Slashdot Mirror
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."
Did Slashdot become Fox News? Deniers on my Slashdot?
This article clearly demonstrates what's wrong with America's science reporting. If the UN had released a report claiming 50 million global warming refugees by 2010, there would be dozens of news articles on it. The supposed incriminating evidence is a Google Cache page with this map that doesn't itself say anything about refugees, but does highlight areas most susceptible to sea level rise. The "50 million climate refugees by 2010" statement is not referenced anywhere in any UN report, it's a six words on one defunct graphic that was part of a larger report on world agriculture by the UN University. This 50 million by 2010 figure comes from Dr. Bogardi at the UN University in Bonn, NOT the United Nations.
The problem with this prediction being made by any scientist is that keeping track of how many refugees there are is difficult (current estimate by the UN is 1 million a year, a figure that the Red Cross lends support to with the statement that environmental disasters are displacing more people than war now) and the causes are debatable. The epic flooding in Pakistan created 10 million refugees, Hurricane Katrina added a quarter of a million refugees, and desertification in Africa is displacing millions. Can we blame these events on Global Warming? Hurricanes and floods happen without a warming world, but a warming world increases the chances of such disasters happening.
Then there are the refugees that no one realizes. In the small coastal town where I live in North Carolina, houses have been falling into the swamp one by one for decades, but the residents blame it on people building their homes in flood zones, not realizing that sea levels in their state have risen three times the rate of rise on the rest of the Atlantic coast. People didn't build their homes in the water, the water rose 1.5 meters over the 50 years since they were built, but nobody realizes this because of landscape amnesia.
You can read all about the various estimates concerning environmental refugees on Wikipedia. It took the author of this untruth less than an hour to post their nonsense and the deniers flooded the Internet with it quickly. It took me two hours to research and write this response, because I wanted to know what I was talking about, and I will only reach a very small audience in comparison. This is why I despair when considering how science could possibly stand a chance against the overwhelming confidence ignorance brings the unscientific masses.
i ~ Celebrating Science, Cyberspace, Speculation
Well, obviously they fled through time to 2020. :-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Shouldn't we be happy that it didn't happen.. instead of gloating about it?
did you forget to take your meds?
Couldn't be that this was all political BS to get more and more money lining the pockets of one political party and their cronies in deference to the other?
Nahhhhhh, people wouldn't be that THAT stupid.
As long as they keep pushing this date out by 10 years we'll be able to solve the problem with cold fusion.
It's the only logical explanation.
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)
Are brought to you by the coal and oil industry. Read about climate at http://www.skepticalscience.com/
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?
There are many refugees in the world. Some of them have moved because of economic conditions (which may be caused by climate change) or civil wars (which may be also influenced by weather - remember that one of the causes of the French revolution was the bad weather caused by an Icelandic volcano eruption (the year without a summer.
And nobody knows how many illegals there are in the USA...
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
Not scary that the predictions are wrong, but that populations in those locations are increasing. We'd better hope these climate change predictions continue being very, very wrong.
The author of that propaganda piece is a known shill of whatever industry pays him.
Here's a video that he tried to take down unsuccessfully.
What do you think the people classified in 'migrant worker' category in increasing numbers are ? famine, plague, drought, are causing people to relocate and seek work.
Read radical news here
If people move to Siberia or North Dakota for that matter due to moderating winter weather are they considered refugees?
uhm...
Well, yeah Miami and Phoenix fill up every Octember and empty every Mapril. No news there.
I unnerstand Palm Springs is nice if you like naked bacon.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
Anyone know if the regions in China on the map that show droughts are the same places experiencing droughts now?
The earth is insanely unpredictable. Any belief that what we do to the planet is the only thing that affects weather and climate is extremely naive. Has the Earth experieced warming in recent decades? Yes it has. Is Man the ONLY reason this is happening. I really really doubt that. This planet has gone from ice ball, to tropical over a number of periods in the 4 billion years the Earth has been around.
Sensationalizing things in the hopes of getting donations for your cause so you can keep getting a paycheck in not the answer.
When people ask me what to do about Global Warming I tell to plant to some trees, since they scrub a lot of CO2 and to pray the Yellowstone Super-volcano doesn't blow up any time soon.
