"The number of migrants across the world is at a record high — 244 million people left their homes in 2015, according to the United Nations. They were driven by war, dire economic straits, and for some, worsening environmental conditions brought on by climate change."
How does your bologna-detector like that claim?
Follow the link, and anyone who can read learns that the 244 million people referred to did not "leave their homes in 2015," but had left their home country some time in the past and had now lived in another country for at least one year. This is a good thing, because the link numbers immigrants to the US at 46.6 million. If that many immigrants arrived in the US in a year, in twenty years the US would have a population of over a billion -- which it does not, and is not about to.
And no, the International Organization for Immigration does not claim all these people left home due to 'war, dire economic straights,' or Anthropogenic Global Warming. Though no doubt most of them found the economic pickings better where they landed, as has always been the case on this planet since one trilobite slithered across the ocean floor to a perch closer to the current's rich harvest of tasty drifters.
Such a blatant and fantastic misrepresentation ought to be astounding in a major newspaper like the Washington Post, and ought all by itself get the author laughed out of journalism for a lifetime. But we're just getting started.
"There’s a growing body of evidence linking migration and climate change, from Pacific island nations being subsumed by the rising ocean, to the drought-wracked Horn of Africa. In a speech this spring, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres warned that 'as regions become unlivable, more and more people will be forced to move from degraded lands to cities and to other nations.'”
We skip these links, since the first two are behind pay walls (and are probably crap, anyway), and the third is, well, a speech from the UN Secretary General predicting future events, which hardly need be taken seriously.
"A recent report from Oxfam found that more than 20 million people a year have been displaced by extreme weather events since 2008, mostly in developing countries."
That would come to one in 350 people in the world. And if you read the article, this figure includes, for example, those who fled hurricanes in the US this past year. (Being "displaced" is not the same as becoming a "refugee" or "immigrant:" it might just mean you moved out of town until the storm blew over.)
Would that be more or less than the percentage of people who fled "extreme weather events" in previous centuries?
You can be sure it is dramatically fewer.
Consider the Bible. Jacob's entire family emigrated to Egypt because of famine, an "extreme weather event" by Oxfam's definition. Naomi and her family also emigrated for similar reasons. That's two or three books in the Bible right there.
Or consider China. The history of China is a history of enormous flooding that forced millions from their homes in some years. And considering the fact that most ancient civilizations were built along rivers -- the Euphrates, Tigris, Nile, Indus, Ganges, Yellow, and Yangtze -- it is a sure bet that major floods alone have almost always taken a far higher toll than one in 350 per year.
Hurricanes, typhoon, and tornadoes, snowstorms, even glacial advances and avalanches, are if anything far more easily thwarted in our era of r-bar, hurricane clips, and snow-blowers, than at any time in the past.
"But linking migration to climate change is tricky because the environment is just one of many pressure points, many all happening at the same time. Take the case of northeastern Nigeria, where nearly 2 million people are displaced. Climate change is clearly a factor: Lake Chad, the region’s main water source, has been drying up as the Sahel Desert expands southward."
Only the Sahel Desert hasn't been expanding south: it's been greening in recent decades. And the lake (which is no more than 30 feet deep at the deepest) was already noted as having dried significantly by 1899. And one major reason is water is being diverted for agriculture.
Dang those facts!
"But at the same time, the Islamic insurgence of Boko Haram has run a brutal terrorism campaign. Rural poverty and food insecurity were already major problems. Economic opportunities are better in the south. So what combination of factors is causing people to leave home?"
I'd guess American gas-guzzlers.
"For any given instance of migration, how can we know the impact of climate change, if at all?
"A new study may help with that question, by looking at a very different wave of migration with 150 years of hindsight. Researchers at Germany’s University of Freiburg analyzed 19th-century migration from central Europe to North America, and discovered new evidence suggesting climate change played a major role in spurring mass movements of people."
"Through the 1800s, about 5 million people immigrated to North America from what is now southwest Germany, including President Trump’s grandfather, Friedrich, who moved to the United States in 1885. The study, published Tuesday in the peer-reviewed journal Climate of the Past, found that up to 30 percent of those people moved because of climate disruptions."
