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American Exodus
Climate Change and the Coming Flight for Survival
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Beschreibung:
Seeking higher ground – how rising global temperatures will lead to unprecedented waves of human migration
Some scientists predict the sea will rise 1.5 meters before 2100, but rapidly melting polar ice caps could make the real amount much higher. In the coming century, intensifying storms will batter our coasts, and droughts and heat events will be annual threats. All this will occur as population grows, and declining water resources desiccate agriculture. What will happen when the United States cannot provide food or fresh water for the overheated, overcrowded cities where 80% of Americans currently live?
The good news is that this overall decline of habitability in the mid-latitudes will be matched by increases in the carrying capacity of sparsely populated lands above the 49th parallel. This phenomenon suggests that waves of environmental refugees will travel poleward as southern conditions worsen. Our northern lands are our Noah's ark - a vital refuge against the moment of mankind's greatest need.
In this compelling cautionary tale, Slade argues that we are entering a long period of global desperation which will be characterized by human migration on an unprecedented scale. American Exodus is a frighteningly believable survey of our immediate future, but it ends on a note of hope: we may yet survive the coming century of climatic change if we act now to safeguard our shelter of last resort.
Giles Slade – American Exodus
Chapter-by-Chapter Description
Chapter One: America’s First Refugees
The combination of environmental events that we know collectively as the Dust Bowl provides a variety of useful lessons for contemporary Americans struggling to understand and accept climate change.
When the rolling clouds of dust struck the Great Plains in 1933, it was as though a biblical plague had visited the country in the worst of times. The nation responded with a grudging, meagre charity.
It is this lack of generosity –this first American example of ‘lifeboat ethics’-- that contains powerful lessons for future migrants or environmental refugees. There are deep implications for our children’s century since the decades that follow will be a period of the most profound climate change in the history of our species including the ice age. –
This chapter addresses these questions:
• Who will move?
• Who will move first?
• Where will they go?
• How will they be received? and
• How will they make their way once they get there?
Chapter Two: Diasporas of Coastal Flooding.
In a world of increasing hurricane activity, much of America’s low lying coastal plain is in peril from flooding. Still there is no national plan to harden endangered areas or to voluntarily relocate American citizens and their infrastructure. This chapter looks at the disaster of Hurricane Katrina to determine the human costs of such last minute crisis management in and around New York City where, once flooded, the 6,000 miles of sewers will turn America’s cultural capital into a very sour apple unfit for human habitation.
Chapter Three: Heat Waves.
Heat waves have disastrous human costs. Numerically, they are the worst environmental killer of human beings. Heat stroke kills about 1,000 Americans during ordinary years. During previous American heat waves this number has multiplied to about 10,000 deaths, and death rates are highest in large, overheated cities.
The next century will see city temperatures between 110 and 120°C and these will last for weeks at a time. Every summer will see deaths on the scale of the European heat wave of 2003 which took between 30,000 and 50,000 human lives. For three or more months of the year the largest American cities, already troubled by lack of freshwater and infrastructure decay, will become barely habitable during the carbon summer of global warming.
Chapter Four: Running Dry.
The immense water management projects of the last century—the Colorado River Aqueduct, Lake Mead, the Grand Coulee Dam—are already inadequate to meet America’s growing demand for freshwater. In some regions, carrying capacity is already nearing collapse as drought threatens human life and agriculture. A century of unprecedented growth in cities, industry and agriculture has placed impossibly high demands on freshwater resources. It is predicted that acute water shortages will affect 36 states by 2013. In addition, America will add 50 million people each generation until, by 2050, there will be about 400 million Americans.
Chapter Five: Epidemiology
The relationship between climate and human disease is irrefutable.
In addition to releasing unknown domestic diseases from dormancy, climate change also welcomes diseases once confined to much warmer climates. Where once Lyme disease infected only 7 in 100,000 Americans, that number has more than tripled with the proliferation of deer ticks in the increasingly warmer climate of America’s east coast.
And since 2004, dengue fever, formerly a problem of the developing world, is now a regular medical watch item in southern Texas where over 20 people were infected in 2007. Warming has enabled the Aedes Aegypti mosquitoes which carry the disease to migrate northwards from neighbouring Tamaulipas State where there were over 1200 cases of dengue fever in 2005.
The alarm over the northward migration of dengue fever is raising concerns that malaria will soon return to the United States due to global warming’s characteristic combination of increased floodwater and warmer temperatures.
Chapter Six: Loaves and Fishes.
