This is a tiny taste of what climate change is going to look like in the future – mass migrations, which by definition overwhelm the countries or regions people migrate to, because it’s not possible to prepare for them in advance. There will be horrors. There already are horrors, and they’ll get worse.
Italian police say they have arrested 15 Muslim migrants after they allegedly threw 12 Christians overboard following a row on a boat headed to Italy.
The Christian migrants, said to be from Ghana and Nigeria, are all feared dead.
In a separate incident, more than 40 people drowned after another migrant boat sunk between Libya and Italy.
The boats are unsafe and horrifically overloaded. Be sure to see the BBC’s photo of the open boat literally packed solid with people.
In the latest sinking, the Italian navy plucked four survivors – a Ghanaian, two Nigerians, and a man from Niger – from the sea and took them to Sicily along with 600 other migrants trying to make the crossing in various vessels. They told the police their inflatable boat sank not long after leaving the coast of Libya with 45 people on board.
Meanwhile, police in Palermo say that 15 Muslim migrants, who travelled on another boat, were arrested on charges of “multiple aggravated murder motivated by religious hate”, after several surviving migrants came forward and told them of an altercation which resulted in 12 Christians being thrown overboard.
The men who have been charged come from the Ivory Coast, Senegal, Mali and Guinea.
More room in the boat for the survivors.
Obviously, the 12 Christian were ‘successful’ in their provocation.
I am a bit puzzled by your opening sentence. Were these people migrating because of climate change?
I don’t know. But climate change is going to cause mass migrations of people trying to escape droughts, flooding, crop failures and so on, and the horrors that keep happening in the Med are only going to get worse.
If what you say turns out to be true, then the U.S. is going to have a real problem too as people flee the Caribbean islands. I know the kind of mess that area can be when people try to cross the Florda Straits. I saw it firsthand when I was assigned to the naval vessel U.S.S Saipan. I saw dozens carried aboard ship in body bags during what is called the Muriel boat lift.
I know. Everywhere is going to have a real problem. If I understand it correctly it’s not even an if, in the sense that some level of drought & flood & crop failure is inevitable. Competition for resources ahead.
I don’t think that the world’s current nationalist structure is going to work very well for dealing with a problem like global climate change that affects everyone. I’m deeply afraid that it’ll devolve into a war between ‘haves’ and ‘drowning/starving/drought’ and humanity will magnify its already severe problem by getting violent and tribal. :/
… two Nigerians, and a man from Niger …
An interesting linguistic challenge there. Maybe the people and culture from the shorter-named nation should be called Nigerese or something equivalent.
dogfightwithdogma @ # 4: … what is called the Muriel boat lift.
As I recall, it was called the Mariel boat lift, since the refugees/deportees left from the port of Mariel.
Pierce R. Butler @7
People from Niger are Nigeriens (English) or Nigériennes (French).
Al Dente @ # 8 – Thanks for the clarification.
I note that our esteemed host’s citation came from the BBC, whose journalistic qualifications have steadily declined for decades but whose copy editors apparently retain a decent vocabulary. As they chose to publish “… Nigerians and a man from Niger…”, it seems they consider the usage you provide as too subtle for a contemporary readership – and who could blame them?
Climate change, even on the worst projections, wont happen suddenly enough to cause tragic mass migrations the way wars, for example, do. All we have to do to mitigate this problem (if it is one) is to change our immigration laws. This is a purely political and not a natural problem at all. That is not to say that there aren’t many good reasons to fear and tackle climate change, just that this isn’t one of them.
“Competition for resources ahead.”
I don’t agree with this either. I mean, I don’t agree it’s inevitable. We already have enough resources in the world for everybody in it to live in comfort all their lives. There is no sign that the world is going to stop getting richer and many reasons to think the population is going to stop growing. It is a question of distribution, a political problem. Not easy to solve but within the bounds of politics rather than nature. Canute would have got it.
To what?
To what? To laws that inhibit immigration much less (eventually not at all).
Pierce A. Butler @7
Thanks for the correction. You would think that someone who was actually there would get it right. That memory thing. Should have checked it online before posting.
There’s a little more to it than simply opening the borders. Where will these people live? Where will their children go to school? When they’re sick, who will treat them? When they break the law, who will catch them? When they’re convicted, where will they be locked up? Where will they work? What jobs will they do?
The UK population is rising by about 0.5% annually due to immigration. That tiny amount is enough to have provoked the rise to prominence of a bunch of right-wing nutters who already have two MPs in Parliament and look in danger of holding the balance of power in a hung parliament in just a few weeks’ time. A failure – no, a refusal – to discuss immigration did for our last prime minister, Gordon “that bigotted woman” Brown.
