OLD CONTENT
I told you it was only a matter of time before this was going to happen:
www.vice.com/en_in/article/mbmaqy/india-continues-to-be-ravaged-by-floods-and-drought-at-the-same-timeAs various reports show India approaching ‘Day Zero’ (the day when a place’s taps dry out and people have to stand in line to collect a daily quota of water), a top Indian expert has warned that Indians may soon become “water refugees” who’ll migrate to water-rich European countries. Rajendra Singh, a Magsaysay-winning conservationist and environmentalist, and popularly known as the “Waterman of India”, made this statement at the recently-concluded Stockholm International Water Institute.
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“In India, such migration is taking place from villages to cities. However, the current water crisis may lead to such climatic migration in the future to other countries,” he told The Press Trust of India. In fact, in India, a March 2019 report by the World Resources Institute has warned that the climate change impact will be considerable because of its large population—at 1.37 billion as of September 18—depending heavily on environment-sensitive sectors such as agriculture. “These factors make adaptation critical,” says the report.
This will also occur elsewhere.
If we do not ruthlessly eliminate all the people who want to keep borders closed, the refugee death toll we have seen up until now will be nothing compared to what we will witness in the future.
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https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/australia/united-nations-human-rights-commissioner-criticises-australias-asylum-seeker-policies/ar-AAIuPhc---
www.rt.com/usa/471887-climate-change-pentagon-interventions/Behind the dull title of “Implications of climate change for the US Army” lies a 52-page report by a team of scientists outlining apocalyptic scenarios: conflicts driven by hundreds of millions of people displaced by rising sea levels; collapse of the US power grid and transportation; and the inability of the Army itself to provide water for its troops, to name but a few.
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The authors see climate-related disasters displacing hundreds of millions of people around the world – giving Bangladesh as one example vulnerable to rising sea levels, with the refugees then triggering conflict in the already unstable and nuclear-armed Indian Subcontinent.
Such crises may require US Army intervention, from disaster response by the Army Corps of Engineers to military operations. However, the report warns, if the water shortages get worse – as they are predicted to – the Army is “precipitously close to mission failure concerning hydration of the force in a contested arid environment.” Operations in places like Syria, Iraq or Afghanistan over the past 27 years will no longer be possible simply due to inability to secure enough water for the troops.
This is why the best way is generally not to try to help at the disaster-hit countries, but to simply let all refugees into destination countries as they arrive by themselves.
As for people in prospective disaster countries, I strongly suggest not waiting for the disaster to hit, but to start moving out as soon as you have the means to do so. The more people emigrate early, the less chaotic the final emigration rush can be.
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finance.yahoo.com/news/far-more-people-risk-rising-160000590.html
The research by Climate Central www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-12808-z, a U.S.-based non-profit climate science and news organisation, underscored the scale of the upheaval projected to unfold as global warming increasingly threatens some of the world's most densely-populated regions.
The study found that 300 million people are now living on land that is likely to flood at least once a year on average by mid-century without adequate sea defences, even if governments manage to make sharp cuts in emissions.
Earlier estimates had put that figure at about 80 million. China, Bangladesh, India and Vietnam account for the bulk of the at-risk population.
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The risks were underlined last month when the U.N.-backed Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a landmark report on oceans that said sea levels could rise by one metre (3.3 ft) by 2100 -- ten times the rate in the 20th century -- if carbon emissions keep climbing.
Even if governments manage some curbs on emissions, the new study, published in Nature Communications, said that about 237 million people spread across China, Bangladesh, India, Vietnam, Indonesia, and Thailand are likely to face annual flooding by mid-century, unless they establish adequate sea defences.
By 2100, if emissions continue unchecked, and ice sheets rapidly disintegrate, then land where 250 million people now live in those six countries will fall below the waterline at high tide -- putting almost five times more people at risk than assessments based on previous elevation data had found.
Migration must be made as easy as possible for as many people as possible as soon as possible. The worst scenario would be if the greatest need to migrate from disaster-hit countries coincides in timing with policies most hostile to immigrants in destination countries. With Salvini etc. around, this scenario is highly possible.
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Nydia Velasquez means well:
velazquez.house.gov/media-center/press-releases/vel-zquez-introduces-historic-bill-protect-environmental-migrants
Washington, DC – Rep. Nydia M. Velázquez (D-NY) has introduced H.R. 4732, the Climate Displaced Person’s Act of 2019, first-of-its-kind legislation aimed at addressing the growing effect of climate change on human migration.
