Biden Falsely Claims Climate Change Forcing Millions Of Migrants To Flee

Recently Yahoo News ran an article, titled “Biden administration report foresees ‘tens of millions’ of climate change refugees in the coming decades.

The report and Yahoo New’s story covering it claims climate change is behind illegal immigration, forcing millions of people to flee their countries.

This is false.

Data on food production, extreme weather, and sea-level rise indicate climate change is not behind the rise in immigration.

Yahoo News writes:

A new Biden administration report paints a grim picture of the climate change future in which “tens of millions” of people are “likely to be displaced over the next two to three decades” because of the effects of rising global temperatures.

In April, Vice President Kamala Harris identified climate change and its effects as one of several root causes that have increased migration from Central America to the United States.

“We are looking at extensive storm damage because of extreme climate, we’re looking at drought in an area in a region where agriculture is one of the most traditionally important basis for their economy, we’re looking at what’s happening in terms of food scarcity as a result of that and, in fact, incredible food insecurity, which we used to call hunger food insecurity,” she said.

Each of these claims is false.

Vice President Kamala Harris stated, “We are looking at extensive storm damage because of extreme climate…”

Harris conflates weather events like “storm damage” with climate. NASA defines it for kids as: “Weather is a specific event—like a rainstorm or hot day—that happens over a few hours, days or weeks. Climate is the average weather conditions in a place over 30 years or more.”

Clearly, you can’t honestly compare the two. This is such a basic understanding that it is clear she’s simply using it as a political tool.

Then she claims “drought and food insecurity” in central America will cause migration towards the United States.

This is false. As my associate, H. Sterling Burnett writes in another Climate Realism piece,

The narrative is people are forced to migrate because people in rural areas can no longer grow enough crops to feed their families or make a living. Yet, crop yields in nearly all migration-prone nations have been steadily increasing, with many setting frequent new records.

Almost all the refugees from North Africa or the Middle East into Europe are coming from regions where food production has increased dramatically in recent decades. The same applies to migrants to the United States from Central America. This is thoroughly documented in Climate at a Glance: Crop Production, as well as in a video-archived panel discussion alongside the United Nations Civil Society Conference in August 2019.

The belief is that immigration will increase with projections of warming, but this is based entirely on computer climate models which the U.N. has recently admitted are flawed. The worst-case scenario can’t happen because the models are wrong.

And then there is history to consider.

In 2005, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) predicted climate change would create 50 million climate refugees by 2010.

These people, it was said, would flee a range of disasters including sea-level rise, increase in the numbers and severity of hurricanes, and disruption of food production.

They even created a map of areas that are most affected, see below.

This is what the UNEP originally said:

Fifty million climate refugees by 2010. Today we find a world of asymmetric development, unsustainable natural resource use, and continued rural and urban poverty. There is general agreement about the current global environmental and development crisis.

It is also known that the consequences of these global changes have the most devastating impacts on the poorest, who historically have had limited entitlements and opportunities for growth.

There’s only one problem. It never happened. Not a single “climate refugee” ever migrated.

And, UNEP, realizing their prediction was wrong, disappeared the original web page and report in 2011.

Now, a decade later, the same tired, unsupportable “climate refugee” claims are being recycled again as a means of scaring people into some sort of political action.

Facts and history simply don’t support these claims.

Read more at Climate Realism