Climate change refugees

Every natural disaster produces refugees, people displaced by the aspects of the event that make it a "disaster." I was four and a half when Agnes hit the Wyoming Valley, causing the Susquehanna to flood, destroying thousands of homes and businesses and forcing tens of thousands of people into temporary housing in mobile homes set up on higher ground. I was reminded of this in late 2005 when Katrina sent refugees from New Orleans on a quest for new homes, and some of them made their way to northeastern Pennsylvania.

"Ordinary" natural disasters happen all the time - a hurricane here, a flood there, an earthquake there, a wildfire over there. People move away temporarily, places are rebuilt, people move back. Life goes on.

Things have changed.

More and more people are becoming refugees due to climate change. Long-term droughts leave areas parched and susceptible to wildfires. Changes in precipitation patterns inflict 500-year floods on areas year after year. Rising ocean levels inundate islands and chew away at shorelines. People, if they are lucky, pack up their belongings and flee - but now without any real hope of a place to return to.

So where do they go? What new homelands will welcome them and sustain them? How will the influx of these "foreigners," refugees within their own countries, change the demographics of their new homes?

And where does it end? Is there some part of the country that exists on a state of climatological grace, where the changes to the global climate will be buffered by an local climate robustness? Would such a place serve as an attractor for climate refugees? Or will we see increased population mobility as more and more places transform from their pastoral present states into places inhospitable to human life? 

Ultimately, we all must be prepared to become climate refugees abandoning our homes when the time comes, or be prepared to welcome climate refugees fleeing from what used to be their homes.