I think the planet will take out our species out long before we can do it ourselves with global warming.
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.
... 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.
xkcd
I think they would only care that many members of the public don't know about google cache.
Warning: The Surgeon General Has Determined that Sigs are Dangerous to Your Health
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.
The planting season has already been delayed one month here. And we still have snow on the ground in April. Snowed yesterday matter of fact. And yet polar bears north of here are supposed to be drowning due to ice melting. Time to move to the north pole where its warm and the ice melts because it sure as hell is not melting south of the arctic circle.
The farthest north settlement in Canada has a terrific climate people are wearing bikini's there and winter coats several hundred miles further south weird. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CFS_Alert
It seems more than a little illogical to state that sea levels rise higher in one Atlantic coast state than the others
Not illogical, only it takes some analysis to understand.
What happens is that the global warming is causing the ocean water to become less dense, both by dilution by melted ice and by thermal expansion from the increased temperature.
The surface of the ocean is approximately an ellipsoid whose exact shape depend on a number of factors. When the surface rises due to the increase in water volume this rise is slightly different from place to place. At the latitude of North Carolina this increase happens to be more than in other places.
http://thewatchers.adorraeli.com/2011/04/15/us-farmers-threaten-by-worst-drought-since-1930s/
http://thewatchers.adorraeli.com/2011/04/15/cuba-is-dealing-with-the-worst-drought-in-50-years/
http://thewatchers.adorraeli.com/2011/04/17/hailstorms-damage-crops-across-states-in-india/
http://thewatchers.adorraeli.com/2011/04/15/dozens-tornadoes-rip-through-u-s-southwest/
http://thewatchers.adorraeli.com/2011/04/15/cuba-is-dealing-with-the-worst-drought-in-50-years/
http://thewatchers.adorraeli.com/2011/04/16/air-pollution-worries-iran-as-sandstorms-wreak-havoc/
Read radical news here
We really don't need any UN-bashing here. Slashdot is usually very good about this, I don't know how this story got through the editing process. Look, it's an inconvenient truth, one which should be quietly ignored. All they were trying to do was alarm people and get them to stand up and take notice, so we could do something about global warming. The fact that the prediction didn't exactly turn out the exact way it was said is immaterial. What's important is that we make progress on climate change legislation. Let's all remember in 2005, Kyoto wasn't a dead deal and there was a lot of room to influence the process in a positive direction.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
The author of that propaganda piece is a known shill of whatever industry pays him.
Here's a video that he tried to take down unsuccessfully.
that's nice but I don't care about that I would like to know why the UN said this in the first place if they knew that there weren't going to be climate refugees. I mean seriously, if it were coming true real estate would have fallen apart in those areas, which is wasn't. So it seems clear the UN had an agenda which they are now failing to hide and cover up.
looks like that was an april fools joke
If you take a look at the map in your link, you'll find it signed "Emanuelle Bournay - Oktober 2007".
The allegation is that UN predicted in 2005 that there would be 50 million climate refugees. Nowhere in that map one sees mention of how many refugees there would be, it just shows the regions more likely to be affected by global warming.
unproving their deaths should be simple as their lives were never proven to have even begun yet, except on the deleted colorrmap.
we're all (pardoning the chosen ones, eugenetics, wearons peddlers etc.) refugees, particularly now what's really becoming clear, is that we still have somewhere to be alive, until all the efficiently scheduled dying stops. if we get blown away with the 500million unproven climate charge carcasses, that shouldn't upset the apple cart, or us, as most of us were never chosen to be/stay alive, like our neogod leaders are, no matter what fauxking murderous madness they force us into, we still worship them almost as much as they worship themselves, & our resources, which we give freely onto them, as it was written, by them.
it's a simple word. no
the UN had an agenda
To its initial goals of safeguarding peace, protecting human rights, establishing the framework for international justice and promoting economic and social progress, in the six and a half decades since its creation the United Nations has added on new challenges, such as climate change, international terrorism and AIDS. While conflict resolution and peacekeeping continue to be among its most visible efforts, the UN, along with its specialized agencies, is also engaged in a wide array of activities to improve peopleâ(TM)s lives around the world â" from disaster relief, through education and advancement of women, to peaceful uses of atomic energy.
