There could be 1.2B climate refugees by 2050 | Hacker News Reader

There could be 1.2B climate refugees by 2050

zurich.com

37 pointslmc47 comments

there could be meteorite destroying life on Earth by 2040

just read what these alarmists claimed 10 or 20 years ago to get perspective

Maybe share a link while you're at it?

and even if thats an over-estimate, how many hundreds of millions are ok

Very important problem. And the effect it will have on xenophobia and support for anti-democratic politics should not be ignored. The 20th century will feel like an age of innocence.

That sounds like Newspeak to me. Insofar as climate refugees may trigger “xenophobia” it will be elites trying to overcome democratic resistance to open borders. In the US, all it took was a modest amount of scarcity ($5 gas and a bit of inflation) for the GOP to pull back ahead in the polls.

I find your point extremely interesting, though I think I'm missing one of your core assumptions. When you highlight the term "democratic," it seems to me as though you implicitly switched away from the ethical perspective of nequo's comment based on the assumption that universal human rights should be respected no matter what. Instead, you seem to be working from a legal perspective based on American law and ethical theory surrounding it. Do you mind expanding on this?

You have to distinguish between “democracy” and “liberal democracy.” Democracy doesn’t inherently require “rights.” And in general “rights” are invoked to curtail democracy. For example, Germany is more democratic than the US, insofar as it leaves far more things to the public to decide—everything from abortion to guns to campaign finance to same sex marriage—without invoking “rights” to override the public’s decisions. The problem with sweeping invocations of “universal human rights” is that in practice they’re not so universally accepted, and tend to be invoked to override the popular will.

My quibble with OP is that he’s using “anti-democratic” to mean exactly the opposite. The concern is not that a minority of voters will force countries to exclude climate refugees. To the contrary, the concern is that a majority of voters will seek to exclude refugees, in contravention to, as you put it, migrants’ “rights.” But who decided those rights exist? Most people in the world would not agree anyone else has a right to live in their country. Even insofar as they might welcome refugees, they would see that as an act of magnanimity, not “rights.”

Illiberal democracy is not an American invention. See Hungary. The truth is that people can vote in whichever government they like. As long as that government still ensures free and fair elections it's still a democracy.

Whether or not Hungary meets this definition in 2022, however, is an open question.

There's more to democracy than the tyranny of the majority. Didn't Hungary (and Poland) also destroy their independent court system?

A pure democracy is literally tyranny of the majority. Anything restricting that tyranny is anti-democratic. Wholly necessary as well in view.

Most people don't define democracy that way. For example, consider the EU's reaction to Poland and Hungary destroying their court systems, not to mention refusing to obey EU court decisions.

The EU isn't a democracy.

You have a point. "Anti-liberal-democracy" would probably be more accurate to say. But talking about "liberal" and "democratic" is hard in a country where this is immediately associated with one of the two major political parties.

What I meant was that our ideas of due process and equality before the law will be seen as much less desirable when those things will be the obstacle to deporting large numbers of refugees. Those things are also fundamental to democracy.

I understand what you mean by “liberal democracy” and I agree that’s a more accurate description.

You might find Shadi Hamid’s writing on illiberal democracy interesting: https://wisdomofcrowds.substack.com/p/first-draft-is-there-a...

A lifeboat is only useful so long as it doesn't sink.

We are headed to a world where accepting all refugees just means your country collapses faster.

Unless you're Canada or Russia the current century will not be a good one.

> We are headed to a world where accepting all refugees just means your country collapses faster.

Do you have a source for this statement? Studies of immigration to the US usually find that it's extremely positive for the country.

>Studies of immigration to the US usually find that it's extremely positive for the country.

Immigrants are highly motivated people who want to have a better life and are willing to take huge risks. Refugees are normal everyday people who are literally running for their lives and would rather not.

Comparing the two groups is extremely insensitive to both of them.

Five minutes of googling pulled this up. There are plenty of academic articles refuting Open Borders. https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2021-opinion-optional-pra...

“Wage suppression. Because foreign STEM graduates are concentrated in certain occupations, their impact on wages is stark even if absolute numbers aren’t huge. In 2018, some 53,000 foreign students earned degrees in computer science or related engineering fields, two-thirds of which were master’s degrees, according to calculations by Hal Salzman, a professor at Rutgers University’s John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development, and Khudodod Khudododov, a research analyst, using data from the National Center for Education Statistics. That year, the U.S. had between 96,000 and 143,000 openings in IT occupations that typically went to candidates with a bachelor’s degree or higher in computer science or engineering, they found. So, OPT participants accounted for anywhere from one-third to one-half of new hires. If you add H-1B candidates, up to two-thirds of openings went to guest workers, according to Salzman.”

Positive in what sense, and positive for who? My family immigrated from a country with a rigidly hierarchical social structure, where they were landed elites. That made us natural Obama voters, allies against German and Scots-Irish Americans (you know, “rednecks” who “cling to their guns and religion”). I don’t begrudge anyone in West Virginia thinking that immigration and the resulting cultural change has been bad for them. It has.

Geography is only half of geopolitics. I predict you are correct about Canada.

I'm actually less sure about Canada. The US would annex them before it lets them have an independent foreign policy.

Russia and Canada are big, but Canada is lots of muskeg and much or Russia is inhospitable, -30 in the Winter and 35 in the Summer. Putin was giving people 200 hectares for free to move into Siberia --few takers.

That's the whole climate-change part - it's not going to be inhospitable for long. Global warming affects the poles more than temperate regions - climate models predict up to 10C warming in the arctic winter. As the permafrost melts the biome is going to change dramatically, although the transition is likely to be quite messy.

