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."

Comments

Re:So, where is the google cache link?

[ArcherB]

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!

Scientific American throws in the towel

[jollyreaper]

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.

Re:Scientific American throws in the towel

[jmac_the_man]

So wait. As I understand it, the problem with Intelligent Design is that it's not falsifiable, right? There's no way to set up an experiment with observable results to disprove the statement, "A supernatural Creator created mankind." That's the problem, right?

By contrast, a subset of modern evolutionary theory states that "Dinosaurs became extinct roughly 65 million years before the first humans." This is falsifiable. Lets say an archeological team discovered a fossilized brontosaurus near a pyramid site in Egypt. Let's also say the brontosaurus had a block shaped like it was used in constructing the pyramids strapped to its head. Let's further say that the brontosaurus was found in the same soil layer that you'd expect other ancient Egyptian artifacts to be found in. And then lets say they found another brontosaurus near the Mayan pyramids. And one near the Great Wall of China. Eventually, science would come to the conclusion that humans and dinosaurs coexisted. (The fact that no one has been able to do this points to the strength of the original theory.)

The statements "Man is causing Global Warming" and "Man is not causing Global Warming," by contrast, are both falsifiable. A lot of the "Man is causing Global Warming" science is hard to falsify, but that's because the people doing that research are hiding their original numbers and only using massaged data to "hide the decline" in the amount of Global Warming taking place. For once, a scientist put out an easily falsified Global Warming theory, that is "By 2010, there would be 50 million climate refugees, and they'd come from these specific places." 2010 has come and gone, and there aren't 50 million climate refugees. Therefore, his falsifiable statement has been proven false.

The correct scientific thing to do is to discard his prediction and move on. Moving on means making changes to similar predictions that are based on the same data, or directly on his prediction. It means giving up whatever money was set aside to deal with the climate refugees. It means maybe next time, listening to the people who say that there won't be 50 million climate refugees in the next five years.

It doesn't mean mocking the people who disagreed with the original prediction for something that has nothing to do with what they said or did. A challenge to a theory isn't "an attack on science," but refusing to let go of an idea that has clearly been proven false is.

Re:United Nations University, Not the UN

[FrootLoops]

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!

Re:United Nations University, Not the UN

[bunratty]

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.

Re:United Nations University, Not the UN

[bunratty]

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.

Re:What it really comes down is...

[bunratty]

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.

Re:Original paper is NOT about global warming

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

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.

Re:United Nations University, Not the UN

[Maxo-Texas]

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.

Re:Anthony Watts is a known shill

[sonicmerlin]

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.