirit, we will end the practice of expressing our own views in this space: an editorial page is no place for opinions.
Get ready for a new Scientific American. No more discussions of how science should inform policy. If the government commits blindly to building an anti-ICBM defense system that can't work as promised, that will waste tens of billions of taxpayers' dollars and imperil national security, you won't hear about it from us. If studies suggest that the administration's antipollution measures would actually increase the dangerous particulates that people breathe during the next two decades, that's not our concern. No more discussions of how policies affect science either-so what if the budget for the National Science Foundation is slashed? This magazine will be dedicated purely to science, fair and balanced science, and not just the science that scientists say is science. And it will start on April Fools' Day.
Scientific American is a trademark of Scientific American, Inc., used with permission
© 2011 Scientific American, a Division of Nature America, Inc.
All Rights Reserved.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Maybe I missed it, but why do you say "This article clearly demonstrates what's wrong with America's science reporting"? The author of TFA, Gavin Atkins, appears to be Australian. The hosting site, Asian Correspondent, doesn't appear to be related to American news. I agree with the general statement that science reporting is more often than not just terrible, but I don't see how America's science reporting enters in here. In any case, thanks for the thoughtful post!
So any statement made by any researcher involved with the UN is essentially the same as an official statement by the UN? Furthermore, if I can show that any of these statements by any researchers turns out the be wrong, the entire field of study and research institution they're involved with is called into question? Using that logic, I can call into question any aspect of anything that's studied and any research institution.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Avalanches have always and will always happen, and there's nothing we can do about it. We can, however, trigger avalanches so they happen when people aren't around so people don't get hurt. Diseases have always and will always happen, and there's nothing we can do about it. We can, however, develop vaccines and treatments to minimize human suffering. Just because we can't fully control nature doesn't mean we can't influence it.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
America has no science reporting. It has sciency reporting, in the Steven-Colbert "truthiness" sense. Now consider that the media is the main way that "climate change" gets communicated to the people of America. The media... and politicians. Is there any surprise that lots of people are insanely skeptical of it? I'd even say that with those inputs, calling it all a load of nonsense is a very rational response.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
I've never heard anyone say "what we do to the planet is the only thing that affects weather and climate". That is not what the hypothesis of anthropogenic global warming states. It states that in addition to all the natural effects on climate, humans can raise the temperature of the Earth several degrees above where they would naturally be if they hadn't burnt billions of tons of fossil fuels. Humans' impact of climate is dwarfed by natural effects, but that doesn't mean we can't affect the climate. You're employing a false dichotomy.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Another religious debate. /flee
No OS on the planet can protect itself from a user with the admin password. - Yvan256
Slashdot now reposts Daily Caller propaganda? It's almost the quality of the 'FBI confirms aliens' post recently. I like this comment in the Daily Caller article; I'm glad /. helps drive their page views, and can follow instructions:
Be sure to leave comments on any website that makes this claim, and link to this and the Asian Correspondent website.
The article is a bit absurd. It looks for the 50 million refugees in the Bahamas, St. Lucia, Seychelles, and Solomon Islands. Safe to say, if you look for 50 million carbon-based humans there, you won't find them.
What is a 'climate refugee' and how many are there? Does this disprove AGW or point to some evil conspiracy? It's surprising to see /. wasting space and its reputation on this nonsense.
Maybe /. will become News of the World for geeks: Sensation for nerds but stuff that doesn't matter.
Also not in the news is the fact that the sea level used to be a LOT higher than it is now and it used to be a LOT lower than it is now. Things change. That's life. None of it had anything to do with humans.
The planet has also been warmer and cooler in the past. When the planet was warmer there was more diversity of life, large swaths of land that are currently too cold for much bio-diversity were more useable by nature and man. When it got colder it was hell. Things change. Given my druthers I would take warmer, please.
With all of this angst over "Global Warming" people are missing the real issue: cut pollution.
Ad hominem is not useful in evaluating the article, and does nothing to address the veracity of it.
shhh being anti US is all the rage over here on /. you'll spoil our fun!
... but here in Vietnam we DO hear quite a bit about the rapid encroachment (and salinization) by the ocean into the Mekong delta. It is clear that with the ocean coming in (I seem to remember an encroachment figure of 1.4km/yr.) and that hundreds of thousands have already been displaced because they can no longer farm there. (This has driven the growth of the big cities which is where I live). The government is constantly projecting that millions more will move in the next few decades (This is from their Thanh Nhien News which is a pretty widely read paper, there's an English website you can visit).
Of course matters will soon be made even worse as upstream countries start damming the Mekong. (They may be doing so because the freshwater source in the Himalayas is losing its snowpack cover. This may also be due to climate change.)
Vietnam is supposedly one of the most susceptible countries to sea level rising but I can imagine things could be even worse in an even poorer (and closer to sea level) country like Bangladesh.
surely you can come up with some legitimate report of these 1.4km/year losses of property??? no???
you know I seem to recall hearing somewhere that the sky is actually orange
If yo would read what he posted and compare it what you post, you would see: you are wrong.
Average all over the world as you calculate, might be 16.5cm but at that particular place it is 1.5m
Do you get it? At that particular place that was very clearly written in the orignal post.
angel'o'sphere
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Perhaps it escaped your attention, but the bit you're quoting says nothing about the amount of refugees, it is rather an assesment on the areas that are at risk of producing refugees for whatever reason, including rising sea levels
Which was exactly wat the OP was pointing out.
