Climate hysterics have raised the prospect of a supposedly rapidly warming climate increasing migration. They should have been a lot more concerned about bad governments sending millions of people with inconsistent values into western democracies. In the course of the long-run human history, natural climate changes have driven substantial migration and led to the end of some early civilizations that couldn’t adapt to either warmer, drier climates or colder ones. Native American tribes in the Southwest and in Central and South America had fairly advanced societies, but may in part have fallen prey to climate changes, although the merciless Spanish invaders had more to do with that. And civilization in the Mideast, Near East and around the Mediterranean struggled to survive climate changes.
A paper from NBER describes potential climate impacts on migration over the last 10,000 years, including examining disparate impacts on farmers and herders. While some of the analysis is fairly speculative, it is important for people to understand that natural variations in climate are normal and have occurred for as long as humanity has been around and those natural variations, before the arrival of sophisticated technology, often played a role in migration and in the rise and fall of societies. (NBER Paper)
