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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."
... 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.
To really understand this, you have to look at the claim. Let's look at what the UN actually said:
there are now about 19.2 million people officially recognized as "persons of concern"-that is, people likely to be displaced because of environmental disasters. This figure is predicted to grow to about 50 million by the end of the year 2010.
Note that the number is not environmental refugees, but actually persons of concern. There is a huge difference between the two, and the second is probably not inaccurate.
Now, on the website in question, UNEP said this
Fifty million climate refugees by 2010
This is obviously not what the original researchers were claiming. Who knows why UNEP put that on their website, but it is most likely an error of their PR agency, not of their science. In short, the scientists were probably right, but the propagandaists were wrong.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Can someone provide some links regarding those organizations? ... that is a complete nonsense claim. (Considering that we don't even know by what ice ages are caused ...)
I learned 1975 that we likely run into a global warming, and I never heard about anyone proclaiming an approaching ice age. After all the next ice age is due in 35k years and not in the next 100
angel'o'sphere
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Well, the news says it is the worst weather (and the highest count of tornados) since 50 years.
If it bleeds it leads. This is sensationalist news, nothing more, nothing less. And highest count in 50 years? Well in the US they only have about 50 years worth of tornado tracking that's considered reliable in most places, and some of those are only reliable to 1970, but tornado numbers have been far higher. Hell where I live the 'accurate temperature and tornado count' is only goes back to about 1973.
Om, nomnomnom...
I'd say you are an order of magnitude off of "paradise" - we need to get to around 250 million if we want "sustainable".
Even trying to cut the population in half (more than half, really) would require nearly preventing all births for 10-20 years. Sure, it is possible but it is entirely possible that you would wreck the motivation people have for having children completely. If you push too hard on this there is the possiblity that people will just give up.
This is a factor that some of the more radical environmentalists refuse to accept - that if you push hard enough the result will be that people will just give up entirely. All it takes is about 15 years of zero birthrate and you're not going to get it back, ever. Absolutely it is hard to disincent the drive to reproduce - but if you succeed the result could be catastrophic.
How hard would you have to push? Well, in the US and Western Europe today the population growth is negative. Many people feel that it isn't fair to bring children into a world of declining expectations and looming destruction of the environment. Mostly this is among educated young people. In the US we are left with immigration as the only population growth factor there is and I suspect Western Europe is pretty much the same way. This portends some very drastic changes in the coming decades as the population shifts away from educated European-extracted peoples and towards Latin American folks that have been subsistance farming for generations and no goals higher than survival. In most inner cities today the idea of the straight-A student is a subject of ridicule, as is the idea of going to college - what, do you want to be seen as trying to prove yourself better than your peers?