When the Tundra defrosts it's muck, things sink, vehicles get stuck. And it's freaking hot in the Summer already, so turn it up and I don't know what it is, but it's not hospitable.

Sure, but if the tundra defrosts for long enough, you start getting evaporation, aquifers, drainage, all the normal water cycle stuff that happens in more temperate parts of the globe.

I want to offer a hopeful rephrasing: "The effect it could have ... should be a call for us to strengthen migrants' rights today."

Action is better than hope. Do you think the rights granted today will still be seen as legitimate in 2050 and not be repealed or overturned by an anti-establishment political movement? What can ensure that they will be?

Please make the connection between xenophobia and democracy

EDIT: I agree that it looks like things could get very bad. Let's hope for best possible outcomes.

Xenophobia can exist anywhere. But it is a notable turn for modern democracies which seemed to have gotten past that.

From the paper "Right-wing extremism/radicalism: reconstructing the concept" [1]:

> Although nationalism, racism and xenophobia are all discrete concepts, policies of exclusionary nationalism and cultural homogeneity often go hand-in-hand with racism and/or xenophobia. Homogeneity is usually advocated on the grounds that there are irreconcilable natural differences between groups of people and that these groups should not mix – i.e. according to a racist doctrine.

> It is the values inherent in liberal and pluralist democracy and the procedures and institutions that sustain these values that particularly stick in the craw of right-wing extremists/radicals. Indeed, Carter defines right-wing extremism by reference to two elements: ‘a rejection of the fundamental values, procedures and institutions of the democratic constitutional state’, and ‘a rejection of the principle of fundamental human equality’.

[1] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13569317.2018.1...

You’re creating a false dichotomy between multiculturalism and right-wing extremism. Most people in the world believe in “exclusionary nationalism and cultural homogeneity” insofar as they believe that their ethnocultural group should have a country of their own to govern according to their culture and values. My home country of Bangladesh was created on this principle. Most people in Asia and the Middle East take it as a given. That’s what the UN Covenant on Civil and Political Rights calls “the right of self determination.”

That doesn’t make them right wing extremists! Bangladeshis (and Japanese and Chinese) don’t believe that they’re superior to everyone else and that entitles them to rule over others. That’s what crosses into right wing extremism.

> Most people in Asia and the Middle East take it as a given.

It's funny that you give Asia and the Middle East as examples, because many of the countries and borders there are the result of European colonialism and not "natural" borders between ethnocultural groups. Take India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Iraq , Syria, Afghanistan, China as examples - they're either with significant ethnic or religious minorities (often multiple of them, like Syria and Iraq, China, Myanmar) or straight up with hundreds or thousands of different ethnic groups (India, Indonesia).

Right, and folks in these countries are constantly cursing the British for that. Few people are happy that they have to share a body politic with different groups. The Hindu population in Bangladesh has dropped by half since independence. India is moving towards integrating its disparate groups along the lines of Hindu identity, marginalizing it’s substantial Muslim minority. And the Chinese have decided that nearly its whole population is “Han” and nearly all speak “dialects” of Chinese in order to erase these internal divisions. In Syria, the Alawite minority has gained power during the Assad dynasty and is taking it out on the majority for past oppression. In Iraq, voting in Parliamentary elections falls largely along ethnic lines.

I was answering a question asking for a link between xenophobia and democracy. This article establishes the link through an analysis of right-wing supremacy in the United States. Could you explain how your reply applies that that context?

However, you do touch on an interesting point regarding the link between Nationalism and democracy. This review paper [1] might be of interest to you. The underpinning question seems to be the moral implications of this relationship in regards to climate change, and I'd love to hear you thoughts on it.

[1] https://ethz.ch/content/dam/ethz/special-interest/gess/cis/c...

My point is that this analysis conflates ordinary democratic nationalism with anti-democratic right wing extremism.

Most people in the world don’t like outsiders, and don’t like the idea of people from outside their country immigrating and changing their country’s culture. Take for example the Japanese. Maybe that makes them “xenophobic” (although I don’t think even that’s accurate) but they certainly aren’t “anti-democratic.” To the contrary, it’s a Democratic sentiment. The people broadly agree that they like their culture and it wouldn’t be good for outsiders to change it. India is a another good example. Hindu nationalism is highly democratic, insofar as it’s broadly supported by the body politic. By contrast, Indian secularism is anti-democratic. It was established by an elite, British educated minority, and is crumbling as ordinary people attain greater political power in the country: https://unherd.com/2021/04/the-culture-wars-of-post-colonial...

In some people their xenophobic feelings are innately so strong, or can be stoked to become so strong that those people will go to great lengths to keep outsiders outside, even destroying their own democracy in the process.

There also could be zero.

Downvotes don't make this statement any less of a possibility. As CO2 increases plants use less water in respiration, making deserts greener. This is part of the reason the Earth is becoming greener despite human activity. For some reason climate change activists always ignore mitigating forces.

How much does this greening offset the other effects of climate change, such as increased severe weather, ecosystem loss, and water scarcity, among other things [1] ?

[1] https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg2/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6...

Well technically if you take the vigorousness of life in Earth's biomes as your metric, climate change has been a net positive.

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/carbon-dioxide-fer...

This brings up the question, why should that be the metric to measure the effects of climate change with, as compared to the other metrics we go by?

There are already many climate refugees.

Probably not 0, but it'll be closer to 0 than 1.2B. We have solutions.

Yah we have solutions but they won't be applied by any competent groups of people.

Seriously, look at silicon Valley and all of the garbage they produced with all their knowledge.

Silicon Valley fucked it all up.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKiq5EwkzDg

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