UNHCR - 24 Million People Have Already Fled Their Homes Thanks At Least In Part To Environment

[hatrack]

The UN refugee agency says some 24 million people worldwide have fled their homes due to environmental factors, and warns their ranks could grow tenfold by mid-century, spurred greatly by climate change.

Sheer numbers and the lack of legal status under international law mean a vicious humanitarian crisis is looming, say experts. Bottom line? Millions of hungry, poor, vulnerable people may simply have nowhere to go.

"In the future, who is going to open their doors to all this misery?" is the rhetorical question asked by Jean-Francois Durieux, in charge of climate change at the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). A decade ago, the threat of mass migrations driven by global warming seemed remote. Predicting how climate change might affect the planet was already vexingly difficult, and trying to calculate the additional impact on human communities only compounded the uncertainty.

It was also feared that extending "refugee" status to those driven from homelands by floods, drought or damaged ecosystems would dilute efforts to help those fleeing political persecution as defined under UN provisions. But today these reservations have given way to alarm as scientists say we are on track for worst-case scenarios laid out only two years ago by the Nobel-winning UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

EDIT

http://www.terradaily.com/2007/091129012043.szwc40mb.html

[kestrel91316]

1. I'm sure this news is fake, because there is no such thing as climate change,

because somebody hacked some emails.

[Patiod]

2. Well, there is, but it's not our fault - it's just cyclical

so we might as well just continue to drill, baby, drill! Plus it could be a tree-hugger hoax!

And we can burn as much Clean Coal(TM) as we want because since climate change is just "cyclical" and therefore not our fault, our adding to it doesn't really count. Or something like that.

[earth mom]

3. Meanwhile Congress and the Obama administration fiddle fart around.

:argh: