zompist wrote:Salmoneus wrote:Second, nobody is seriously suggesting that, *blam* in 2100 there will be 40 million displaced people suddenly. We're talking 40 million people over the next 80 years. Or around 500,000 a year on average. And... that's not many! To pick a country, there have been around 2,000,000 displaced in south sudan this year alone. Hundreds of thousands more in Ethiopia and Somalia. And that barely makes the news. Increasing numbers of climate refugees will certainly add to the global strain, but the annual numbers will be much smaller than we currently experience from wars, oppression, manmade famines and random natural disasters. 500,000 a year. For a benchmark, there are currently around 22 million refugees a year.
You're right that 40 million Bangladeshis won't be refugees in one event, but it's just as silly to imagine them trickling in at a steady half a million a year. When it comes to floods, changes in watercourses, melting ice, and last but not least politics, the number could fluctuate wildly.
Yes, that's true. I'm sure no-one will disagree that we will see continued periodic refugee crises, as we have done for decades. There may be several million one year, and then fairly few for a couple of years.
Plus, 500,000 is a lot of people when their new neighbors don't want them. That's about the number of Rohingya refugees.
That's true, and many countries will have an assortment of political discussions over such issues - for some countries, this will be a continuation of existing political disagreements, while for others it will represent another turn in the endlessly turning cycle of political disputes.
Again, I never said that climate change would not be expensive. Just that it will not represent a serious threat to the survival of civilisation, as rotting puts it. And indeed that it will largely be business as normal. Which, yes, will be unpleasant for some people, as the world is always unpleasant. So yes, Bangladesh will have some climate problems. But just look next door at India, which already has more undernourished children than sub-Saharan Africa, where the political structure (which has nuclear weapons) appears profoundly weak, and where the entire agricultural system is, analysts tell us, on the verge of wholesale collapse even without climate change. And then we move along to Pakistan, and I'm sure they'll do
just fine, they've got no problems at all...
If apparently I'm a monster for being willing to discuss real-world problems in a "dispassionate" way - that is, treating them as real world problems we will have to address, rather than as edgy slogans for more-distressed-than-thou political posturing - then I would reply that to treat future climate change as a unique, unprecedented problem is disrespectful to all the people who have died and are dying and have been displaced and are being displaced on an even greater scale by all the other problems in the world that nobody cares about. Oh, suddenly we care about Bangladeshis now, when they may be affected by climate change. Great. I mean, the same people didn't give a shit when they were just starving from poverty, dying of disease, being flooded by cyclones, being slaughtered in a brutal war, or being victims of religious extremism. But if there's some nice fashionable global warming involved, suddenly
those refugees are an existential threat to civilisation. This whole idea that the significance of human suffering in the third world can be weighted precisely by how much it can be attributed to the specific political issues that being discussed on Western university campuses today is, I think, frankly rather repellent. I'm sure, Zompist, that you're not doing it on purpose. But when we fearmonger over the suffering that will be caused by this one cause, against a blank background, as though even greater suffering weren't already happening for many other causes, that's exactly what we're doing - we're whitewashing the current, and future, suffering of the world and focusing only on the relatively small bit that directly resonates with our own policies.
Yes, I regret that tens of thousands of people in Vanuatu are going to have to move to higher ground, or other islands, or out of the country altogether. But I don't see that as more important, or more of an urgent give-all-power-to-Robot-Draco threat to civilisation, than, say, the tens of thousands of people killed by the genocidal campaigns in Khordofan. Ok, let's say maybe 10 million people end up fleeing Bangladesh - I don't see that as much more important than, say, the 10 million Germans forced to flee the Sudatenland alone, or the 10 million people who fled Colombia. More than a million fled Colombia in 2000-2005 alone. 2 million Iraqis fled Iraq between 2003 and 2006 alone. It's not disrespectful to Bangladeshis to say that their future refugees will be no more cataclysmic than all of the ones from a hundred places in the world who aren't refugees from a hot-button issue like climate change - in fact, it's disrespectful to everyone else to pretend that oh, when climate change kicks in suddenly there'll be refugee problem,
as though there weren't already a refugee problem on a far larger scale. One group it's disrespectful to is Bangladeshis, who have been emigrating at similar levels for decades - there's more than 100,000 first-generation Bangladeshi immigrants in London alone (1/3rd of the population of one of the boroughs - one ward has even been renamed "Spitalfields and Banglatown").
[nor is this a new phenomenon. In Ireland in the 19th century, for example, a million people died of starvation and by 1890 40% of the surviving Irish-born population had emigrated. Yet civilisation survived us.]
Germany has taken in 600,000 Syrian refugees, and it has absolutely affected German politics.
Oh, have the old political parties collapsed? Have there been constitutional amendments? So far there hasn't even been a change of Chancellor. A right-wing party did well in the polls for one year, and now is doing less well. It's hardly the fall of Weimar, is it?
As for Trump, don't be disingenuous. You know perfectly well that incendiary comments about Syrians were part of his campaign, and that a "Muslim Ban" was both one of his campaign proposals, and almost the first thing he did in office. The tiny number of Syrians actually resettled here, and their complete innocence of "terrorism", had nothing to do with the political effect.
Which is exactly my point! The political effect had nothing to do with Syrians. And you know perfectly well that incendiary comments about Syrians were a tiny part of his campaign, and that the "Muslim Ban", which of course was never implemented, was not specifically about Syrians.
The UK, for instance, has allowed in a paltry 120,000 refugees, barely statistically noticeable, and Syrians are only a tiny, tiny fraction of that - yet read certain papers and you'd think they'd already taken over the country - one syrian and one million syrians are essentially the same for these people
Exactly. Small streams of refugees produce an inordinate reaction. At the least, climate change is going to ensure a continuing supply of refugees, and thus a continuing temptation to xenophobic reaction.
No. Climate change is not going to ensure a continuing supply of refugees. That's like saying that climate change is going to ensure a continuing supply of rain in Scotland. No - it was going to rain in Scotland anyway. Increasing the sales of bacon would not 'ensure a continuing supply' of heart attacks and cancer - because those things are happening already. They're in no danger of going extinct. "Ensures that it continues" implies that there would otherwise be some risk of it ending! Selling more bacon may statistically produce an uptick, but it's not the underlying problem. Focusing on controlling bacon sales because otherwise there might be heart attacks and cancer in the future is kind of ignoring all the people whose relatives are dying of those things right now for reasons that have nothing to do with bacon. Likewise, refugees are not an endangered species. There's no 'risk' of refugee crises ending any time soon. Adverse climatic change and sea level rises may statistically increase the number of refugee crises (hopefully countered by a decrease in the much larger causes of refugees: war and genocide), but they're not ensuring that the crises continue, because those crises were going to be continuing anyway.
We're staggering along with our arms cut off and haemorhaging blood, and being told that, oh no, that nasty rash we've got is sure to kill us dead unless we change to these fully organic wool t-shirts.
Don't get me wrong, it IS a nasty rash. We should do something about it. But we should also retain a sense of proportion about all the other things that are wrong with the world.