Importantly, the bill would create formal protections for climate-displaced persons (CDPs). CDPs are individuals who have been forcibly displaced by climate change or climate-induced disruptions, such as sea-level rise, glacial outburst floods, desertification or fires. According to studies by the International Organization for Migration (IOM), there could be as many as 200 million CDPs by 2050 globally. In fact, these predictions could easily be exceeded with the intensification of political instability and armed conflict resulting from climate drivers.
In response, Velázquez's legislation would create a humanitarian program separate from the U.S. refugee admissions program. The new program would admit a minimum of 50,000 CDPs, beginning with Fiscal Year 2020, allowing CDPs to access resettlement opportunities. The President would be granted authority to further promote resilience among communities facing the impacts of climate change as well as directed to collect and maintain data on displacement caused by climate change.
“Despite this Administration’s efforts to strip the world’s most vulnerable populations of refuge, America will continue to stand tall as a safe haven for immigrants,” said Velázquez. “This legislation will not only reaffirm our nation’s longstanding role as a home to those fleeing conflict and disasters, but it will also update it to reflect changes to our world brought on by a changing climate.”
50000/year is orders of magnitude too low, however. Going by the above estimate of 300 million climate refugees, it would take 6000 years to admit them all! Even if the US accepts only 25% of all climate refugees (as US GDP is ~25% of world GDP), that would take 1500 years, which is ludicrous. Do people these days even bother to number-crunch anymore?
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Rightists are mad that leftists are bringing up climate refugees, instead of opting to address more "popular" environmental issues.
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I had once heard that the US Pentagon had contemplated worst case scenarios were the US would have to use tactical nuclear weapons on climate refugees. Cannot remember where I heard that though, nor have I found any information on it since?
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Julian Castro on board:
www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/9/4/20849369/julian-castro-climate-refugeeDemocratic presidential candidate Julián Castro’s climate plan, released Tuesday, calls for the US to create a new category of refugees to
welcome people displaced by the warming planet.
The US only accepts refugees who have been targeted based on their race, religion, nationality, politics or affiliation with certain social groups. As climate change threatens everything from crop production to coastal cities, tens of millions of migrants are expected to be pushed out of areas that will no longer be habitable in the coming decades.
The World Bank estimates more than 140 million migrants will be displaced as a result of climate change by 2050. Castro’s plan is meant to address that growing crisis. But other experts worry it will come at a cost for people who are fleeing persecution in their home countries.
Migrants displaced by climate change have no formal rights in the US and internationally. While 164 countries signed a United Nations agreement in 2018 to work together to resettle those migrants, the pact is not legally enforceable and depends on voluntary participation.
The US and its international partners, however, are running out of time to determine how they will support such migrants. Glaciers are melting and sea levels are rising, flooding low-level coastal areas where migrants have already started to flee. Increasing global temperatures have led to the desertification of farmland just as growing populations demand higher food production, making the terrain unlivable. Droughts cause local conflict over control of water resources and are the biggest killer among weather-related catastrophes, according to the UN.
Castro’s plan acknowledges that the existing criteria for refugees in the US may cover some migrants who have been persecuted in “climate-driven conflicts,” but ultimately, he says it’s not enough. The US must be proactive and “cannot wait for climate change to destabilize a society before providing assistance,” he writes.
The US is also militarily powerful enough to pressure most other countries to accept climate refugees by threatening WMD strikes on all which refuse. This must also be an American duty in face of the looming crisis. The US will not be able to take all the refugees by itself, nor should it take refugees who would rather go elsewhere but who are turned away, as this would only further encourage other countries to keep turning refugees away in the knowledge that someone else will take them all. Instead, the American duty is to ensure each country either takes in all who turn up at their borders, or simply be destroyed.
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Big win:
www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jan/20/climate-refugees-cant-be-returned-home-says-landmark-un-human-rights-rulingIt is unlawful for governments to return people to countries where their lives might be threatened by the climate crisis, a landmark ruling by the United Nations human rights committee has found.
The judgment – which is the first of its kind – represents a legal “tipping point” and a moment that “opens the doorway” to future protection claims for people whose lives and wellbeing have been threatened due to global heating, experts say.
Tens of millions of people are expected to be displaced by global heating in the next decade.
