Friday, April 24, 2015

No Room in the Lifeboats

In view of the catastrophe in the Mediterranean, where more than 800 trafficked African migrants died in shipwreck, I report the following statistics and prognoses, from the UN's 2013 IPCC assessment report, culled by French Left leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon on his blog today:


  • Climate change will indirectly increase the risk of violent conflicts such as civil wars and inter-group confrontation while intensifying underlying causes of conflict such as poverty;
  • 40% of the earth will experience desertification, affecting 2 billion people;
  • Global production will decrease by a net 2% per decade, despite all the offsetting technical advances, and in the face of a need for increases in food production of 14% per decade;
  • In 2013 22 million people were displaced from their homes by climate change, a small harbinger of the climate migrations to come.
As the EU prepares to strengthen its border controls while reducing by 2/3 its rescue funding, as Americans in the southwest and elsewhere clamor for stronger fences and border patrols, and Australia deploys its navy to turn back all migrants from its territorial waters, we have to wonder what it would be like to live in a world where disasters like the one off the coast of Libya are an everyday occurrence.

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