They would like to know in advance where they will be needed.
P.S. seriously, /., another site redesign and you still can't parse apostrophes and hyphens? Encode everything in UTF-8 already, jeez!
You can't take the sky from me...
Their arrival has been delayed by bad weather.
babys, puppy dogs, oxen etc... god was nowhere in sight, & the survivors are sick & starving yet today. still unproven, therefore uncountdead. no wonder the map needed editing? what about the georgia stone? being moved (inland) to utah we hear. the freemormons?
it's all in the teepeeleaks etchings, as it's all happened before, & even before that. disarm? not yet?
Why is this categorized as politics?
There are plenty of people around the world who would prefer to be refugees than be in their current situation, but they are held back by economic factors. You can't claim refugee status while you are still in your birth country, and you can't leave your country if you don't have the financial means to leave. There are plenty of areas where climate shift has had detrimental effects on peoples' ways of life, but some of those same places are under other circumstances of economic repression at the same time, making it impossible for the people who live their to actually leave and become refugees somewhere else.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I would like to know why the UN said this in the first place
Is there any evidence that the UN made this prediction at all?
From TFA to the original paper there is a huge difference. For instance, TFA cites population growth in islands like Bahamas, St. Lucia, and Seychelles, which were never mentioned in the paper.
What Dr. Myers actually said is that there were 25 million refugees in 1995 fleeing disasters caused by desertification and global warming and that number could double in ten years. This seems a perfectly reasonable claim, if one wants to discuss it the best way would be to get hold of Dr. Myers method for counting refugees and defining which ones are "environmental" and see if that prediction became true.
Now, instead of doing this, TFA says the UN has "removed" a page that they, so much smarter than the UN that they are, recovered from Google cache. Then they invent a lot of false data, but they never realized that the actual paper is readily found by googling so their lies are easily debunked.
Then why were the pages on the UNEP website? The UNEP is part of the UN (yes, that's United Nations). It is not relevant whether or not UN University or United Nations came up with the data - it was published on the UNEP site, and is now gone.
This post is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
The sea level does not rise 1.5 meters in one place and 16.5 centimeters in another place. Are you imagining that there is a bulge in the water?
If a tide gauge says the water here is 1.5 meters higher than it was a century ago, it is a safe bet that the land under the tide gauge has subsided or someone screwed up.
With so many people posting their own version of facts, it helps knowing the past history of such people, so that you can disregard their claims. What made me google for this Anthony Watts was the claims he made that the UN had predicted 50 million refugees coming from Bahamas (population 330000), St. Lucia (population 173765), and Seychelles (population 84000).
With numbers like these, something looks wrong. So I googled for the original study to find out what it said. it was no surprise that neither Bahamas, Seychelles, or St. Lucia were mentioned there.
What it says is that there are million of refugees coming from regions affected by desertification and that number is increasing.
And you know what's the funny thing about all this? If you take the trouble to actually read the paper Dr. Norman Myers wrote, you will notice that he does not mention global warming at all. What he calls "environmental refugees" are, in his own words, "people who can no longer gain a secure livelihood in their homelands because of drought, soil erosion, desertification, deforestation and other environmental problems, together with associated problems of population pressures and profound poverty. In their desperation, these people feel they have no alternative but to seek sanctuary elsewhere, however hazardous the attempt."
In their haste to deny global warming, people like Anthony Watts do not even try to find out who they should write against...
You want to know why people don't give a shit about climate change (or believe it's happening at all)? This is it. For the past 20+ years all they hear is this ridiculous, end-of-the-world hyperbole and none of it ever comes true. The ice caps didn't completely melt. Florida is not under water. Nobody on the coast had to sell their condo. People still live on the equator. It still snows in basically the same places it always had. This is the same exaggerated bullshit people tried to convince me of in 1991. Back then they were certain it'd happen by the year 2000.
The ICCC has published scientific results and is updating them when they find something wrong in them. That is not supposed to be shocking. There has been some errors in the evaluation of sea rise levels in older ICCC reports. Now they are a lot less catastrophic.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
The clue is in the title: "Scientific American"... it is a journal that believes the scientific method is the best method to use when trying to interpret information.
I guess if you prefer another methodology for resolving diverging points of view, interpreting data or explaining unknown phenomena you need to choose another journal? Something with a title like "Politics weekly" "Sociological review" "Religious opinions" or so forth?
Whether or not the scientific method is the best method to resolve all debates is another issue... but I think it's a fair guess that "Scientific American" probably thinks it's the methodology it will use to approach problems. Probably an American bias there as well I should imagine ;-)
This sort of thing could get you arrested as a denialist.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Don't hurry love.
If we can disregard any research or claims that are funded by the coal and oil industry, because their backers have a stake in things, can that go the other way? Can we disregard any research funded by a green group, or someone with carbon credit stakes? Both stand to gain from pushing anthropomorphic global warming (yes green groups stand to gain, more money, more influence, more of their agendas get implemented). How about stuff financed by the UN? They have a stake in it too as it would give them more control, something they very much want.
Just saying that the whole "Attacking the funding," thing cuts both ways. You cannot act as though one side is pure and noble and the other is evil and corrupt. Rare is that the case with humans. Both sides have humans with agendas on them.
Finally if you are going to go after someone for their funding source, you should go and provide some evidence. If he's funded by big energy, provide a citation.
A place that talks about Planet X (http://thewatchers.adorraeli.com/2011/02/20/what-about-march-152011/) and a "miracle radiation antidote" (http://thewatchers.adorraeli.com/2011/03/17/dmso-the-antidote-for-radiation-poisoning/). Ya that for sure is where I'm going for quality news.
It's because many people's minds can't even grasp an issue that has 200 year-scale inertia.
"Oh, it didn't happen this year. See. They're lying." Comments like that just show the profound total
misunderstanding about the scale in space and time of these phenomena.
Read "Climate Wars" by Gwynne Dyer. He has a sobering discussion of the planning that conservative
organizations like the Pentagon are doing for global warming's effects. He also discusses how the real recent
data is worse than the worst-case projections of IPCC.
Gwynne's got a brain the size of a planet so he's actually capable of thinking rationally about these issues
and you should probably believe some of what he says.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
www.climatedepot.com
Cue the moronic Slashdot "I saw it on TV so it MUST be true" crowd, leaping to the defence of their 'man made global warming' dogma.
Idiots.
People need to understand what a problem these kind of tactics are. The reason is that many of the "Ok for use with GW because it is so important," tactics are that of con men. For example requiring complete acceptance of the claims and shouting down anyone who questions it as a denier or an idiot, that's a favourite of con men. That's how they distract from their lack of evidence, it to attack anyone who dares question their claims.
Another favourite is claiming consensus. This one is used by the most common con men, advertisers, all the time. "4 out of 5 doctors agree," "Trusted by more people," and so on. They try to sell you on the idea that since most people agree with a stance, it must be right. Of course Feynman pointed out that is bunk, since most people aren't that good. Having a lot of opinions one way or another doesn't matter.
Yet another is a position of authority sort of thing. Something along the lines of "You can't question this because you don't understand how it all works. You have to be a highly trained expert to understand it, which I am and you are not, so you need to take my word for it." They just brush off bothering to explain anything by claiming that you can't understand it anyhow, it is a mystery that your mind cannot penetrate, so just take their word on it.
They also love to have claims where no matter what happens, it supports their position. X happens, they claim "This is clear evidence of what I said." Then the opposite of X happens, they claim "This is again clear evidence of what I said." They are able to tell a story to explain how anything fits their claims. They don't revise their claims based on new evidence, they shoe-horn the evidence in to showing how it supports their claims.
Well you'll notice that these things are common with con men, and if you want a great example look no far than most religious evangelicals. However you'll also notice a lot of this goes on the the global warming debate. Now that doesn't mean that the people involved are con men necessarily, however it really gives many people pause. Why are you acting like con men if you aren't trying to con people?
