Prepare To Retreat Before Global Warming Kill Us All

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Summary: The latest issue of Science has a powerful paper about our coming desperate attempts to prepare for climate change. Let’s look under the hood to see how scientists produce advice for policy-makers. It reveals that the peer-review process is broken, greatly weakening our ability to see and prepare for climate change.

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Flipping through my new issue of Science, one of America’s top two science journals, this caught my attention: “The case for strategic and managed climate retreat” by Anne R. Siders et al. in Science, 23 August 2019. It is a powerful paper by three rising stars from Harvard and Stanford. It is getting a lot of attention (e.g., in Naked Capitalism’s daily links). From the abstract; red emphasis added on buzzwords …

“Faced with global warming, rising sea levels, and the climate-related extremes they intensify, the question is no longer whether some communities will retreat – moving people and assets out of harm’s way – but why, where, when, and how they will retreat. …We argue for strategy {sic} that incorporates socioeconomic development and for management that is innovative, evidence-based, and context-specific. …

“In some cases, retreat may need to include reparations or payments for loss and damage to address historic practices that placed communities at risk or to enable communities to retreat in a way that does not exacerbate past wrongs (for example, forcibly relocated indigenous, minority, or impoverished populations, or greenhouse gas emissions from major economies that contribute to rising seas, imperiling island nations). …

“The opportunities presented by succeeding in this work are immense, and the climate risks are urgent and growing.”

That sounds ominous! But before adopting their recommendations, I read on to learn the basis for this forecast. Here it is.

Retreat in response to natural hazards already occurs. It can be driven by major disasters, when people abandon their homes and relocate permanently. Economic pressures such as decreasing agricultural yields or rising insurance prices sometimes push people away from hazardous areas. Government programs have relocated populations out of at-risk areas, moved roads and other infrastructure, imposed setback requirements, banned return to disaster-prone areas, or condemned and demolished buildings considered too risky (2–8). Even in areas experiencing overall growth, some people are retreating (such as in Manila, Nairobi, and New York City) (2–4, 7–10).

“Whether driven by disasters, market forces, or government intervention, people will continue to move from hazardous places as climate risks escalate.”

Let’s see those references about people who are moving “from hazardous places as climate risks escalate.”

1. “Managed Retreat – A Strategy for the Mitigation of Disaster Risks with International and Comparative Perspectives” by Stefen Greiving et al. in Extreme Events, March 2018. This discusses responses to a wide range of natural disasters. It gives no examples of retreat due to climate change, let alone anthropogenic climate change.

1. “Managed retreat as a response to natural hazard risk” by Miyuki Hino et al. in Nature Climate Change, May 2017. Gated; open copy here. They examined 27 cases of managed retreat, but linked none of them to climate change.

1. “Managed Coastal Retreat: A Legal Handbook on Shifting Development Away From Vulnerable Areas” by Anne R. Siders (then a graduate student at Stanford), a Columbia Public Law research paper, November 2013). 158 pages. It describes responses to natural disasters. I found no links to climate change.

1. “A climate of control: flooding, displacement and planned resettlement in the Lower Zambezi River valley, Mozambique” by Alex Arnall in The Geographic Journal, June 2014. I do not have access to this.

1. “Planned Relocations, Disasters, and Climate Change: Consolidating Good Practices and Preparing for the Future” by Sanjula Weerasinghe for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, 2014. The Google Scholar link provided does not go the paper. No examples of retreat due to climate change. They mention Alaska and Fiji, but give neither details or supporting citations.

1. “Agency-driven post-disaster recovery: A comparative study of three Typhoon Washi resettlement communities in the Philippines” by J. Sedfrey S. Santiago et al., in the International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, March 2018. Gated; open copy here. Again the Google Scholar link provided does not go to the paper. Typhoon Washi hit in December 2011. It was a tropical storm, fifth-strongest category on the Tropical Cyclone Intensity Scale and sixth on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale (i.e., the category below hurricane). Not an unusual event (details here). The paper does not mention climate change.

1. “Climate change, migration and conflict: receiving communities under pressure?” by Andrea Warnecke et al. for the German Marshall Fund of the United States, 2010. It gives no examples of retreat from climate change.

None of those references support the claim. I see this happening more often lately (e.g., Michael Mann did it in his testimony to Congress; details here).

Here are the references the authors give to support their belief that “the climate risks are urgent and growing.”

• _.
• _.
• _.

That is bizarre, for that claim is the foundation for the paper and the basis for its significance. What does “urgent” mean? What do they mean by “growing?”

More specific to the paper’s conclusions, what numbers of people will be forced to retreat under each of the scenarios used in the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report (RCP2.6, RCP4.5, RCP6.0, and RCP8.5)? Most simulations show relatively small effects from RCP2.6. Most show that RCP8.5 would be a nightmare. AR5 gives no probabilities for each RCP. If the authors found no studies about retreats for each RCP, that would be worth mentioning.

Summary

The authors give no evidence that climate change is forcing “retreats.” How many people will climate change force to retreat in the near future, or in the 21st century? The authors do not say. Readers do not know what the authors mean by “the climate risks are urgent and growing.” Severe inconvenience or extinction? More broadly, the paper gives no evidence supporting “the case for strategic and managed climate retreat.”

This paper is alarmism, without the details and evidence characteristic of good science. It does provide an example showing that peer-review has collapsed in fields related to climate science. If the conclusions are politically pleasing, the paper gets waved through. This does not build confidence in the need for massive police action.

About the authors

The authors are fast-tracd academics. Anne Siders has a JD from Harvard and PhD from Stanford. She is an Environmental Fellow at Harvard’s Center for the Environment. Miyuki Hino is a Ph.D. candidate in the Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources at Stanford. Katharine Mach is an Associate Professor at the University of Miami School of Marine and Atmospheric Science, and a lead author for the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report and the US Fourth National Climate Assessment.

Other posts in this series

1. The replication crisis in science has just begun. It will be big. – Climate science is just one of the affected fields.
2. A crisis of overconfidence in climate science.
3. About the corruption of climate science.
4. The noble corruption of climate science.

For More Information

Ideas! See my recommended books and films at Amazon.

For a briefing on the current knowledge about rising sea levels, see these by climate scientists Judith Curry.

• A Special Report on Sea Level Rise.
• Sea level rise: what’s the worst case?
• Sea level rise whiplash – about new research.

1. Let’s prepare for past climate instead of bickering about predictions of climate change – Doing something is better than nothing.
2. Manufacturing climate nightmares: misusing science to create horrific predictions.
3. Focusing on worst-case climate futures doesn’t work. It shouldn’t work.
4. “Climate’s Uncertainty Principle“ by Garth Paltridge.
5. Listening to climate doomsters makes our situation worse.
6. Enlisting peer-reviewed science in the climate crusade.
7. How fast is the world warming? Is it burning?
8. See how climate science becomes alarmist propaganda.

To help us better understand today’s weather

To learn more about the state of climate change see The Rightful Place of Science: Disasters & Climate Change by Roger Pielke Jr., prof at U of CO – Boulder’s Center for Science and Policy Research (2018).https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/08/29/prepare-to-retreat-before-climate-change/