Scientists have been sounding alarms about the overpopulation of America since 1968 when Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb claimed that there would be food riots in the United States by the 1980s. Professor Ehrlich did not anticipate the Green Revolution which facilitated rapid growth of the world’s population. But he is not alone in the belief that America is rapidly outgrowing its carrying capacity.
This chapter will examine the food security of the United States in the near future as the population adds 50 million during each of the next two generations. In 2009, malnourishment is already a problem for America’s poor. By 2050, this problem will blossom into full blown domestic famine and drive Americans from the population centers of the southwest, the Great Lakes, and the north-eastern United States.
Chapter Seven: 20 Million Mexicans.
In the coming decades, Mexicans migrating to El Norte will be joined by others from Central America, as global warming intensifies the aridity of the sub-tropics. Between El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua and Honduras there is an area called the Central American Drought Corridor whose population (about 8.6 million people) currently suffer cumulative economic deprivation from recurrent droughts. Having survived previous droughts by selling off family possessions, rural residents now have little left to provide them with an economic buffer against further hardship.
Chapter Eight: The Northern Ark.
At a low level of ‘discomfort’, Americans will be encouraged to migrate due to the seasonal amplifications of climate change. These include intense spring flooding, megafires, heat waves, twisters, megastorms and a growing assortment of infectious tropical diseases. But more pointedly, at the level of ‘survival’, Americans in the largest population centers of the United States—the eastern seaboard, the southwest, and the Great Lakes region—will be pushed to abandon their homes due either to sea level rise or to radical reductions in the availability of freshwater; and agricultural production.
To these desperate people, Canada will suddenly look very promising.
Chapter Nine: Survivability in the Distant Future.
Over the short term, of course, humanity can save itself physically through poleward migrations. But these will diminish our numbers even as they simultaneously pare down our advanced, costly and complex civilizations to much more localized, less powerful entities. Food production, communications, manufacturing, transportation and the transfer of knowledge will all suffer. There will almost certainly be a dark age… So far, visions of such migrations have focussed exclusively on the North Pole. But as the Antarctic gradually shakes off its ice age slumber, it too will be considered a refuge. While the isolation of this uninhabited continent may initially seem prohibitive in terms of logistics and costs, it is the very quality of remoteness that will make it much more attractive and secure than either Siberia or the Arctic Archipelago. The 21st century will see wealthy states establish state-of-the-art beachhead colonies in remote Antarctica. -This process has just recently begun.
Over the short term of the next 50 years, climate extremities are inevitable and irreversible. All we can do is ameliorate long term damage to our habitat by developing a systematic ‘sustainable retreat’ as James Lovelock calls it from our economic ideology of sustained growth and hyper consumption. Carbon and other green house gases have to be removed from the atmosphere in massive proportions. Short-term global cooling strategies have to be developed and deployed, the world will need to be reforested and the oceans deacidified and restocked. Can we do all of this under extreme circumstances while selflessly reaping
Chapter-by-Chapter Description
Chapter One: America’s First Refugees
The combination of environmental events that we know collectively as the Dust Bowl provides a variety of useful lessons for contemporary Americans struggling to understand and accept climate change.
When the rolling clouds of dust struck the Great Plains in 1933, it was as though a biblical plague had visited the country in the worst of times. The nation responded with a grudging, meagre charity.
It is this lack of generosity –this first American example of ‘lifeboat ethics’-- that contains powerful lessons for future migrants or environmental refugees. There are deep implications for our children’s century since the decades that follow will be a period of the most profound climate change in the history of our species including the ice age. –
This chapter addresses these questions:
• Who will move?
• Who will move first?
• Where will they go?
• How will they be received? and
• How will they make their way once they get there?
Chapter Two: Diasporas of Coastal Flooding.
In a world of increasing hurricane activity, much of America’s low lying coastal plain is in peril from flooding. Still there is no national plan to harden endangered areas or to voluntarily relocate American citizens and their infrastructure. This chapter looks at the disaster of Hurricane Katrina to determine the human costs of such last minute crisis management in and around New York City where, once flooded, the 6,000 miles of sewers will turn America’s cultural capital into a very sour apple unfit for human habitation.
Chapter Three: Heat Waves.
Heat waves have disastrous human costs. Numerically, they are the worst environmental killer of human beings. Heat stroke kills about 1,000 Americans during ordinary years. During previous American heat waves this number has multiplied to about 10,000 deaths, and death rates are highest in large, overheated cities.
