There was a brouhaha last week about an item that once appeared on the web site of the U.N. Environmental Program, UNEP, in which appears a map headlined "Fifty million climate refugees by 2010." Written in 2005, it was based on a paper by environmental scientist Norman Myers.
According to the Wall Street Journal, UNEP took down the page when a journalist from AsianCorrespondent.com asked about it. He pointed out that many of locales the map identified as likely sources of climate refugees are "not only not losing people, they are actually among the fastest growing regions in the world."
Well, the map is long gone. If you are like me, you are a bit curious about what exactly was in it. After some digging, I found a cached version of the original web page here:
But the map on this page is a bit small and hard to read. So here is the map itself:
http://www.recycledisland.com/Climate_refugees.pdf
If I am reading the map correctly, it was anticipating climate refugees from areas that included San Diego and the pacific coast of Washington.
Well, as Yogi Berra said, it is hard to make predictions, especially about the future.