The Guardian view on climate change and social disruption: how one form of chaos breeds another

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/mar/08/guardian-view-climate-change-social-disruption

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In 2014, around 3,500 boat people died trying to cross the Mediterranean to enter Europe. They risked their lives and lost. According to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees around 218,000 people got to Europe “by irregular means” last year. They took a chance and survived.

Among them were those fleeing the violence in Syria, and of these, a proportion must be counted as climate refugees. Possibly because of global warming, the years 2007 to 2010 saw the most sustained drought on record in the Fertile Crescent. Agriculture collapsed, and around 1.5 million people abandoned failing farms in the countryside for Damascus and other cities. That is, they became climate refugees. Livestock was obliterated, cereal prices doubled, and children started to sicken with nutrition-related illnesses. The 2011 Syrian uprising against the Assad regime began in the crowded settlements of climate refugees.

That label is a new one, but the idea is not just old, but prehistoric. The animating concern of the Guardian’s Keep it in the Ground series is that burning existing stocks of oil, gas and coal could, as Naomi Klein has written, result in cities drowning, citizens fleeing storms and droughts, and whole cultures being swallowed by the sea. Don’t dismiss this as wild speculation: anthropology and archeology are demonstrating how climate chaos has produced exactly such effects in the past.

The first migration into Europe and Asia by homo sapiens out of Africa has been linked to the intermittent greening and parching of what’s now Saudi Arabia, in line with the ups and down of various ice ages. Rapid climate change obliterated one culture in Inner Mongolia more than 4,000 years ago, when it appears some of the displaced may have moved south and helped found what became China. Climate scientists have recently linked the collapse of the Mediterranean civilisation of the late bronze age to water shortages and hunger. Similarly, the failures of the Harappan civilisation in the Indus valley, and the Pueblo culture of the American southwest have been linked to drought. The Assyrian empire centred on Nineveh – remnants of which are now being demolished by Islamic State – fell in the 7th century BC, a time of climate stress.

So the phenomenon of the climate refugee is not new. What is new is that, this time, the problem is of human making. Families are being driven from their land and livelihoods by changes effectively engineered by human action: the profligate burning within the last two centuries, of fossil fuels buried in the 60m years of the carboniferous period. Governments have repeatedly been warned that this is a problem that can only get worse, that drastic and concerted action is needed, and that by 2050 up to 150 million people could be displaced. In 2010 alone, according to UN International Secretariat for Disaster Reduction figures, 150 million were affected by floods. Flood refugees get the chance to go home when the waters recede. But in the decades to come, as rainfall patterns shift and the seas rise, some people – in Bangladesh, in Florida, in the Nile delta – will see their homes submerged forever. Islanders will find their coral atolls untenable. California is now in the grip of catastrophic drought linked to climate change and – remember John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath – California is now the most populous US state, thanks at least in part to settlers who walked off dusty Oklahoma farms eight decades ago. If California’s vineyards and orchards continue to desiccate, then some could start to consider the return journey, for the same reason that Syrian and Libyan families take to the perilous seas: because there is no choice.

There are many reasons for civil war and social conflict, but extremes of temperature and drought often seem to be at play. The message from the packed, unseaworthy boats bobbing on the Mediterranean is that people are prepared to die to get to Europe, and Europeans are not prepared to kill to stop them. There is more to come. If the climate modellers are correct, then in a few decades, the climate refugees won’t only be outsiders, trying to get in. As temperatures soar and southern Europe dries up, people could one day start to abandon their farms and orchards and move north to seek sustenance and water. We really are all in this together.