All this talk about "sea level rise creating masses of refugees"...
Sea level rise is measured in millimeters per year. It is currently said to be very fast, at over 3 mm/yr... Well, say it's 4 mm, to make it extreme! That's 4 cm in a decade, 40 cm in a century. In a CENTURY!....
How many houses that people live in today are more than 100 years old? Very few, right? 40 cm of sea level rise means the sea line moves a number of meters inland. But the sea line already changes a lot, between high tide and low tide, normal tide and super full moon tide, not to mention storms that always happen now and then! Thus, nobody builds a house JUST by the water line. And thus, by the time it's time to demolish your house and build a new one, because the old one is approaching 100 years of age and is falling apart, you'll build your new house a few more meters inland and you'll be fine for another 100 years.
Even the worst, most extreme outcome of the worst, most extreme IPCC scenario, predicts less than 90 cm sea level rise in 100 years:
"But some countries are already below the sea level in large areas!", you may say. True, but they're managing, and we're still talking about a very small and slow change here. Plenty of time to adjust your strategies.
"But the sea rises faster in some areas than in others!", you may say. True. But even if it's 40 cm (or 90 cm) in 50 years instead of in 100 years, that's STILL plenty of time to adapt and move your buildings inland.
"But some countries, like Bangladesh or Djibouti, don't really have much room to move inland! They are already over-populated, and large parts of their territory will be lost if the sea rises!", you may say. Well, this is a very interesting argument, isn't it? Let's talk about that!
So we agreed that moving your house a few meters every 50 or 100 years is not really a big problem in itself, and certainly nothing that should be termed "fleeing". But what if that space is already occupied? What if the entire country is already full? Then, you would want to settle a few meters into the next country, wouldn't you? But you can't... because you're not a citizen there. So it seems to me that the real problem here is not actually the sea, but our human idea of "national territory". Had this slow sea level rise happened in the Stone Age, nobody would even have noticed it! Nobody would live long enough to see any change with their own eyes, and buildings didn't stand for more than a few years, anyway (if even). And of course, there were no countries! People kept moving around with the changing conditions all the time. In fact, since the last glacial maximum, around 18,000 years ago, the sea level is said to have risen with astonishing 130 m, and the Stone Age saw over 30 such glacials come and go. With every one of them, people would have had to move large distances. And if we didn't have national territories, we would, too!
The term "anthropogenic climate crises" gets a new meaning, doesn't it? Yes, we created the crisis, but not by changing the climate!... By building a rigid social structure that cannot handle a changing climate. So wouldn't it be fair to discuss changing the system as a way to solve the problem? Instead of sending billions of dollars to countries for lowering or not increasing their CO2 emissions, maybe we could discuss a system of land sharing? That if the sea has eaten 20 square kilometers of a country, this could be shared between the nearby inland countries, so that the net loss will be maybe just 2 square kilometers or so instead?
"But this will never happen!", you may say. If so, I must object that this argument falls rather flat, if at the same time, you want to stop climate change...! THAT, if anything, will never happen! But let alone climate change, even just the idea of the entire world stopping using fossil fuels while they are still abundant, cheap and easily available is something I could easily argue "will never happen!"... but alarmists still invest a lot of money and efforts into this, don't they! Why the preference for one 'impossible thing' over another? If you think about it, 'countries' are something that has only existed for a split second in the history of humanity; There's nothing saying that this system will necessarily be the one prevailing to the end of time. And
fossil fuels, on the other hand, save lives. With their help, some regions in the world have doubled or tripled their life length, and cut child mortality down to a fraction of what it used to be... But that's the thing you say we will give up more easily?
Obviously, it would be much more convenient for us all if the sea level stayed exactly where it is, no doubt about that. And so, if indeed human activities affect the sea level, then this is something that should be factored in, when we decide on our line of action. However, I say "factored in", because as mentioned, there are other factors! The extended life length and reduced child mortality must be factored in, too! The questions we must ask ourselves are therefore
e.g. "Is it better for Djibouti that the sea level stays exactly where it is, and they remain on a life expectancy of 67 years and a child mortality of 57 per 1,000? Or indeed, that the latter values worsen? Or is it better that they use fossil fuels to reach Swedish style life expectancy of 83 years and child mortality of 3 per 1,000, and then solve the possible land problem if and when it happens some several hundred years into the future?"
And in any case, just because sea level rise could, indeed, become an inconvenience in some places, this does not in any way justify the alarmist and greatly misleading talk of "masses of refugees"!... There won't be any masses of refugees as a consequence of sea level rise. There could only possibly be problems with over-population of certain areas as national territories shrink, which could be solved by a more pragmatic approach to national territories, or indeed by the use of levees and other technologies, as is already happening in
e.g. the Netherlands and New Orleans.
----------------------------------
Further reading:
