Essays by Eric Worrall
“… Unable to adapt to increasingly harsh conditions, millions – or even billions – of people will need to move. …”
BBC: “Is the world ready for a wave of mass migration due to climate change?”
By Gaia Vince November 18, 2022
Gaia Vince asks: With up to three billion people expected to be displaced by the effects of global warming by the end of this century, will that lead to a shift in the way we think about national borders?
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Boundaries define our fate, our lifespan, our identity, etc. Yet they are an invention like the maps I used to draw. Our borders do not exist as immutable aspects of the landscape, they are not a natural part of our planet and were invented relatively recently.
However, it can be argued that most of these imaginary lines are not suitable for a 21st Century world with soaring populations, severe climate change, and resource scarcity. Indeed, the idea of preventing foreigners from using the border is relatively recent. Countries used to be more concerned with preventing people from leaving than with preventing them from coming. They need their labor and taxes, and Migration is still a headache for many states.
However, there are real human frontiers set not by politics or hereditary sovereignty, but by the physical properties of our planet. The planetary boundaries for our mammals are determined by geography and climate. For example, humans cannot live in large numbers in Antarctica or in the Sahara. As global temperatures rise, triggering climate change, sea level rise and extreme weather in the coming decades, much of the world is home to some of the largest populations that will become It’s getting harder and harder to live. seaside, island nation and big cities inside The tropics will be among the hardest hitbased on predictions of climate scientists.
Unable to adapt to increasingly harsh conditions, millions – or even billions – of people will need to move.
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Read more: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20221117-how-borders-might-change-to-cope-with-climate-migration
My favorite example to refute this nonsense claim is the British colonization of Australia.
Leaving aside the very real issues associated with the mistreatment of Aboriginal Australians, consider what Australia’s colonization says about the climate change experienced by the colonists.
The colonists, mainly from England and Ireland, experienced a average high temperature 9C to 23C (in the London area), was moved to Sydney Australia, where spent a average high temperatures from 17C (62F) to 26C (78F).
The colonists brought their crops and livestock.
After a few false starts, such as planting wheat in the fall, because the curators were too ignorant and uneducated to understand that the seasons in the Southern Hemisphere were opposite, the colony prospered. . Within a few years, Australian colonists were cultivating and raising cattle they once raised in England, but in a much warmer climate.
There is a change. As the colonists spread northward, to areas with warmer climates, they discovered that they had to change the timing of sowing seeds. For example, if you want to grow Maine potatoes in the subtropical Bundaberg, you must plant them in the fall. Cold-tolerant Maine potatoes thrive in the mild conditions that Bundaberg residents call winter, and are ready to harvest in the spring, before the summer heat arrives.
My point is, global warming is not a threat to people living in warm countries. All they have to do if warming occurs, is adapt a little, just as the British colonists easily adapted to much warmer conditions in Australia.
What about the arguments that global warming is different from moving house? Claims that global warming could bring about unbearable wet bulb temperatures. Could global warming somehow bring about less benign conditions than the change experienced by people moving to a warmer country?
Evidence says no. My proof for this claim is Paleocene-Eocene Maximum Heat, which occurred about 55 million years ago. PETM is a relatively rapid natural warming event, culminating in temperatures about 5-8C higher than today.
Guess what thrived during the heat peak 55 million years ago? monkey. “… Primates actually suddenly appeared on all three northern continents during the 100,000 year period Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum of the Early Eocene, ≈55.5 milliona. …” based on Rapid geographical dispersal of Asia–Europe–North America of the earliest Eocene primates teilhardina in the Paleocene–Eocene Maximum heat. Much of the world is covered by tropical forests – perfect conditions for arboreal monkeys.
Fish also become more abundant during this extreme warm periodcontrary to all alarmism These days you hear about the impact of global warming on fish.
Tell us how well our monkey ancestors did in Paleocene-Eocene Maximum Heat, there is no reasonable level of global warming that would render important areas of the planet uninhabitable for tropical species like humans. The temperatures during the PETM’s extreme warming event 55 million years ago were well within the tolerance range of our apes ancestors, so we humans should be able to tolerate a warming of this magnitude. similar. If anything, humans are even more heat-adapted than our primate ancestors – teilhardina The marmoset is covered with fur.
If a pack of ancestral monkeys with brains the size of a thread able to adapt to the sudden extreme heat of the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum and thrive in a world much warmer than our ancestors experienced, we humans can manage any degree what kind of global warming our species might experience.
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