The concluding remark about 'climate refugees' is out of place in this otherwise very important discussion about failed states.
Climate change and its perceived influence on the mankind is a very controversial subject, and today most of people's suffering from poverty and misgovernment has nothing to do with it. Advancing your own pet theories using a real-life tragedy as a prop is a bad taste.
Agreed, and I quarreled with that statement briefly. What I think the author is trying to say is that soon, there will be climate refugees, and when that happens, we'll need to know what to do with them, and we can use this event as an example on how the world should handle it.
It wasn't necessary in the argument, and yes, he was pushing his theories, but it may not have been so completely insulting as: "climate changed caused an earthquake!"
Climate change and its perceived influence on the mankind is a very controversial subject, and today most of people's suffering from poverty and misgovernment has nothing to do with it.
The fact that a lot of people today suffer from poverty and misgovernment is indeed not entirely due to climate change (although there is dutch disease/resource curse: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse)
However it is not hard to realize that those suffering right now will suffer even more were climate change effects as severe as some scientist predict, is it?
Climate change and its perceived influence on the mankind is a very controversial subject, and today most of people's suffering from poverty and misgovernment has nothing to do with it. Advancing your own pet theories using a real-life tragedy as a prop is a bad taste.