Climate change mass migration implications: "On The Move"

Read about this in Science Magazine.  Goes to my "Covering Climate" riffs.

 

Photo from the Science Magazine review. Been there, seen that fiery, smoky sky.

2018 wildfire haze, in front of my house in Antioch, looking W. toward SF mid-day.

 

AMAZON BLURB FOR THE BOOK

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice

"

 

On the Move explains how we got here and where we're headed. It's crucial guide to the world we are creating." —Elizabeth Kolbert, author of Under a White Sky and The Sixth Extinction



 

A vivid, journalistic account of how climate change will make American life as we know it unfeasible.Humanity is on the precipice of a great climate migration, and Americans will not be spared. Tens of millions of people are likely to be driven from the places they call home. Poorer communities will be left behind, while growth will surge in the cities and regions most attractive to climate refugees. America will be changed utterly.



 

Abrahm Lustgarten’s On the Move is the definitive account of what this massive population shift might look like. As he shows, the United States will be rendered unrecognizable by four unstoppable forces: wildfires in the West; frequent flooding in coastal regions; extreme heat and humidity in the South; and droughts that will make farming all but impossible across much of the nation.



 

Reporting from the front lines of climate migration, Lustgarten explains how a pattern of shortsighted policies encouraged millions to settle in vulnerable parts of the country, and introduces us to homeowners in California, insurance customers in Florida, and ranchers in Colorado who are being forced to make the agonizing choice of when, not whether, to leave. Employing the most current climate data and predictive models, he shows how America’s population will be squeezed northward into a shrinking triangle of land stretching from Tennessee to Maine to the Great Lakes. The places many of us now call home are at risk, and On the Move reveals how we’ll deal with the consequences.

These are the opening book lines from the Prologue:

 

I totally get it. In 2017, my late younger daughter was diagnosed with Stage IV pancreatic cancer. There were days when her chemo sessions had to be canceled because the area wildfire smoke was so heavy in the air. Four months after she died, I had to have aortic valve replacement heart surgery. My postop PT rehab sessions had to be canceled several times for the same reason. In 2019 we left California and moved to Baltimore—only to then get slammed with COVID-19 shutdowns the following year, and then persisent fire smoke from massive Canadian wildfires.

Below, the author's cool web page (click the image).

FROM SCIENCE MAGAZINE:

American climate migration
Increasingly inhospitable conditions will change the nation’s demography, argues a journalist

Currently, less than 1% of Earth is too hot to support human life, but researchers estimate that by 2070 nearly 20% of the planet’s surface will be outside humanity’s comfort zone. The “bubble of unlivability” could include up to a third of the people on Earth, and existing inequalities will likely increase conflict. In the United States, vulnerable populations will be prone to disproportionate risk.

On the Move, by journalist Abrahm Lustgarten, is a poignant and meticulously researched exploration of climate change and both its imminent and long-term effects on human migration in the US. Through analysis, personal narratives, and projected future scenarios, Lustgarten unveils the stark reality of a world on the brink of massive demographic shifts driven by an increasingly inhospitable climate.

Lustgarten begins with a personal account of the moment he recognized the climate crisis as a reality that no region will escape. His usual view of the San Francisco skyline was replaced by “a sepia-toned, smoke-filled universe,” he writes. “Just twelve miles away as the crow flies, behind the ridge of parched and brittle redwoods I could see from my window, the Point Reyes National Seashore was burning. Tall gray towers of smoke billowed upward, raining down soot.” He then details how climate-driven migrations are not a future possibility but rather a current event, with historical precedents and emerging patterns that signal a profound shift in how and where people can live.

Lustgarten predicts that Americans will see an influx of migrants from the south and will experience considerable internal migration as well. Increasingly frequent and severe wildfires, extreme weather patterns, and sea level rise will make some areas uninhabitable. “The poorest neighborhoods— many of them predominantly Black and Latinx—are in the lowest-lying areas, and they will suffer first,” he observes.

The book begins with an analysis of climate change pressures, providing a glimpse into what life might look like within several decades. Here, Lustgarten highlights the risks many Americans have unknowingly accepted by living in vulnerable areas and how economic policies have exacerbated these risks.

In subsequent chapters, Lustgarten projects the demographic shifts that are likely to occur within the United States. These include coastal residents moving inland because of rising sea levels and hurricanes, as well as migration from the drought-stricken Midwest to regions with stable water sources...

Amid the growing body of literature on climate change, Lustgarten’s book provides a crucial examination of the impacts—realized and projected—in our own backyards and how these changes are remaking society. Importantly, it is both a call to action and a blueprint for how to weather the coming storm, highlighting historical injustices and charting an equitable path forward. review

No "praise-criticism-praise" dings. 100% positive review assessment. I've just begun reading the book. 

