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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   30113 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 12, 2024

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Has anyone blamed it on climate change yet? There was a huge push for a while to talk about how climate change would cause a huge, worldwide refugee crisis. Bangladesh was the poster child, with maps claiming that some huge proportion of the country was going to be submersed in water. By those maps and estimates, it was by far the biggest outlier that allowed for some of the splashy-sounding numbers that were trumpeted.

I have no idea what's going on there, but I'm guessing that the country isn't submersed in water, is it?

I don't know what the current coastline situation is, but: more volatile weather > lower crop/fishing yields > higher food prices > more civil unrest. So climate change might not be off.

Any actual evidence for any of those intermediaries? Or even just actual "people" (as in "prominent, narrative-shaping type folks in the chattering class") actually trying to argue for such a casual pathway in this case (whether or not they bring any actual evidence for the proposed intermediaries)?

Like sure, I can just imagine a billion possible causal pathways that are at least as plausible a priori, but bare a priori plausibility for something to be the case is about the most thin gruel out there.

Loads of people blamed the Arab Spring (and Syria especially) on climate change. There was a multi-year drought and water shortage in Syria immediately beforehand, food prices rose a lot... Just search up Arab Spring Climate Change and it will come up.

Oh, I'm totally aware that people tried to do that. Some were more hedged than others. Some minor academic spats happened. People mostly tried various ways to be like, "Well, we're not gonna, like, say that climate change caused caused anything (because we can't accomplish that), so we'll, like, call it a 'threat multiplier' or 'intermediate variable'."

But I guess none of that really matters, since one can so clearly see both the impact of climate change and the obvious moment of sparking the Syrian Civil War in this chart.

If you really want to rehash what is/isn't supportable for Syria/Arab Spring, we can. But in this thread, I was asking about Bangladesh. Do you have some data on Bangladesh that indicates a causal and/or primary role for climate change?

I don't know anything about Bangladesh, for some reason I thought you were talking about the general case, I missed the 'this case'.

Which step seems dubious? I guess that attacking "climate changes causes more volatile weather" is possible but remaining are quite blatantly obvious to me.

Obvious? As in, like, you have data sticking out in your face about the crop/fishing yields and food prices in Bangladesh leading up to the recent civil unrest? Where did you see this data? Can you point me to it?

I don't have a Twitter account, so I may not be getting a proper snapshot of his recent activity; I think they only give us a weird smattering of posts from different years. Anything specific to Bangladesh?

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