It’s a huge issue because it’s been successfully spun as a zero sum game – and the reality is that for all but the top few percent, it IS a zero sum game. More immigrants does mean a worse standard of living for a lot of those who are already the worst off. There’s no quick or easy fix, and it would need a fundamental restructuring not just of one economy but of the whole world. I think OB’s scenario is more likely.
“The UK population is rising by about 0.5% annually due to immigration. That tiny amount is enough to have provoked the rise to prominence of a bunch of right-wing nutters who already have two MPs in Parliament and look in danger of holding the balance of power in a hung parliament in just a few weeks’ time. ”
I think you have overstated the problem a bit but of course there will be political problems in handling immigration, but I believe these are manageable. It is definitely NOT a zero sum game. The benefits from freer immigration massively outweigh the mostly imagined social problems, as well as being ethically much more palatable. If OB’s scenario comes to pass the blame should not be laid on climate change and climate changers but on the electorates who keep their borders closed. We could eliminate global poverty in a decade simply by liberalising immigration policies.
Bluntnose @11
Are you of the view that growth is limitless? Do you not think that continued depletion of natural resources and envrionmental degradation will eventually have an impact on the world getting richer? How do you square what you have said here with reports, including peer-reviewed research, that indicates we are approaching the limit of many extractable mineral resources?
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/jun/04/mineral-resource-fossil-fuel-depletion-terraform-earth-collapse-civilisation
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/02/limits-to-growth-was-right-new-research-shows-were-nearing-collapse
Seems to me there are signs that the world will not keep getting richer. You just don’t seem to have looked very closely to see them.
What are these reasons? How soon do you think this growth will stop? I have seen projections of a world population in excess of 9 billion by 2050. Can we sustain a population of this size? There are a number of scientists who make a compelling argument that Earth’s carrying capacity is somewhere between 9 billion and 10 billion. One of these scientists is sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson. His calculattions are based on the availability of Earths finite resources. As Wilson pointed out in his book The Future of Life, “The constraints of the biosphere are fixed.”
With increasing life expectancy, increasing demand for materials goods, increasing demands upon the planet’s limited resources, increasing human population, human impact on the planet’s environment and ecosystems, I am very skeptical of the implication that economic growth is or can be unlimited and that we will continue to get richer. I, unlike you, see signs that there are limits to just how rich we can get. And this does not even address the growing concentration of that wealth in the hands of a relatively small number of humans.
“Are you of the view that growth is limitless? Do you not think that continued depletion of natural resources and environmental degradation will eventually have an impact on the world getting richer?”
For all practical purposes, yes, I think growth is limitless. Even if it weren’t, we have enough wealth as things stand and we are certainly going to get richer. Growth does not depend on limitless natural resources, which is why the richest countries are not necessarily those with the most natural resources. That does not mean that there are no good reasons to fight environmental degradation.
” I have seen projections of a world population in excess of 9 billion by 2050. Can we sustain a population of this size?”
Most experts predict that the population growth will slow to a stop at around 9,000,000,000, a more than sustainable size I think. Don’t forget, we could fit all those people into Texas, if we squeezed a little bi (some would have to share houses).
“As Wilson pointed out in his book The Future of Life, “The constraints of the biosphere are fixed.””
Never send a biologist to do an economists job. Wilson is a great scientist and I am interested in everything he has to say about ants. But human societies and ant societies have nothing in common.
” I, unlike you, see signs that there are limits to just how rich we can get. ”
Where do you see these signs? I am reminded of Paul Ehrlich predicting back in the 70s that by now civilization would have ground to a halt as we descend into a death battle for dwindling resources. He took up where Malthus left off.
First I’ve heard of this solution as a means to addressing poverty. Perhaps you could offer some citations or sources to substantiate this claim.
“First I’ve heard of this solution as a means to addressing poverty. Perhaps you could offer some citations or sources to substantiate this claim.”
There is a lot of research that points in this direction and I could dig some of it out for you if you are really interested, but it won’t be during office hours.