I know why the religious types do it: They have a preordained conclusion, that being whatever they take their holy book to claim, that they want to be true. They then do what it takes to try and support that. They aren't looking at evidence to reach a conclusion, they are trying to force evidence to support their conclusion, ignoring or shouting down that which doesn't, and getting mad at anyone who questions them because they have no real support.
Fine, but why then do AGW types do this, if their position is one on science, on fact? It gives many cause to wonder.
Whats up with the America hate on Slashdot? Bigotry is still bigotry even when the mob approves of it. Clearly, you are no better than Americans.
Uh, the point is that none of the areas of concern has experienced a population loss or generated any refugees. So it's not at all stupid to point out the report is suspect.
UN Climate Refugees + UN IPCC + ClimateGate + UN WHO Pandemic Scare (no pandemic) = Fraud.
"What Happened To the Climate Refugees?" Easy, they disappeared to the same place as all the "I'm going to go John Galt" Republicans complaining about socialism (even though taxes on the rich are much lower than they were through most of the Cold War).
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...
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.
Are you aware that the warmest parts of the globe are deserts?
Ice ages might be bad for biodiversity in the Northern latitudes, but our main problem today is desertification and global warming only makes it worse.
We don't always see things happening slowly around us. For example the population of South Florida is always growing. Who is to say that the recent weather patterns are not causing people to avoid moving here? I would think that a lot of people would have great fear of moving to New Orleans as well.
In essence we are only on the leading edge of this catastrophe. I'm certain we will see populations shifting about soon enough.
I see a page cache from grida.no, which is not the fucking UN. The UN is not in Norway. In fact, going to grida.no clearly says ' Established in 1989 by the Government of Norway as a Norwegian Foundation'. They just collaborate with the United Nations Environment Programme.
On that page, I literally see this text: 'Fifty million climate refugees by 2010. Today we find a world of asymmetric development, unsustainable natural resource use, and continued rural and urban poverty. There is general agreement about the current global environmental and development crisis. It is also known that the consequences of these global changes have the most devastating impacts on the poorest, who historically have had limited entitlements and opportunities for growth.'
Yes, that does say 'Fifty million climate refugees by 2010.'...in no context whatsoever.
So, in short, we've got something not produced by the UN, on a non-UN page, that says as some sort of image subtitle, 'Fifty million climate refugees by 2010.'
Yeah, boy, the 'UN' sure got that one wrong, didn't they?
Hilariously, if you follow the links, they talk about how the island that the 'UN' said would have problems now have more people on them, which is a) not actually disproving anything about people fleeing them, just that people are being born faster, and, BTW, you can be a climate refugee, have your house destroyed, and still being the county, duh, and b) appear to have a total of one or two million people, so it would seem rather insane for anyone to predict that 50 million people would leave them.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
You'd know that there *are* millions of climate refugees.
Start here or here or here ("12 out of 13 'flash' appeals in 2007 related to weather"). Here's 3/4 of a million soon to be refugees in just ONE island nation (now go add up the rest).
Pretty nice writing that snide and ignorant summary from your comfortable suburban basement, wasn't it?
you had me at #!
What a smug, clueless jerk-off he must be. Europe can do without this type that thrives in North America.
you had me at #!
We're talking about the rise in sea level, not the bulge at the equator.
There are not two places on the Atlantic coast where the difference in the mean sea level has changed by 1.5 meters.
Just completely sad and disgusting.
Your reference to 3/4 million turns out to be less than half that, and the period of the problem is predicted to 100 years, which hardly amounts to "soon to be refugees".
Most book stores have "reading comprehension" self-help guides. Buy one.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Climate change or not I'd be more concerened that the population of places that clearly can't handle large populations like the Bahamas have gone up by 50k+. Glorified sand bars weren't meant to support that many people.
Still, pointing at population increase in places like major Chinese cities proves pretty much nothing except this one report was wrong about timelines. Population can swarm into a place faster than the rate of global change. One is like a rushing herd, the other is a creeping glacier. It isn't a matter of if they will arrive but when.
They took down the site not because of some "cover up" (nice conspiracy theory crap there) but probably because they realized it was wrong. Exaggerating climate change like that doesn't do real climate science any favors. No more than the total denial people do us any favors.
