Will poor nations suffer greatly from climate change?
Cover Interview of November 18, 2011
I can certainly imagine that parts of Bangladesh will flood and sea level rise may submerge parts of the nation. But I would be surprised if such dramatic changes could occur overnight.
Instead, there will be a predictable pattern of which land will be lost. The owners of this land will suffer an income shock. Where will the people go? In a world that allows for international migration, people from a Bangladesh could migrate to Western China or Eastern India.
In 30 years, India and China may have developed to the point where they may be seeking younger, low skill immigrants to take on service jobs similar to those immigrants take up in the U.S. today—a crucial role in the service industry.
Today there is great concern about the possibility of “environmental refugees” moving across borders. I think that the right way to think about this issue is gains to trade in the international labor market. Self-interested households will migrate to the areas that offer them jobs and decent wages, and where they will be welcome.
As long as there is sufficient adjustment time to trends induced by climate change (such as sea level rise), there is no reason to think that wars will break out as desperate refugees seek higher ground.
Spontaneous generation is one of those wrong theories that clutter the basements of the biological sciences and that now look so very obviously wrong that it is hard to see how anyone could have taken them seriously in the first place. Why wouldn’t it occur to anyone that flies might be laying eggs that were too small for us to see? How simple would the crucial experiment be? What I have tried to do in much of my work is to turn this ‘obvious wrongness’ on its head—why, exactly, does it seem so obviously wrong?—and see what the new picture that emerges from that inquiry says about science and our belief in its results.Daryn Lehoux, Interview of November 13, 2017
It’s commonplace to say that humor is subjective, since what’s funny to you might not be funny to me. But humor is also a loaded concept. If you – or your people – have no sense of humor, or the wrong one, that means you’re less rational, tolerant, understanding, or civilized. You don’t get it. Or, worse, you lack something human. Modern Chinese debates about humor were very much caught up with these fundamental questions of value.Christopher Rea, Interview of October 26, 2016
I can certainly imagine that parts of Bangladesh will flood and sea level rise may submerge parts of the nation. But I would be surprised if such dramatic changes could occur overnight.
Instead, there will be a predictable pattern of which land will be lost. The owners of this land will suffer an income shock. Where will the people go? In a world that allows for international migration, people from a Bangladesh could migrate to Western China or Eastern India.
In 30 years, India and China may have developed to the point where they may be seeking younger, low skill immigrants to take on service jobs similar to those immigrants take up in the U.S. today—a crucial role in the service industry.
Today there is great concern about the possibility of “environmental refugees” moving across borders. I think that the right way to think about this issue is gains to trade in the international labor market. Self-interested households will migrate to the areas that offer them jobs and decent wages, and where they will be welcome.
As long as there is sufficient adjustment time to trends induced by climate change (such as sea level rise), there is no reason to think that wars will break out as desperate refugees seek higher ground.