"Climate refugees" keeps being repeated ad-cliche as if it were a guaranteed near future event, but I'd love to see the concrete scientific evidence backing up its inevitability. Also, please, show me one single movement of climate refugees to have occurred so far who moved place specifically because of human-caused climate change.
By example: I live in the tropics, and while many people leave this country for assorted reasons of economic opportunity and bad local/national government, nobody has yet left because of global warming.
If you look at the big picture one things that stands out is regional rural to urban migrations. I put a lot of immigration in that context. 90% of rural to urban migration is internal and 10% spills over.
There are currently huge internal migrations inside of Africa, but some percentage heads to Europe usually following expat family members.
So in a way we already have refugees not from climate change but from industrialized agriculture.
I can't point you to a single study that encompasses everything that forms the basis of my opinion. If you already acknowledge the existence of human-caused climate change to at least the extent accepted by the IPCC (which by all accounts represents a low bar, because of the political reality of the panel's makeup and process), then there should be enough of a basis for a few additional pieces of information to illustrate my line of thinking. I also assume you understand that individual weather events, while caused by climate, cannot be linked with 'concrete scientific evidence' to climate change. Yet when it comes to human displacement, individual weather events are more than enough to trigger mass migrations.
>show me one single movement of climate refugees to have occurred so far who moved place specifically because of human-related climate change.
Climate change in the Fertile Crescent and implications of the recent Syrian drought - CP Kelley (2015)
"worst drought in the instrumental record, causing widespread crop failure and a mass migration of farming families to urban centers"
"Century-long observed trends in precipitation, temperature, and sea-level pressure, supported by climate model results, strongly suggest that anthropogenic forcing has increased the probability of severe and persistent droughts in this region, and made the occurrence of a 3-year drought as severe as that of 2007−2010 2 to 3 times more likely than by natural variability alone."
Regarding future climate migrations, the chain of events that looks set to play out in many places is quite clear. The Maldives, for example. Islanders (~300k) depend heavily (70% of GDP) on the coral reef for their sustenance and livelihood. Ocean warming is destroying the coral, and the life that goes with it. If that's not enough, sea-level rise will swamp the islands; the highest point is only two meters above sea level (100cm of base sea-level rise is anticipated by 2100, and that excludes storm surges). On top of that, intensificiation of extreme weather events will destroy homes, boats, and land infrastructure (what little even exists). Inhabitants will be displaced as their livelihood dies off and their land dissapears under the ocean, assuming they have the means to go anywhere else and that those places will allow them to relocate.
This scenario or very similar repeats for most small island nations across the pacific (~2M), the carribean (44M), and elsewhere (~17M). Note that it's a distinct scenario from the historical example I linked above, which is a representation of the kind of climate-related displacements to be expected closer to the equater and on major land masses. Those are more representative of the shift expected to the 'habitable zone' of our planet, as it moves further away from the equator.
Examining these and thank you for the elaborate reply. I don't actually deny human-caused climate change mainly because the evidence for its occurrence seems more than overwhelming, but I do mistrust hyperbole and fear ful speculation of possible things that haven't actually occurred, aren't in the process of happening and haven't been backed (to my knowledge) by the same kind of concrete science that demonstrates how temperatures have been rising at an exceptional rate. This does not necessarily equal certain other things, unless a solid connection between them can be made,
By example: I live in the tropics, and while many people leave this country for assorted reasons of economic opportunity and bad local/national government, nobody has yet left because of global warming.