There are no climate refugees because this Climate Change doomsaying is bullshit.
The scale of the change we're talking about is 1.5 degrees over 150 or more years.
We first have to assume that the climate is changing. Second we have to assume that humans are the cause. Third we have to assume that humans can reverse the change. Fourth, we have to assume that the change will have a negative impact on the organisms of the planet.
Only the first one of them is even possibly the case.
When someone tells you that there's no time for you to check for yourself and that you must listen to them, they're bullshitting you.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
50 Million Environmental Refugees By 2020, Experts Predict
So, I guess they just moved the goal post, but that same nice round 50 million number. Seriously, they must be just pulling these numbers out of thin air?
The Earth gets something like 10000X times more energy every day than we use that day in our civlization.
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/09/surface-area-required-to-power-the-whole-world-with-solar-power-wind.php
So what is the problem you are so worried about? There is room for quadrillions of people living in space habitats in the solar system, too. Why be such a doomster? Renewable energy is now close to the price of fossil fuels, but without the environmental costs (where fossil fuel companies privatize short-term profits and socialize long-term costs). We mainly have social problems, not technical ones. See also:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ultimate_Resource
Have you really studied the technical possiblities for making the world work for everyone, and further, making the solar system work for quadrillions of people? We do have some big problems, but we have billions of people to help solve them. It's problematical to on the one hand say humans are a geological force and then on the other to deny that such a powerful force could be used to some benefit if we had the social will to do so. Thin film solar, wind generators, moving away from meat consumption, grinding up rocks for fertilizer, and maybe even cold fusion, are all parts of the solutions.
http://remineralize.org/
http://www.nanosolar.com/company/blog#177
http://pesn.com/2011/01/17/9501746_Focardi-Rossi_10_kW_cold_fusion_prepping_for_market/
It is people who have used their creativity to come up with those sorts of ideas...
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Thanks for this comment. I see that there are lots of critiques of the answer which are also valuable and interesting. What surprised me most is that for most /. posting all I see is a lot of jokes. Pus it probably took quite a while to formulate this response.
I used to read /. comments for the insightful responses that people made to questions and articles. But for quite a while all I see are jokes. At least for the top rated articles. Did they do something to the karma system? Perhaps stop giving karma to people who make jokes?
I was lucky enough to see this before the link was taken down. Here is what i found.
On the map it says "Climate refugees will mainly come from developing countries, where the effect of climate changes comes on top of poverty and war." Not a word about rising flood waters making people move. Instead it two links to the sources that gave them data for the maps.
One was: Norman Myers, 'Environmental refugees, An emergent security issue', 13. Economic forum, Prague, OSCE, May 2005;
That begins: 'There is a new phenomenon in the global arena: environmental refugees. These are people who can no longer gain a secure livelihood in their homelands because of drought, soil erosion, desertification, deforestation and other environmental problems, together with associated problems of population pressures and profound poverty'
The other was: Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, 2005 ; Liser, 2007. That lead me to this page, http://www.maweb.org/en/index.aspx
Again no flooding.
So what Gavin Atkins did was take something that was not said. And made some random population samples to prove something that was not said is not true.
And now the internet is a buzz. Another nail in the global warming coffin. Science is defeated by mis-direction and lies. YAY! team.
I find it ironic that a site that pretends to be pro-science would post an anti-science page without even checking the facts.
Maybe not 50 million, but definitely more than in 2005... http://www.suncomeup.com/
If you weren't so arrogant and stupid you would've realised these 4-6 year old articles are all based on the inaccurate report the summary talks about.
We have absolutely no way to verify that Pakistan or Aussie floods have anything to do with climate change - keep in mind that pro-AGW camp repeatedly tell us local weather patterns are no indication of anything, or is that only when it doesn't help their argument?
As for the Maldives - they've not needed to evacuate yet have they? This is in fact the exact point the article is making. Sure they may well need to some time in the near future - though many islands are finding that the sea level rise is slow enough that the coral supporting the island is able to grow with the sea levels - but they haven't needed to yet. Despite the dire predictions leveled by the world's media, we're not facing an inundation of ex-islanders running from the tides - as they said we would be by 2010....