Another data point for the hypothesis that climate denialism correlates with stupidity, I guess.
Mart
"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?
Science and religion aren't held to the same standard on /.
Religion is dismissed because "science is repeatable". Global warming can't stand up to the criticism they give other kinds of faith, but is regarded as not only science but the holy grail of science.
I really hope you're joking... otherwise, this is basically evil. It's okay to lie to the people, as long as it's supposedly in service of what you think is a greater good? This is exactly why so many smart people don't believe in AGW. People see that you're lying about this, and they start to wonder what else you're lying about.
Add up the lies and ridiculous hyperbole about what global warming is going to do, the blatant money-making schemes (see carbon credits), the political power-grabs by the same people who have been trying to grab more and more power for decades, the ad-homium attacks against the opposition, and the ineffective things that we're supposed to do to stop it, and it's no wonder that so many people think that it's all a giant scam.
I don't reply to ACs
Why are you under the impression that events that have happened regularly throughout history are suddenly "because" of human caused climate change when that hasn't been the case before?
How illogical.
It's sampling bias.
The same poppycock that results in people believing things like "deaths come in threes" or that there are a massively larger number of earthquakes worldwide versus how many there were before we had the ability to measure and detect them like we do today.
In that vein, it should be noted that (outside of highly unlikely corner cases of 1 meter rises in sea level causing a boat full of people going 'Dude, where's my island?' to wash up on your shores), it can be a bit tricky to identify the root cause of somebody's refugee status.
A reasonable percentage of Africa's ghastly little bush wars, for instance, are proximately about some goofy ethnic struggle or an ego clash between two psychotic strongmen; but the punchline generally boils down to the fact that the local subsistence agriculture/pastoralism hasn't actually been providing subsistence of late, which really stirs people up.
The assorted uprisings that a number of arab states are currently seeing are in the same boat. It isn't as though the populace just noticed that their leaders are brutal kleptocrats. A spike in food prices, though, has pushed them from feeling poor and downtrodden to feeling desperate and downtrodden.
Even if one wishes to leave macro-level climate out of the picture entirely, it isn't at all difficult to identify regions where high-intensity agriculture, and often shoddy practices, are converting farmland to desert or marginal scrub at a fair clip.
In short, the scientists were probably right, but the propagandaists were wrong.
And yet it's the propogandists that influence the minds of Hollywood celebrities and other high-profile people who then spout off on the subject and encourage people to vote one way or another on politicians that want to involve trillions of dollars on the subject, or use it as a vehicle by which to tax one group and give it to another group. That's the problem.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
If you had taken a quick look at the link you provided, you'd have seen this graph that shows how temperatures rise very quickly after an ice age and then slowly creep down over millennia.
If we are in an interglacial period, climate should be cooling, not warming.
I see about one degree per 10000 years on the upswing. Sustained over a century or more, one degree C per 25 years means it's 25/10025 = 0.25% caused by interglacial warming and 99.75% something else. Or, rounded to the nearest integer, 0% and 100% respectively. Clearly, finding out what this 'something else' is rather than pretend it doesn't exist would seem to be prudent.
Close. The right starting and ending letters...different middle, "pula".
po----tion
Cut po-pula-tion.
Nothing we do will matter if we don't stop incenting new babies and let the population naturally fall to 3 billion (even 2 billion- the planet would be a paradise with 2 billion).
If you don't take these measures now- you STILL have take them when we hit 9 billion (10 billion... 11 billion) and life will be a lot more miserable then with dead fisheries, high cellulose fruits and vegetables and no meat except for the wealthy.
We can fix most of these problems in one generation.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
People like you getting modded insightful are why I avoid Slashdot these days. The "hockey stick" talking point has been debunked so many times, including on this site, that all I can do is roll my eyes when people bring it up. The lack of trust that computer professionals have on this site for climate scientists' conclusions boggles the mind.
The world was always coming to an end, the Apocalypse was just around the corner, you were a sinner, you needed to change your ways, but buy some indulgences and we'll let you off the hook. Hurry, sign here, The End is Near.
Nowadays, The Roman Catholic Church is out of the Apocalypse & Indulgences business, so the Church of Global Warming has risen to fill the void. Same threats and labels (replace "heretic" with "denier"), same hucksterism (replace "indulgences" with "carbon credits"), same promotion of despair-in-the-face-of-overwhelming-forces (replace "God" with "Science!!"), same hypocrisy by the movement's leaders (replace the avarice and power abuse of various archbishops and cardinals with the jet-set lifestyle of Al Gore and his rockstar acolytes).
Sorry, Ye Faithful, I don't need to be a student of "climatology" to know how this ends. I'm already a student of history, and we've been through this all before...
Stop whining about me lighting your house on fire. Houses have burned before in this area and houses will burn again. None of it had anything to do with humans. Sure I poured gasoline on all the bushes around your house and threw a match into the mix... but it's not like "a burning bush" is a new phenomenon--we even have documentation of this in biblical times. Relax!
So? What do you think happens when the debate moves to pollution? The same people whining about how global warming can't be real because climate has changed in the path here start whining about how pollution isn't really that bad and poor manufacturers shouldn't be forced by the statists to spend 3% of their revenues on pollution control technology because that will usher in a permanent economic depression. This same debate will be played out, only talking about dioxins instead of CO2.