The images were searing. The body of a drowned 3-year-old washing up on a Turkish beach. At least 200 more drowned when their boat sank off the coast of Libya. An abandoned truck in eastern Austria wherein 71 people suffocated, their bodies so badly decomposed in the heat that authorities at first couldn't tell how many there were. There have been similar images all year. According to the U.N. Refugee Agency, an estimated 300,000 people have fled across the Mediterranean this year, with at least 2,500 dying. Calais long has been a center of migrant camps, and this summer it became the source of nightly disruptions to the international Eurostar train service. In 12 months, 15 people from the camps died trying to sneak onto trains or lorries passing through the Channel Tunnel.
The political leadership has been sharply mixed. Hungary's openly bigoted Prime Minister Viktor Orbán is, not unexpectedly, inflammatory and cruel. Slovakia's government is little better. Britain's despicable Prime Minister David Cameron, who cut funds for Mediterranean search and rescue missions, first took a stand against admitting more refugees before relenting a little, agreeing to allow a relatively pathetic few. The big surprise has been Germany's Angela Merkel. Fresh off squeezing the life out of the Greek economy, she has been surprisingly compassionate and brave. The European people also have shown great nobility. From Vienna came one of the most beautiful images, when the riot police called out to monitor a 20,000 strong protest in support of the refugees respectfully removed their helmets as the procession passed. Munich greeted refugees with applause, sweets and toys. Its mayor acknowledged the difficulty of accepting 10,000 people in one weekend alone, but said his top priority wasn't to worry about the numbers, but to try to accommodate them and make them feel safe. The German media have been supportive of what they see as a transformative moment akin to reunification, and the German business community welcomes the economic opportunity. Sweden began granting residency to refugees from Syria two years ago, and Denmark this week temporarily closed both roads and train services, overwhelmed by the number of people trying to pass through to its welcoming neighbor.
No one can ignore the crisis anymore. Europe is scrambling to find answers, with refugee quotas to be distributed according to various nations' capacities. The world is watching. But the cause of the horror is largely being ignored. It's a classic case of treating the symptoms. People are fleeing wars and droughts in the Middle East and Africa, and even amidst the best of the best intentions, the source of the crisis is rarely part of the conversation. It will get worse. What's happening now in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa is only the beginning. It is a portent. And if the world's political and economic leaders don't awaken to that fact, they will remain unprepared as the crisis morphs into crises, and the entire world is overwhelmed.
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Of course, the immediate reaction to the refugee crisis has focused on the refugees themselves. That's how it should be. But when the world's leaders look for causes, they focus on wars—blaming and exacerbating endless wars. These wars profit no one but defense contractors, who are making a killing off the killing. Unprecedented levels of weapons sales are fueling the carnage. And amidst the ongoing crisis of people risking death by flight to avoid death by war, Britain's Cameron wants more bombing. The United States cashes in by selling more weapons to Saudi Arabia, which is worried about Iran. Russia sells more weapons to Iran, which is worried about Saudi Arabia. Germany, Britain, and France all reap the economic benefits of arming a region awash in arms and armed conflicts, and regimes remain in power by using their arms against their own people. Not only will none of this help solve the refugee crisis: It will only make the crisis worse.
Perhaps disaster relief for refugees is considered yet another form of public subsidy to private industry. Given that the wars keep getting worse, and the arms inevitably end up in the hands of the latest enemy, it's certainly not about national or international security. But even that's not the real story. It's only part of the real story, as are the refugees themselves. The real story is indeed about national security, but it is about the actual cause of the crisis. The arms sales are but a cash grab. The refugees are just a cost of doing business. The real story about national and international security is climate change. The 2006 Stern Review, which was the most comprehensive study ever undertaken to assess the economic consequences of climate change, estimated there would be some 200 million climate refugees by the middle of this century. That number now looks conservative.
In 2011, the
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported that climate change was "a major factor in more frequent Mediterranean droughts." By 2013, researchers were linking the drought in
Syria to its civil war. A year ago, the Emmy Award-winning documentary
Years Of Living Dangerously further fleshed out the link between climate change and the war in Syria, as well as growing violence over increasing water scarcity in Yemen. Last spring, a peer-reviewed scientific study
explicitly linked the Syrian war to climate change:
“It’s a pretty convincing climate fingerprint,” said Retired Navy Rear Adm. David Titley, a meteorologist who’s now a professor at Penn State University. After decades of poor water policy, “there was no resilience left in the system.” Titley says, given that context, that the record-setting drought caused Syria to “break catastrophically.” “It’s not to say you could predict ISIS out of that, but you just set everything up for something really bad to happen,” Titley told me in a phone interview. Given the new results, Titley says, “you can draw a very credible climate connection to this disaster we call ISIS right now.”
