I look at the refugee crisis unfolding before our eyes (still happening, BTW, despite the recent shifting of media focus) 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 (mostly on fire last summer).
But what’s the same for 99% of people, no matter the local climate, is this: wherever you are, that’s where you’re stuck. Whatever your climate 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 such a simple premise, but it’s the meat of the matter. Your local climate influences everything. And if it becomes unbearable or uninhabitable, and you can’t change it back, then what do you do? What happens then?
In Telangana, India last 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.”
And we’re stuck. We’re all stuck. That is, we’re stuck until it becomes unbearable. And when it does become unbearable, and you decide to flee, where will you go?
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 entire town burns down? 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 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 pretty please 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 (yes, majored in SCIENCE) 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.
It’s axiomatic that Jindal and the rest of his ilk on the right are wrong about climate change. But they are also, in their entrenched denial, going to be the most surprised and horrified when more and more people start coming to America from places rendered uninhabitable by global warming — places with drought, with flooding, with disease — and places below sea level swamped by the rising waves.
The refugee crisis isn’t going away. It’s going to get worse, and bigger. It’s going to come here. Environmental migrants are going to arrive on our shores.
In addition, many of us will likely become climate change refugees as well. Because that’s really what you are now, if you’re 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 that’s what you are now if you still haven’t been able to move back to New Orleans in the 10 years since the storm that washed away your home. And that’s what you are now if you still aren’t back in your house in New Jersey 3 ½ years after Hurricane Sandy.
So we look at the stories about the refugee crisis and we are shocked by the horror of the situation, and marvel at the guts and grim determination – or just plain desperation and panic and no other options – motivating the hundreds of thousands fleeing from war, from persecution, and from poverty. All those exhausted, hungry, frantic Syrian and Afghan and Senegalese moms and dads and kids, all those Nigerian and Serbian aunts and cousins, all those Iranian and Iraqi dispossessed shopkeepers, nurses, professors and office workers, all fleeing to the West. Some 350,000 in 2015.
And here’s where I circle back to stuck – and to local. Here’s where I think it’s important to drive home the terrifying fact that we are all stuck here together on our friendly local only known inhabitable planet!
It’s one thing for people to leave war-torn countries. It is quite another to get off a planet that is increasingly inhospitable – and uninhabitable – all over.
If there’s gunfire in the streets and bombs going off in your city, you might be able to make it somewhere that’s at peace. But what do you do if the climate of your entire planet is altered beyond your wildest imagination? We aren’t there yet, and best estimates indicate we have time before the global s*** hits the fan… but as it gets closer — what then?
As the global climate continues to change, there’s nowhere else for us to go. We’re not all going to fit into Alaska, or Switzerland, and anyway, you can bet your sweet bippy that your friendly neighborhood oligarchs are busily making sure they’ve got the best real estate all wrapped up, just in case they turn out to have been wrong all along about climate change.
We. Are. STUCK.
Carl Sagan said it better than I ever could, so I’ll close by quoting him.
Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
Let’s make it – together – against climate change, shall we?