This isn't evidence that the whole thing was a giant sham, or that we're all going to be fine - but it is damn fine proof that most of the predictions were fucking FUD! Little more than fear-mongering, specifically designed to stir folk into a frenzy of action. Whatever their (or your) reasons for thinking this was a good idea, it wasn't. Lying to the public is rarely a good idea, as when they find out you've done so, it's fucking near impossible to regain the same trust (at least for 4-5 years until they've had enough of the other parties lies... oh wait, wrong topic :s) - just look at the drug war: tell people that weed and ecstasy make them impotent and will kill them - yet when they see people merrily taking them with no such side effects, they happily ignore the real side-effects because the fake ones have been shown as FUD. No matter what real science is done in the mean time, the people don't have any reason to trust you anymore.
No, the sea is approximately level, so the rate that the sea level rises can't be higher in North Carolina than in other nearby states. The cited article compares to the rate of sea level rise at different times, not at different places.
It's not like most of them cared about it changing!
Climate Change. Bring it!
Your post was thoughtful, unlike TFA. The only thing you missed was the perfect opportunity to recommend that all Slashdot overlords, submitters, moderators, and participants equip themselves with the following ignorance reduction module (aka an excellent book):
Innumeracy - Mathematical Illiteracy Consequences by John Allen Paulos .
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
some *tiny* amount of warming -> more warming -> yet more warming -> even more warming
First, why exactly isn't it 500 degrees (or something like that) on the surface if every warming causes more warming ? Note what that skepticalscience page says :
more co2 -> warming
warming -> more co2
(and by now "natural" co2 release far, far outstrips human co2 release)
You must see that if that's true, then it's over. Since human co2 emissions are drops in an ocean compared to what oceans throw into the athmosphere as a reaction to warming. It may very well be true that humans caused the initial, tiny, temperature spike (but that would be the humans of ~ 1800-1850, and the real cause of present time global warming is a ridiculously small event), but everything else was a feedback loop that's unrolling until the oceans run out of co2 and we lowly humans just don't have the resources to prevent it from happening.
I mean, answer me this question : if there is a feedback loop, then we're doomed to let the warming run it's course, independant of how many economic sacrifices we make or don't make. Increasing human co2 output makes little difference. Decreasing it makes little difference (even a full stop of human co2 emissions - we all drop dead after stopping our car - would not stop the warming, or even mitigate it's effects by 1%).
So if people truly believe in the feedback loop theory of global warming (and without the feedback loop theory, you can't have AGW as far as I understand it), then why do these people support co2 limiting policies ? If there is a feedback loop between the athmosphere and the oceans that's warming up the planet, then limiting co2 output is like trying to rescussitate an Egyptian mummy : the ship has sailed.
Please, answer this if you can. It's very hard to get decent answers to questions like this.
If you calculate what reasonable energy levels would be using only renewable sources, and food using only organic farming without fertilizer and divide that by what it takes for a USian to be comfortable, you only get near 100 million, not even 250 million.
The problem with any number far below the current population size is that the only way to accomplish such a number is by killing. If you limit births, you depopulate medical centers, while creating a huge supply of care-needing older people. If you choose to populate the medical centers, that labor cannot be used for the actually productive parts of the economy, adding to the problem. The only way to get it down even a single billion humans, in a way that does not crash the world economy, is by killing a billion humans. That sucks ? Of course, but the alternatives suck more : if we do crash the world economy, we will probably lose more than a billion humans ...
As for efficiency improvements, that's worse than doing nothing : Jevon's paradox.
In reality the only viable option going forward, while losing oil, is converting our energy infrastructure to nuclear, and make sure we can electrically create food from water + co2 + trace elements. That *could* (in theory) work, and sustain 6 billion people, or even 100. But hey, you have fukushima and such idiocies like "natural food is healthier" (just ask anyone over 50 exactly how true that statement is), so politically, we're pretty much doomed to try the non-working things.
... but it is damn fine proof that most of the predictions were fucking FUD!
No, it's just proof that you and most people don't understand the time scales involved in those predictions. Many of them are coming true faster than the original predictions predicted.