Presenting Published Prognostications

APPROPRIATELY, publications presentng facts about climate change proliferate, prognostications proceeding apace. Aside from whether humanity will do enough soon enough to avert our impending disaster, by the time we are ravaged by it, we will, if nothing else, have had the opportunity to become aware of it, and educated about it. Everyone seems to becoming to the party. Books and articles are being published by all manner of scientists, historians, sociologists, and journalists. Among the most dramatic consequences of onrushing climate change is now well underway and will escalate dramatically very soon; mass human migration. Already millions of desperate people are on the move and have relocated, escaping collapsing economies precipitated by extreme weather patterns, mostly extensive flooding and prolonged drought. The trend will intensify. During the rest of the twenty first century billions of people will be forced to relocate farther away from rising ocean levels.In some areas, persistent heat and drought will require the same response. In a passionately and compassionately written new monograph: "The Great Displacement: Climate Change and the Next American Migration", journalist Jake Bittle lays out the problem, by focusing on specific places and people in the United States, what has already happened to them, and what will inevitably continue to happen to them and to millions of other people. Bittle discusses the Florida Keys, which have already been decimated by powerful hurricanes, driving residents to the mainland. By the year 2100 all the keys will be underwater, all the people living and visiting there will have fled north. Among the more poignant personal anecdotes elucidated by Mr. Bittle concern California residents who have alternately suffered the ravages of Earthquakes, drought, wildfires, an unaffordable housing and insurance prices. Home insurers are beginning to abandon areas where climate change is and will inevitably make insurang homes and property an automatically losing proposition, such as chronically drought stricken areas, and coastal regions. True, as migrants leave reviously densely populated places like California and America's coastlines, property values and housing prices should decline, becoming more affordable,but insuring them will become a near impossibility, with no corporations of sufficient size and liquidity seeing any way to do so reasonably profitably. The great migration from California to Montana has already begun,and will continue. Mass migrations punctuate world and American history. Most of them have probably not been studied with sufficient detail, because humans are funadmentally nomadic creatures, who only very recently traded their nomadic lifestyle for neolithic civilization in cities, with the invention of agriulture and animal husbandry,We built our big cities and established our international borders of fear and defense,but even those artificial constructions could not stop us from moving around in groups. As we move into our unknown future, one thing we know for sure; we'll keep right on moving, even when we're never quite sure why or whereto.