Except of course UN rulings do not enforce themselves:
While the judgment is not formally binding on countries, it points to legal obligations that countries have under international law.
Ultimately, what will decide the issue is whether or not the major military powers of the world are willing to use WMDs on countries that deport refugees.
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www.msn.com/en-au/news/coronavirus/un-food-agency-chief-world-on-brink-of-a-hunger-pandemic/ar-BB132fh9UNITED NATIONS (AP) — The head of the U.N. food agency warned Tuesday that, as the world is dealing with the coronavirus pandemic, it is also “on the brink of a hunger pandemic” that could lead to “multiple famines of biblical proportions” within a few months if immediate action isn’t taken.
World Food Program Executive Director David Beasley told the U.N. Security Council that even before COVID-19 became an issue, he was telling world leaders that “2020 would be facing the worst humanitarian crisis since World War II.” That’s because of wars in Syria, Yemen and elsewhere, locust swarms in Africa, frequent natural disasters and economic crises including in Lebanon, Congo, Sudan and Ethiopia, he said.
Beasley said today 821 million people go to bed hungry every night all over the world, a further 135 million people are facing “crisis levels of hunger or worse,” and a new World Food Program analysis shows that as a result of COVID-19 an additional 130 million people “could be pushed to the brink of starvation by the end of 2020.”
He said in the video briefing that WFP is providing food to nearly 100 million people on any given day, including “about 30 million people who literally depend on us to stay alive.”
Beasley, who is recovering from COVID-19, said if those 30 million people can’t be reached, “our analysis shows that 300,000 people could starve to death every single day over a three-month period” — and that doesn’t include increased starvation due to the coronavirus.
“In a worst-case scenario, we could be looking at famine in about three dozen countries, and in fact, in 10 of these countries we already have more than one million people per country who are on the verge of starvation,” he said.
According to WFP, the 10 countries with the worst food crises in 2019 were Yemen, Congo, Afghanistan, Venezuela, Ethiopia, South Sudan, Syria, Sudan, Nigeria and Haiti.
The borders have to be back open before this hits. This is why I keep saying that the idea of using WMDs against states which close their borders to refugees must be taken seriously. The numbers who could die from starvation if denied entry dwarfs the numbers of likely WMD deaths (to say nothing of the latter being more deserved than the former).
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www.newscientist.com/article/2242855-climate-change-has-already-made-parts-of-the-world-too-hot-for-humans/#ixzz6LyKOeunUGlobal warming has already made parts of the world hotter than the human body can withstand, decades earlier than climate models expected this to happen.
Jacobabad in Pakistan and Ras al Khaimah in the United Arab Emirates have both repeatedly crossed a deadly threshold for one or two hours at a time, an analysis of weather station data found.
Wet bulb temperature (TW) is a measure of heat and humidity, taken from a thermometer covered in a water-soaked cloth. Beyond a threshold of 35°C TW the body is unable to cool itself by sweating, but lower levels can still be deadly, as was seen in the 2003 European heatwave that killed thousands without passing 28°C TW.
A US-UK team analysed weather station data across the world, and found that the frequency of wet bulb temperatures exceeding temperatures between 27°C TW and 35°C TW had all doubled since 1979. Though 35°C TW is thought of as a key threshold, harm and even death is possible at lower temperatures, so the team included these in their analysis.
Billions of people could live in areas too hot for humans by 2070, study says
Hong Kong (CNN)If the planet continues to warm at current levels over the next 50 years, up to 3 billion people could be living in areas that are too hot for humans, a new study has found.
For thousands of years, humans have lived within a narrow "climate niche" where average temperatures are ideal for society to flourish, and conditions favorable to grow food and keep livestock.
In findings published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on Monday, an international team of archaeologists, climate scientists and ecologists said that if heat-trapping greenhouse gas emissions continue at the current pace, by 2070 billions of people will be living in conditions hotter than those that have allowed life to thrive for the past 6,000 years.
www.cnn.com/2020/05/05/world/global-warming-climate-niche-temperatures-intl-hnk/index.htmlnationalpost.com/news/world/swathes-of-middle-east-and-north-africa-will-be-too-hot-for-humans-as-early-as-the-2040s-study
Good thing Judeo-Westerners put in all that effort helping Jews colonize Palestine, a land in which perhaps no one can live on with in 40 to 50 years.... Brilliant!!!