The headline this morning was stunning.
Greece's coast guard picked up nearly 2,500 migrants from the sea in dozens of search and rescue operations, part of a relentless flow of people seeking the safety of Europe after facing war and poverty in the Middle East, Africa and Asia.
This followed hard on the heels of horrifying news at the end of last week – 71 people found dead in the back of a refrigerated truck in Austria, also refuges. And, as the Washington Post notes, as refuges crises “shock Europe,” a “bigger crisis looms” in the Middle East. I look at the refugee crisis unfolding before our eyes (away over there in Yurp and other furrin parts, nowhere near ‘Murica, nudge nudge, wink wink) and I gape in wonder at a vision of the future. Of the climate change driven future. Something essential about climate change that most conversations about it fail to adequately convey is just how inescapable one’s local climate is. Climate varies over the face of the globe, obviously. Some people are (IMHO) lucky enough to be freezing their nads off in Iceland, while others live in Miami Florida (hot and wet), or Hyderabad Telangana (tropical wet and dry), or Chelan Washington (probably on fire at the moment). But what’s the same for 99% of people, no matter the climate, is this: wherever you are, that’s where you’re stuck. Whatever your climate locally, if you don’t have lots of freedom and enough money, then without the heroic determination it takes to flee, you have to deal with it. It seems like a such a simple premise, but it’s the meat of the matter. Your local climate influences everything – from food prices and heating or cooling costs, to civil unrest and insecurity, to devastating wild weather – including floods and drought and terrible storms. And if it becomes unbearable or uninhabitable where you live, and you can’t change things back, then what do you do? What happens then? There's more "fun" below the fold.
In Telangana, India, this summer, almost 600 people died, victims of a deadly heat wave that made news the world over. In all, over 2,300 people perished from the heat in India. They were stuck. Stuck outside in the sweltering heat with no shade or water, doing day labor. Stuck being old and infirm and more vulnerable to dehydration and exhaustion. Stuck being delicate little kids in a heatwave that brought temperatures of over 113 degrees Fahrenheit – which was just the temperature, not the heat index. There is no reason to suppose that the coming summers will be anything but the same, if not worse. Yes, next summer may be cooler, because that’s how these things work. We get a jagged upward trend line – always going higher in the end, but juddering up and down year-to-year. But remember that the ten hottest years globally have all happened since 1998. And climate scientists are predicting that 2015 will be the hottest year ever recorded “by a mile.” What do you do when the pavement melts? What do you do when your town’s power grid fails, and the lights go out? What do you do when your neighborhood burns down? What do you do when your subdivision floods? What do you do when your city is drowned by a hurricane? What do you do when food shortages cause wide-spread civil unrest, and there’s shooting in the streets? What a lot of people in far off countries are going to do is summon the heroic determination to flee. The Syrian refugees of right this minute may not be climate change refugees. But there will be climate change refugees soon. Environmental migrants will not all stay within their own countries, either. The terrified white GOP members who are clamoring for a Donald J. Trump presidency with a central platform of deporting “illegal” brown people from America should be tuned in to this, but of course they’re not. They likely agree with Governor Bobby Jindal, who wrote a letter to President Obama asking him to lay off the climate change argle bargle whilst in New Orleans to commemorate the 10 year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. (Which, BTW and alas, it seems the President mostly did.) Wrote biology major Jindal:
While you and others may be of the opinion that we can legislate away hurricanes with higher taxes, business regulations and EPA power grabs, that is not a view shared by many Louisianans. I would ask you to respect this important time of remembrance by not inserting the divisive political agenda of liberal environmental activism.
Those on the right are wrong. But those on the left are also often guilty of not putting climate change in the proper perspective. The far-off refugee crisis in Europe isn’t going away. It’s going to get worse. And it’s going to come here. Environmental migrants are going to arrive on our shores. But in addition, many of us will likely become climate change refugees as well! After all, isn’t that really what you are now, if you are moving to live with your sister-in-law in Minnesota because your house in Sterling, Alaska was burned to the ground in the Card Street fire? And isn’t that what you are now if you still haven’t been able to move back to New Orleans in the 10 years since the storm washed away your home? So we look at the stories and we are shocked by the desperation. We’re shaken by the horror of the situations that are forcing people to flee their homes en masse in search of a better life elsewhere. We marvel at the strength and determination of folks who have no better option than to grab their in-laws and their kids and flee into the night to meet some guy their cousin told them about who will lead them to a smuggler who can get them passage on a ferry – maybe –that might get them to Greece, or France, or the UK. But what we are crucially missing is that, at a deeper level, we are all stuck. Like the folks in the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans were stuck when the storm blew in and the levees failed. Like the people who are battling back wildfires are stuck. Like the farmers who are desperately trying to figure out how to cope with the drought in California are stuck. We are all stuck here, together, on Planet Earth. The terrified, panicked, helter-skelter migrations we are beginning to see will be, in the final analysis, doomed. When the seas rise by three feet, and the global temperature soars by more than 4 degrees Celsius – which it is on track to do if something isn’t done NOW – we will be stuck. When there is nowhere else to move – when no place is better than another – then even as more and more of us flee into the night, headed someplace “better,” we will be stuck. Our "local" climate is the climate of EARTH.
And if it becomes unbearable or uninhabitable where you live, and you can’t change things back, then what do you do? What happens then?
What does happen then? I hope I will not be alive to see it, but if we as a species don’t get our act together soon, that terrifying, nowhere to run, nowhere to hide future is exactly where we’re headed. Gawd help us, one and all.