As the study's abstract explains:
There is evidence that the 2007−2010 drought contributed to the conflict in Syria. It was the worst drought in the instrumental record, causing widespread crop failure and a mass migration of farming families to urban centers. Century-long observed trends in precipitation, temperature, and sea-level pressure, supported by climate model results, strongly suggest that anthropogenic forcing has increased the probability of severe and persistent droughts in this region, and made the occurrence of a 3-year drought as severe as that of 2007−2010 2 to 3 times more likely than by natural variability alone. We conclude that human influences on the climate system are implicated in the current Syrian conflict.
And it's not just Syria. As Aryn Baker reports in Time:
Across the Middle East and Africa climate change, according to climatologists at the U.S. Department of Defense-funded Strauss Center project on Climate Change and African Political Stability in Texas, has already affected weather. These changes have contributed to more frequent natural disasters like flooding and drought. Agricultural land is turning to desert and heat waves are killing off crops and grazing animals.
So people are leaving their homes, carrying what they can, and seeking safety elsewhere. And it's not only in the Middle East and Africa. For years now, climate refugees have been fleeing rising sea levels in rural Bangladesh for the capital city of Dhaka. As Raveena Aulakh of the Toronto Star reported in 2013:
Dhaka is the fastest-growing megacity in the world; its population is about 17 million, up from 12 million in 2005 and six million in 1990. By 2025, the UN says the city will be home to more than 20 million people.
The International Organization for Migration estimates that nearly 5 million of the people crowded in Dhaka's brutal slums are climate refugees, and many of those who are able are working in sweat shops to survive. It will get worse. And it can happen here. Yes, the climate crisis can happen here. As Joe Romm explained in July:
Many other recent studies have been done on this subject, such as “Water, Drought, Climate Change, and Conflict in Syria” by climate and water expert Peter Gleick. Perhaps the central takeaway from this area of research is that the greatest danger to humanity this century from human-caused climate change is Dust-Bowlification and the threat to our food supplies and hence global security. That’s because large parts of the most inhabited and arable parts of the planet — including the U.S. breadbasket — face the exact same heating and drying that have already affected the Mediterranean.
Indeed, more and more research is tying climate change to the California drought, the worst in 1,200 years. Other research has tied climate change to extreme weather events such as Hurricane Sandy.
The refugee stories out of Europe will continue to dominate international headlines. There will be more horrors for the people fleeing the wars and droughts of the Middle East and Africa. There will be more calls to send more weapons to fight the region's wars. There also will be calls to send more soldiers. Humanitarian aid will save lives. Military aid will continue to make things worse. But who will pay attention to what's really going on? In January 2013, Nicolas Stern, the lead author of that landmark 2006 study on the economic consequences of climate change, admitted he had gotten it wrong. In fact, he said, it's worse:
Looking back, I underestimated the risks. The planet and the atmosphere seem to be absorbing less carbon than we expected, and emissions are rising pretty strongly. Some of the effects are coming through more quickly than we thought then.
A year ago, he released a new report:
“Hundreds of millions of people, perhaps billions of people would have to move,” he warns. “If we’ve learned anything from history that means severe and extended conflict. “We couldn’t just turn it off. You can’t make a peace treaty with the planet, you can’t negotiate with the laws of physics. You’re in there, you’re stuck. Those are the stakes we’re playing for and that’s why we have to make this second transformation, the climate transformation and move to low carbon economy.” Stern has co-authored the recently published New Climate Economy report, which argues that the world can head off the worst effects of climate change, and enjoy the fruits of continued economic expansion, if it moves quickly to invest in a low-carbon economy.
In November 2015, world leaders will gather in Paris, once again attempting to hammer out a global climate agreement. Will they see the refugee crisis for what it is? Will they stop merely trying to patch wounds, or will they create more wounds and worsen them with their industrial militancy? Will they finally see the current headline-grabbing horrors for what they really are? Because this is a portent—unless they do something to stop it. Not with refugee quotas. Not with more violence. It has to be a global effort to face up to the real crisis. This is the beginning of what will become the new normal. It will grow even worse—faster than was expected, and worse than was expected. World leaders must act now. And we must make them.