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Comment by walrus01 | Hacker News Reader

I think the biggest immediate change we will see from climate change and "climate emergencies" is massive migration of people. If sea level rise affects a significant portion of Bangladesh, or Rajasthan remains at 50C weather for long periods of time, millions of people will become climate refugees.

https://www.unhcr.org/climate-change-and-disasters.html

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/nov/02/climate-...

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The Arab Spring and the Syrian war arguably started due to climate change. Crops fail due to extreme weather conditions and farmers migrate to cities. Not enough work or supplies leads to civil unrest. Civil unrest leads to war, which leads to migration to countries with jobs available and more temperate climates. The article doesn’t mention it, but how many of the 5 million living in Chennai have moved to find places that are easier to live in? When will millions start to move out of Chennai if the situation carries on like this?

I took a pretty boring poetry class a few years ago. Most of the poems other students (including myself) were boring and mostly just written for the sake of getting the assignment done.

There was this one girl in the class who wrote a poem titled, "Millions," or something along those lines. Anyway, at the end of each stanza, she wrote "and millions of people flooded inland."

It was super powerful to me and was the first time I really considered what a massive problem that's going to be. I don't even know how we could prepare for it.

This current crisis is 90% mismanagement and ineptitude, 10% climate change and that's probably being very generous.

You can't cite a source because this is opinion presented as statistics.

I can't find it but someone from one of the zones in India that is suffering from severe water shortages said just this (what you mentioned).

They said everything from filling in lakes to leaking water pipes and a corrupt local government are more to blame than climate change.

What's interesting is that even private enterprise can't fix this problem since there is probably a water cartel already in place to profit from the situation with the local government officials in on the take.

Why hasn't the local population held their government responsible or is this not possible?

India is a super corrupt place where faith in government services is low. There's also a kind of apathy involved where long term corruption has narrowed people's horizons about what government can achieve.

Right, so the way to look at it is that humanity has always suffered from an epidemic of mismanagement and ineptitude, with no vaccine in sight (though democracy and education certainly help!). Now on top of that epidemic, we are faced with an additional disaster and we'll have to somehow survive both at the same time.

Yes, and it will make the Syrian refugee crisis look like a joke in comparison. There will be extreme backlash from the right and even center depending on the volume of migrants. It will not be pretty.

Why was this downvoted? There's plenty of evidence in the linked articles.

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