 

It's reminding me that I am remiss, in not yet finishing Michael E. Mann's latest:

We live on a Goldilocks planet. It has water, an oxygen-rich atmosphere, and an ozone layer that protects life from damaging ultraviolet rays. It is neither too cold nor too hot, seemingly just right for life. Despite our ongoing search—which, with the recent advent of the James Webb telescope, now extends out nearly fourteen billion light years—we have thus far found no other planet in the universe with such benevolent conditions. It’s almost as if this planet, Earth, was custom made for us. And yet it wasn’t.

For the vast majority of its 4.54 billion years, Earth has proven it can manage just fine without human beings. The first hominids—proto-humans—emerged a little more than two million years ago. Only during the past 200,000 years have modern humans walked the Earth. And human civilizations have existed for only about 6000 or so years, 0.0001 percent of Earth’s history—a fleeting moment in geological time.

What is it that made this fragile yet benevolent moment of ours possible? Ironically, it’s the very same thing that now threatens us: climate change…

Mann, Michael E.. Our Fragile Moment (p. 8). PublicAffairs. Kindle Edition.

apropos of On The Move, Dr. Mann notes

The fact that the rate of warming today far exceeds that during the PETM presents its own unique challenges. We saw that mammals and other species migrated away from regions that became too warm, or literally—as in the curious case of the shrinking horses—adapted to the warmth. But the rate of warming today, as we’ve seen, is more than ten times greater, exceeding the rate at which plants and animals can be expected to migrate or adapt. And adding insult to injury, we’ve built all sorts of obstacles—in the form of cities, highways, and other infrastructure—that stand in the way of likely migration routes.

Now what about a worst-case scenario, where we actually regress, reversing the climate policies we’ve already enacted, proceeding instead to burn all of the reasonably accessible fossil fuel reserves? The state-of-the-art model projections used in the most recent assessments of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) indicate a most-likely warming, in that case, of about 7°F by 2100, plateauing in 2300 to an approximate 14°F warming. That is a huge, devastating amount of warming, but it’s not a “runaway” greenhouse scenario, nor is it a PETM hothouse scenario. What if we instead take the most extreme end of the IPCC simulation range? In that worst-case scenario we’re looking instead at as much as 11°F by 2100, plateauing to about 23°F in 2300. That would put global average temperatures at around 83°F two centuries from now. That scenario is extremely unlikely as it assumes a reversal of climate policy progress already made and is based on the most extreme of the more than fifty climate models analyzed by the IPCC. Though it still falls several degrees short of the PETM, it’s uncomfortably close, and possibly hot enough that much of the planet would be uninhabitably hot for humans and other large mammals. So yeah, if we try really, really hard, we could make at least most of this planet unlivable for human beings… [Our Fragile Moment, pp, 182-183]

Ugh.

HEAT, DROUGHTS, FLOODS,  FAMINE, WARS?

WHAT OF MASS MIGRATION POLITICS?

… [Stephen] Miller and another Breitbart editor, Julia Hahn, became close. With rosy cheeks and fair skin, Hahn had grown up in Beverly Hills, another wealthy hub of Los Angeles County. During a social gathering at Hahn’s apartment, Miller didn’t want to talk about anything except immigration. “That was all he was fixated on,” McHugh says, “even in a social gathering.”

He recommended that Breitbart do a story about the racist-dystopian book The Camp of the Saints. It was the book that helped inspire Tanton and May to create anti-immigration think tanks, the one filled with degrading descriptions of refugees, such as “kinky-haired, swarthy-skinned, long-despised phantoms,” and “teeming ants toiling for the white man’s comfort.”

Miller suggested that Breitbart “point out the parallels” between the novel and real life. Days later, Julia Hahn wrote a four-thousand-word ode to the book. She compared Pope Francis to Raspail’s fictional pope who preaches universal love, suggesting the book was prophetic. “Pope Francis is urging America to throw open her borders,” she wrote. (In fact, he had urged the United States to treat migrants “in a way which is always humane.”) Hahn compared Hollywood celebrities to the book’s “celebrity elites” who “throw bacchanalian bashes to celebrate and raise funds” for refugees. She likened Rubio to “one of the most dangerous characters . ... ‘full of the milk of human kindness,’ ” Albert Durfort, who fights for an immigration policy that will “seal their doom.” She wrote: “Importing millions of migrants from failed countries with different values and customs will not raise standards of living but will instead merely remake the West in the image of those failed countries.”

After that, Bannon repeatedly cited the book to describe the situation at the border. “It’s not a migration. It’s really an invasion. I call it the Camp of the Saints,” he said.

Guerrero, Jean. Hatemonger: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, and the White Nationalist Agenda (pp. 149-150). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition. 

It behooves us to recall the explicit 2024 promises of The Verminator, should he return to The White House, along with his seething xenophobic White Nationalist in Chief Stephen Miller.

Stay tuned. More shortly...

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