Have a look at this for a flavour:
http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/interactive/2013/jan/31/remittances-money-migrants-home-interactive
Bryan Caplan is also very good on this subject. I like him because he always gives due weight to the moral case for liberal immigration laws, something that is very often left out in our national debates:
http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2014/04/america_should.html
Should be doing something else, but this is a useful resource that will lead you lots of the pertinent research:
http://openborders.info/double-world-gdp/
@Bluntnose, 16:
Which part of what I said about the rise of UKIP do you believe to be overstatement? Their prominence is unarguable. Their number of MPs is a matter of fact. There is definitely a general election in a few weeks’ time. Which leaves only how much danger you believe there is of them holding a balance of power afterwards. Nobody ever predicted the Lib Dems would ever get into power – least of all the Lib Dems themselves, which is why their leader made all those rash promises in 2010 that he then had to not merely break, but actually burn and bury. This is the least predictable election in recent history, and few people would bet against UKIP doing better than we’d like.
Spoken like a person who doesn’t live where the immigrants actually go. I note you have not addressed any of my actual questions, other than to dismiss them as “mostly imagined”. We already aren’t building enough homes for just the people we’ve already got. We already haven’t enough school places for the children already here who can speak the native language. We already have shortages of staff in our healthcare system, cuts in our police services and overcrowded prisons, with just our existing population, increasing as it is at 0.5% per year. On what basis do you believe it possible to deal with a much larger increase? You can open borders overnight – but you can’t build the infrastructure to accommodate the resulting influx overnight.
I don’t agree that growth is limitless. I think this is form of fantasy thinking.
I am not disputing that we will get richer. I am disputing what appeared to me to be an assertion by you that we will continue to get richer indefinitely. With this new statement above you seem to have moved the goalpost.
I am not nearly as certain as you appear to be that 9 billion people is a sustainable population size. It occurs to me that we may not be using the term sustainable in the same way. By sustainable I mean something significantly greater than subsistence. I suspect that the quality of life will be significantly diminished for a greater number of people with a population of 9 billion versus the current 7+ billion. Will civilization collapse? I doubt it. But I don’t think life gets better for most people with a larger population, and thus greater demand on Earth’s resources. You seem to have some utiopian style faith or belief in the power of human ingenuity to overcome the growing problems that come with resource depletion and environmental degradation. I think Ophelia was right when she said there will be increased conflicts over resources in the decades ahead. Disclosure: I come from this issue as a person trained in the Earth Sciences. I have read a great deal about economics, but am of course not an expert. But what I do know about the subject, leads me to the conclulsion, based on my much deeper knowledge of Earth Science, that some economists have it wrong when they assume that Earth’s resource base is of essentially trivial concern when it comes to the issue of economic growth. Earth’s resource base does place limits on growth. It places limits on how much richer we can get and for how much longer we can sustain wealth and economic growth.
I am not very trusting of the job that economists do, especially those who hold onto what I think is the utopian fantasy that economic growth is limitless. Carrying capacity is a sound scientific concept. All ecosystems have a carrying capacity. The Earth as the largest of ecosystems has a carrying capacity. So when scientists say the Earth has a carrying capacity, we may quibble about what number it actually is, but the concept is rock solid science. Economists ignore this concept at our peril.
I listed some of them in my post. Furthermore, I provided links to two sources that discuss this. Did you bother to read them?
Fail to see the relevance of this comment. Being able to squeeze them all into the state of Texas certainly is not any kind of an argument for the claim that 9 billion people on the planet is a sustainable population size. The population issue is not about having sufficient surface area for people to live upon. It is about the availability of resources, including quality soil capable of growing sufficient quantities of food.
So Paul Ehrlich got it wrong. You think this is a rebuttal argument? May well be that the only thing he got wrong was the timeline. There is peer-reviewed research that concludes that the original Club of Rome report in 1972, which the utopian-thinking economists dismissed, was not actually wrong. One of the links I provided above discusses this. I’ll provide it again. Please go read it before you respond.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/02/limits-to-growth-was-right-new-research-shows-were-nearing-collapse
At this point, you might be concluding that I am some kind of alarmist. Well, I am not. I am not attempting to paint a gloomy portrait of the future, though a gloomy future is one possible scenario. My objective here is to combat what I think is a dangerous style of thinking. That we can economically grow ourselves out of the potential problems we face. The future does not have to be gloomy. The quality of life does not have to substantially diminish for the bulk of humans. But I think it more likely that these things will come to pass if we buy into your fantasy version of economics. Because if we do, as so many on the political right have done today, we will dismiss the problems we may confront as trivial or even non-existent. Then they don’t get appropriately addressed. And then the gloomy scenario becomes significantly more probable. If you think not then read Jared Diamonds Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed or Guns, Germs, and Steel
Please describe, clearly, an economist’s job. And name one who does that job with any degree of objectively verifiable accuracy.