The next century will see city temperatures between 110 and 120°C and these will last for weeks at a time. Every summer will see deaths on the scale of the European heat wave of 2003 which took between 30,000 and 50,000 human lives. For three or more months of the year the largest American cities, already troubled by lack of freshwater and infrastructure decay, will become barely habitable during the carbon summer of global warming.
Chapter Four: Running Dry.
The immense water management projects of the last century—the Colorado River Aqueduct, Lake Mead, the Grand Coulee Dam—are already inadequate to meet America’s growing demand for freshwater. In some regions, carrying capacity is already nearing collapse as drought threatens human life and agriculture. A century of unprecedented growth in cities, industry and agriculture has placed impossibly high demands on freshwater resources. It is predicted that acute water shortages will affect 36 states by 2013. In addition, America will add 50 million people each generation until, by 2050, there will be about 400 million Americans.
Chapter Five: Epidemiology
The relationship between climate and human disease is irrefutable.
In addition to releasing unknown domestic diseases from dormancy, climate change also welcomes diseases once confined to much warmer climates. Where once Lyme disease infected only 7 in 100,000 Americans, that number has more than tripled with the proliferation of deer ticks in the increasingly warmer climate of America’s east coast.
And since 2004, dengue fever, formerly a problem of the developing world, is now a regular medical watch item in southern Texas where over 20 people were infected in 2007. Warming has enabled the Aedes Aegypti mosquitoes which carry the disease to migrate northwards from neighbouring Tamaulipas State where there were over 1200 cases of dengue fever in 2005.
The alarm over the northward migration of dengue fever is raising concerns that malaria will soon return to the United States due to global warming’s characteristic combination of increased floodwater and warmer temperatures.
Chapter Six: Loaves and Fishes.
Scientists have been sounding alarms about the overpopulation of America since 1968 when Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb claimed that there would be food riots in the United States by the 1980s. Professor Ehrlich did not anticipate the Green Revolution which facilitated rapid growth of the world’s population. But he is not alone in the belief that America is rapidly outgrowing its carrying capacity.
This chapter will examine the food security of the United States in the near future as the population adds 50 million during each of the next two generations. In 2009, malnourishment is already a problem for America’s poor. By 2050, this problem will blossom into full blown domestic famine and drive Americans from the population centers of the southwest, the Great Lakes, and the north-eastern United States.
Chapter Seven: 20 Million Mexicans.
In the coming decades, Mexicans migrating to El Norte will be joined by others from Central America, as global warming intensifies the aridity of the sub-tropics. Between El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua and Honduras there is an area called the Central American Drought Corridor whose population (about 8.6 million people) currently suffer cumulative economic deprivation from recurrent droughts. Having survived previous droughts by selling off family possessions, rural residents now have little left to provide them with an economic buffer against further hardship.
Chapter Eight: The Northern Ark.
At a low level of ‘discomfort’, Americans will be encouraged to migrate due to the seasonal amplifications of climate change. These include intense spring flooding, megafires, heat waves, twisters, megastorms and a growing assortment of infectious tropical diseases. But more pointedly, at the level of ‘survival’, Americans in the largest population centers of the United States—the eastern seaboard, the southwest, and the Great Lakes region—will be pushed to abandon their homes due either to sea level rise or to radical reductions in the availability of freshwater; and agricultural production.
To these desperate people, Canada will suddenly look very promising.
Chapter Nine: Survivability in the Distant Future.
Over the short term, of course, humanity can save itself physically through poleward migrations. But these will diminish our numbers even as they simultaneously pare down our advanced, costly and complex civilizations to much more localized, less powerful entities. Food production, communications, manufacturing, transportation and the transfer of knowledge will all suffer. There will almost certainly be a dark age… So far, visions of such migrations have focussed exclusively on the North Pole. But as the Antarctic gradually shakes off its ice age slumber, it too will be considered a refuge. While the isolation of this uninhabited continent may initially seem prohibitive in terms of logistics and costs, it is the very quality of remoteness that will make it much more attractive and secure than either Siberia or the Arctic Archipelago. The 21st century will see wealthy states establish state-of-the-art beachhead colonies in remote Antarctica. -This process has just recently begun.
Over the short term of the next 50 years, climate extremities are inevitable and irreversible. All we can do is ameliorate long term damage to our habitat by developing a systematic ‘sustainable retreat’ as James Lovelock calls it from our economic ideology of sustained growth and hyper consumption. Carbon and other green house gases have to be removed from the atmosphere in massive proportions. Short-term global cooling strategies have to be developed and deployed, the world will need to be reforested and the oceans deacidified and restocked. Can we do all of this under extreme circumstances while selflessly reaping