"Cyclical Climate Claims Recycle Climate Refugee Fairytale"

Source:

https://www.heartland.org/news-opinion/news/cyclical-climate-claims-recycle-climate-refugee-fairytale

"Historically, climate change, just like the seasons, follows natural cycles—solar cycles, shifts in ocean currents, and orbital cycles, for example.

Alarming climate stories also come in fairly predictable (news) cycles.

During wildfire and hurricane seasons, when natural weather conditions have historically produced hurricanes and wildfires with regularity,

compromised scientific journals and the press will run myriad stories linking any ongoing wildfires and hurricanes to human-caused climate change.

This happens despite a lack of evidence that hurricanes or wildfires have become more frequent or more severe during the recent period of modest warming than they have been historically.

This sentiment also rings true for the farming industry.

Global crop production has boomed in recent decades, with new records set for yield and production year over year in spite of the recent warming, according to United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) records.

... Each year, some area or another will experience record late-season cold spells, floods, or drought, resulting in failed harvests.

This is how life has been since humans stopped focusing on hunting and gathering and settled down to farming.

Yet when crops fail, one can expect a flurry of journal articles and overheated news stories linking isolated instances of crop failures to climate change.

... these articles claim crop failures are the harbinger of a disastrous global food future, absent political actions ending the use of fossil fuels.

In between these seasonal weather events, climate alarmists ... try to tie climate change to any ongoing political and social upheaval anywhere it is occurring.

A pandemic breaks out?

Climate change caused it.

War or political revolutions break out?

Climate change caused it.

Another periodic climate crisis de jour is the “climate refugee crisis.”

... as a flood of illegal immigrants breaches the U.S. southern border daily, a Google News search displays dozens of news stories in local papers and national publications that claim climate change is creating the problem.

The articles say the Biden administration should recognize “climate refugees” as an official class of persons deserving asylum on humanitarian grounds.

Climate conditions did not change between the Trump and Biden presidencies, so it is clear the present flow of illegal immigrants into the United States is not a result of climate change.

... President Joe Biden’s shift to a more welcoming immigration policy than that enforced by President Donald Trump has made entering the country more promising.

But you wouldn’t know this from reading mainstream media stories discussing the current crisis at the border.

For example, the International Policy Digest (IPD) and The Hill published articles titled “It’s Time to Recognize Climate Refugees” and “How to manage migration intensified by climate change,” respectively.

The IPD article falsely stated “refugees are … fleeing climate change.”

“In the face of warmer temperatures, reduced precipitation, and blighted crops—struggling farmers from Guatemala and El Salvador are giving up and fleeing to the U.S. border,” the IPD article states.

“Climate change will submerge American communities like Isle de Jean Charles, Louisiana, and entire countries like the Maldives.”

The Hill also cited refugees from El Salvador and Guatemala as proof of climate change causing migration.

For good measure, it then threw Honduran refugees into the mix, blaming 2020’s hurricane strikes in Honduras on human greenhouse gas emissions.

Yet looking at each of these claims in detail, one can find no significant link between the past century’s modest warming and forced emigration from any of these countries.

Instead, research shows many parts of the American coast and most small-island nations, including the Maldives, have seen their respective land masses, populations, and property values increase in recent years, rather than seeing them sink under rising seas and emigration.

Research published in 2018 by GIScience & Remote Sensing found 15 of the 28 uninhabited islands on Tuvalu’s Funafuti Atoll had their shorelines increase in recent years.

Also, the population on Fongafale, Tuvalu’s largest island, has increased by 33 percent.

Tuvalu’s government has felt confident enough in its long-term future to erect brand-new government buildings and associated infrastructure.

The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 2018 “Interim Report” observes there is “only low confidence for the attribution of any detectable changes in tropical cyclone activity to anthropogenic influences.”

History shows it is not uncommon for hurricanes and tropical storms to strike Honduras, which is “brushed or hit” by hurricanes every four years on average, although some decades have been busier than others.

For example, the 1890s, the 1930s, the 1960s, and the 1970s—all of which were cooler time periods than today—saw multiple hurricanes striking Honduras.

One of the worst hurricanes ever to strike Honduras was in 1934, nearly 90 years of climate change ago.

Data from the FAO (show) crop yields and production for most major crops in El Salvador and Guatemala have boomed in recent years regardless of drought cycles.
 
Shamefully, IPD even trotted out the long-refuted lie that the Syrian refugee crisis, beginning in 2011, was caused by drought and failing crops.

In truth, mass migration from Syria stemmed from a civil war as people sought to overthrow the Asaad regime during the Arab Spring democracy uprisings and the efforts by Al-Qaeda to establish a Muslim caliphate.

Climate change had nothing to do with Syria’s refugee crisis.

Syria is in an arid, desert region where, for thousands of years, droughts have been the norm, not the exception.

In fact, the entire region experienced the same drought as Syria, yet neither war nor mass emigration broke out in Iran, Israel, Jordan, or Saudi Arabia.

... When the disingenuous Syrian-climate-refugee narrative first reared its ugly head, FAO data showed Syrian crop production had increased by approximately 50 percent since 1995, as Heartland Institute President James Taylor pointed out.

In addition, Syria’s 2011 Arab Spring uprising occurred in a year in which the nation’s farmers produced the eighth-highest crop yields in the country’s history.

The constant attempt to link illegal immigration to climate change is part and parcel of what one author referred to as “the endless, fruitless search for climate refugees.”

Millions of people flee their homelands each year.

The causes are what they have always been: war, political persecution, and poverty, not climate change.

Refugees now, as they always have, are leaving their countries in pursuit of a better life for themselves and their children.

Climate refugees, if they exist at all, are few and far between, and they provide no justification for authoritarian policies to fight climate change."