@sonofrojblake
You are quite wrong in your speculations, I live in an area of high immigration and with high markers for social problems and it is obvious to me, even from where I am sitting, that the problems I hear in the media laid at the feet of the immigrants are imagined for the most part. But that doesn’t mean that nobody loses out ever. But that is beside the point. The point is whether there is a net benefit, including the benefit to the immigrant. The Bryan Caplan article I linked to is very good for this, I recommend it. He points out, for example, that women entering the work place had disbenefits for some men but we would be appalled at the suggestion that women should therefore be prevented from working (although many did suggest that and for the same reasons that are now used to argue against immigration).
The reason I dismissed your claims that immigration was creating significant social problems is because we have lots of evidence and all of it refutes that case. The shortage of school [;aces is not due to the (s you point out) very small population increase due to immigration. How could it be? The vast majority of those immigrants are working age adults. Nor is the housing crisis down to a sudden new demand, it has been growing, and documented as growing, for decades. It is caused by a the wrong policies and poor planning. If anything, immigration has helped alleviate these problems by increasing tax revenues and providing vital support workers in our hospitals and social services.
And like I say, I see this first hand and don’t have to rely on despatches from the Daily Mail.
@dogfight
So do I. And if we look at economic history it is very clear that increases in global population correlate with a movement away from subsistence living. I don’t see any reason for that to change.
You seem to have some utiopian style faith or belief in the power of human ingenuity to overcome the growing problems that come with resource depletion and environmental degradation.
Why utopian? So far this seems to be the case. Why should it not be the case in the future? I think you are making the mistake of thinking of humans mainly as mouths, as consumers. But humans are also brains and hands. Adding to the population by 2 billion will massively increase the sum of human genius and productive capacities. And the more they come together in urban masses, the more this seems to be the case.
You think it trivial that Malthus and Ehrlich were so extravagantly wrong in their predictions, and I agree their mistakes prove nothing about the future, but you must see that it should us pause. Why were they wrong? What factor did they leave out of their calculations?
And again, it is not a fantasy that we can economically grow through our problems, so far we have done just that. As the population of the world has ballooned, so has the wealth. If you check out some of the links I posted before, you will see people arguing (with evidence) that we could double global wealth simply by opening borders, that is without any increase in resource use at all. This isn’t fantasy. The number may not be right, but even if they were half right that would be enough wealth to manage all our immediate social problems and for some time into the future too..
It’s not just mass migrations, but mass invasions. Vietnam, Burma and Thailand are three of the ten biggest producers of rice in the world. Given its track record of human rights violations, a murderous regime like China would have no compunction about making up specious claims to “justify” invading, stealing rice and killing thousands along the way. Bangladesh is also a large producer of rice and surrounded by India, another overpopulated country whose politics are becoming more extreme.
The US has already done it, invading Iraq and Afghanistan (and seeking to invade Iran) to “secure” enough oil for its own demand and consumption. Why be surprised if other countries do the same to ensure the supply of a more immediate need like food? China has already done something similar in Tibet, occupying the country and giving the population a brutal choice: be absorbed or eliminated.
Bluntnose all the way back @ 11 –
Are you serious? How could we possibly – even under optimal conditions, i.e. no climate change, already have enough resources in the world for everybody in it to live in comfort all their lives? The vast bulk of what people need to survive is food, which is organic and perishable, and vulnerable to changes in the environment. Of course we don’t already have enough resources in the world for everybody in it to live in comfort all their lives. There isn’t some magic warehouse somewhere with enough food to feed 7 or 10 billion people for 100 years.
There are going to be huge crop failures. You seem to be unaware of this. I hope everyone isn’t unaware of it.
Also, Bluntnose – I asked you the other day – since you’re commenting regularly, please adopt the convention of using blockquotes instead of quotation marks; it’s easier to read.
The reason people don’t have enough food is because they don’t have enough money. The food is there, they are just unable to buy it. This has been true even in famine situations, which is why we don’t get famines where there is a free press. Amartya Sen has the facts and figures and they are pretty undebateable. And the money is there too, we just haven’t shared it out right. There is more than enough wealth in the world today (including food) for everybody to lead a comfortable life. I think the future will be many times richer, especially if we do what the evidence shows we should and, say, open the borders.
So the question is just whether we will be able to keep growing, packaging, storing and transporting enough food to feed the world. I think the evidence all points to, yes we will. One of the advantages of a globalised market economy is that crop failures don’t lead to hunger, because no population depends on a single crop.
Surely everyone has noticed that famine has disappeared even as population has exploded and climate has dramatically shifted? Except in North Korea, of course.
Sometimes common sense is misleading, follow the evidence.
