Climate Migration Has Begun: The Emergency is Here

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They were probably using the backhoe to build a sea wall. But at some point you have to give up.

In recent weeks, four — count them, four — major, reputable news organizations have run major stories on the beginning of the greatest disruption of American life that has ever occurred: climate migration. Attention: these stories all recognize not that this disruption is possible if we don’t do something soon, but that it has already begun. 

Take a minute to let the headlines, and their sources, sink in:

• ProPublica — The Great Climate Migration: Climate Change Will Force a New American Migration;
• The Guardian — ‘We’re moving to higher ground’: America’s era of climate mass migration is here;
•  CNN — As people flee climate change on the coasts, this Midwest city is trying to become a safe haven;
• Quartz — Americans’ best option in the face of climate change is to retreat from the coasts.

The ProPublica piece is the most exhaustive, and includes a well researched set of maps showing present and future threat levels for the country. It begins with a review of last summer, during which searing heat in the southwest, raging wildfires throughout California and elsewhere, spreading drought in the breadbasket, relentlessly rising sea levels along both coasts, vicious hurricanes and tornadoes in the southeast and south, and floods in the heartland all set new records. Each of the factors made, and continue to make, increasing chinks of the country uninhabitable.

Denial, about this, too, is rampant. People continue to move toward the threats, continue to build expensive homes in remote, tinder-dry California forests, on the ever-more-frequently submerged coasts and then, thanks to a generous government subsidy to the insurance industry, rebuild the homes in the same places when they are destroyed.

But increasingly, people are giving up, as the Guardian details. The real estate market in Florida, much of which is increasingly affected by so-called “sunny day flooding” because of rising sea levels,  has changed dramatically, devaluing beachfront properties in favor of structures inland, on  higher ground. (The mayor of South Miami is actively looking for a fallback residence in Washington D.C.) Several small towns in Alaska, along the West Coast and on barrier islands elsewhere are actively considering physically moving inland. 

So far, the movement of climate refugees within the United States is a trickle. And so far, the more significant migrations — from Central America northward to the United States, and from Africa and the MIddle East northward to Europe — are not widely understood as climate migrations, which they are. And so far, denial and clinging to false hope continues to trump — so to speak — any and all significant action that might be taken to mitigate the gathering storm. As ProPublica observed:  

“The population shift gathering pace is so sprawling that it may rival anything in US history. “Including all climate impacts it isn’t too far-fetched to imagine something twice as large as the Dust Bowl,” said Jesse Keenan, a climate adaptation expert at Harvard University, referencing the 1930s upheaval in which 2.5 million people moved from the dusty, drought-ridden plains to California.”

Personally, I think this is a severe underestimate. The Dust Bowl migration was from one specific region to California. What is coming is a flight from every coastal and Southern state, inland and northward, in numbers so enormous that they will threaten to overwhelm every inland and northern community into which they roll like a human tsunami. 

It’s an emergency that is not coming soon. It’s starting now.