I was under the impression he just didn't like growing grapes.
But if this is true (big if), I'm not sure it helps Tim's case. Bad weather happens in every century. But the amount of CO2 kicked out by industrialization before 1900 would have been a tiny fraction of what it is in modern times. No cars. A world population a third to quarter what it is now. Little industry except in a few countries. Even if the small world population with its primitive industry in a few remote corners could burn enough carbon to effect the weather already, the extra energy would likely have gone into warming the surface of the oceans.
So Tim is cutting the branch he is sitting off with this argument. Apparently the gas-hog driving must have started in the early 19th Century, already. | Shame on you, "Honest" Abe! |
“'I was surprised, to be honest,” Glaser said. 'The 19th century is a period with remarkable changes in the climate, economy, and politics. This is like a case study of learning how system change works.'”
"The findings reveal a historical precedent for a pattern that is increasingly familiar: unusual weather, followed by crop failures, followed by economic instability, followed by a mass exodus.
The study’s window of time, from 1812 to 1887, was a transitional period in climate history following the so-called Little Ice Age, when global temperatures were much cooler than today.
As temperatures began to heat up in response to what we now recognize as manmade global warming, it was a time of tumultuous year-to-year variability. Years of drought were suddenly punctuated by crop-killing cold snaps. So while the “climate change” people experienced then was different from what we’re living through now, its impact on food systems was similar.
Researchers identified a handful of emigration peaks throughout the century, then matched those to historical records of weather, harvests and prices for local staple grains such as barley, oats, and rye."
"That correlation was compelling on its own, Glaser said. But, of course, there’s more to the story: the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, increasing industrialization and global trade, and other forms of political and economic upheaval. So Glaser and his colleagues built a statistical model that could account for the influence those other factors exerted on emigration."
Here you see the witch-hunted mentality perfectly framed and hung on the wall of history: confirmation bias on an apocalyptic scale, combined with a complete inability (or unwillingness) to think critically.
If 1.3 billion people, burning perhaps 2% of the present CO2, were able to so dramatically effect the climate already by 1885 (remember, the effect isn't instant, so we have to count back several decades from that point), why hasn't the entire globe burned up by now and the smoke gone up to the moon?
Yet that is clearly McDonnell's meaning. Temperatures were heating up because of "what we now recognize as global warming." This is why he mentions "increased industrialization" as one of the contributing factors to forcing Grandpa Trump, or at least his neighbors, out of Europe.
But then, in another bizarre twist, McDonnell admits that in fact it was COOLING that was causing the problems: 1
"In some years, the environment was a dominant factor, such as 1816, when the eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia sent up a cloud of volcanic ash that put a chill on European crop production and spurred thousands to flee.
"In other years, other factors were more important, such as the practice followed by some municipalities in the 1850s of paying their poorest citizens to move out. But overall, it was clear that millions of people might have stayed put if not for adverse climate conditions, the study found. The upshot, Glaser said, is that researchers should make better use of historical records to look for clues about how climate migrants might behave in the future. That’s going to be even more important as global warming continues to send more people on the move."
It is hard to understand how a literate person could put up with such drivel in their newspaper. McDonnell holds to an ideology which The Washington Post wishes to promote, but that is no excuse for such shoddy reporting.
McDonnell begins by claiming 240 million people migrated in a single year for apocalyptic reasons, a figure no one with any head for numbers would buy for an instant. In fact the number refers to all who live outside their home country and have done so for at least one year, for any reason. He claims areas of the world that have greened in recent years are actually becoming desert. He ignores the reality of Lake Chad in favor of his doomsday cartoon. He shows no sense of historical awareness, for instance of the fact that people have fled weather (or climate) disasters throughout recorded history, and before. (See theories for the fall of the Harappan and Maya civilizations, for instance.) He conflates cold weather disasters with global warming, and shows no sense whatsoever when it comes to proportion and the scale of industrialization in the 19th Century and now.
And yet this fellow seems to get published easily enough.
What people these days put up with, if you only flatter their prejudices.
Trump gets Spitting Image treatment
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