Damn, ballsed up the blockquotes again! First para only should be in quotes.
Bluntnose @26
Why is it obvious to you? Are you basing this on your personal observations? If you are then there is good reason for those of us reading your posts to be skeptical. Anecdotal evidence is weak evidence for any claim that is subject to empirical investigation, as is the one you have made.
Fixed; thanks for using them upon request!
I’ve read Amartya Sen too, but he wasn’t addressing climate change as far as I recall.
Look up what’s happening to the glaciers that feed the huge rivers that irrigate all of South Asia.
No, obvious for the reasons I gave but also confirmed from my personal observations. I did spell that out. There is absolutely no evidence in the data that UK problems in housing, unemployment, health or schooling are being caused by immigration.
Thanks for fixing the formatting Ophelia, I will try to be defter.
Then again, the Himalayan glacier situation is apparently not as clear-cut as I thought I remembered, at least according to this report:
http://dels.nas.edu/Report/Himalayan-Glaciers-Climate-Change-Water-Resources/13449
I wasn’t referring to Sen to refute climate change theories but only because of what he has to say about resource allocation and famine. I don’t deny climate change or the dangers it represents, I just disagree with the one particular point about migration.
Yes but the point is that climate change is likely to change the facts about resource allocation and famine. Even if it’s true that famine in the past has always been a matter of allocation rather than quantity of food, it doesn’t follow that that will always continue to be true. Climate change could make it physically impossible to grow enough food for the existing population.
Not under current projections, we should still be able to grow crops on a large scale even if temps go up by two degrees. But I was really talking about migrations, whether moving populations would be a disaster , and the point was that it will be only if we make it one through our political choices.
So there’s just no problem when tens of thousands of people arrive in a given city needing housing and jobs and schools for the kids and all the other infrastructure that people do need? An open-ended number of people can just move in, no problem, no strain, no shortages?
On what planet?
Climate change will not happen so suddenly that that scenario is likely to happen. A war might lead to that but not climate change. But if we open our borders now we will be able to absorb the movements. Migrants bring solutions as well as problems. It ois the border and the refugee camp that is the menace.
What do you mean? Climate change overall won’t happen suddenly, but it can certainly cause sudden catastrophes – it already has. And you really didn’t answer the question…
I think that when you get things like the flooding in Bangladesh, it appears “sudden” but may be an acute instance of a long-term problem. The drought in California is another example. California’s drought may not result in massive displacements, but Bangladesh, if it experiences more flooding, certainly will.
Take a more realistic example: many global ocean rise scenarios would put half of Tel Aviv under water. What, do you think that the Israelis are going to nicely ask the Palestinians for more land?
Global climate change is not simply going to stress national borders, it will stress national budgets and services. If human nature hasn’t changed, that means that the “haves” may feel themselves being dispossessed by the “have nots” and – historically – that doesn’t resolve itself so nicely.
Not events that are likely to lead to tens of thousand of people to be displaced at once. It takes a war to do that. You are right, if climate change led to whole populations moving overnight, that would be unmanageable. But it won’t. Or, at least, there is no evidence that it will. We have already seen a huge amount of climate change and no depopulations.
The level of migration that is likely to happen can be dealt with by opening the borders now.
Exactly.
Flooding in Bangladesh is down to land mismanagement and is a long term problem. I have never read an expert on the region who disputes that. If there is one, I would be interested to see it.
But you are right, the population of Bangladesh would be hugely aided by more liberal immigration policies in the west. Why don’t we let them come to where they wont be drowned and can earn ten times more money?
Take a more realistic example: many global ocean rise scenarios would put half of Tel Aviv under water. What, do you think that the Israelis are going to nicely ask the Palestinians for more land?
Really? We have to make it about the Jews? Again?
There is plenty of room in Israel for the population of Israel. If they choose to displace Palestinians it is for political reasons. I bet we agree on that really.
But the Jews are good people to ask about the evils of closed borders. Ask them.
We just don’t know that and there are good reasons to think it isn’t the case. We are already half way through the worst case scenario for global warming and so far it hasn’t been so, we have continued to prosper. So why assume the worst? Open the borders and I believe the worst consequences can be averted. It is a simple solution with the added benefit of being the obvious moral thing to do, so even if it doesn’t ‘work’ it is right.
dogfightwithdogma @ # 14 – Ftr, I met two Marielitos not long after the “boatlift” (both had previously been serving prison sentences for murder).
One of them stole some stuff – and immediately gave it to people in serious need of it. The other risked his life to save the life of a friend of mine.
There are just no limits to the insidious effects of socialism!