It is widely expected that Justin Welby, having now screwed the crown on Charles III’s head, will shortly retire as Archbishop of Canterbury and put himself out to grass. If so, he is not going quietly. This afternoon, in the House of Lords, he launched a wholesale attack on the government’s Illegal Migration Bill, which includes measures to offshore the processing of asylum-seekers in Rwanda, describing it as ‘isolationist, morally unacceptable and politically impractical’ to leave developing countries to handle the world’s refugees.
But one comment in particular stands out in the Archbishop’s speech. He asserted that ‘the IPCC forecasts that climate change by itself, let alone the conflicts it is causing, will lead to at least 800 million more refugees a year – in total – by 2050’.
It is an extraordinary claim, but is there any truth in it? If the Archbishop was trying to say that 800 million people would be displaced by climate change every year that would mean one in ten of the world’s population having to do a runner every single year. But let’s assume – which seems fair given his delivery – that the words ‘a year’ were an error and that the Archbishop was correcting himself when he added the words ‘in total’. It is still a stark figure, that 800 million people could be displaced by climate change by 2050, so did the IPCC really predict that?
The IPCC’s 85-page synthesis report, published in March, does not mention the word ‘refugee’ once. Nor does the Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability report published last year. What the synthesis report does say is that between 3.3 billion and 3.6 billion people ‘are living in contexts that are highly vulnerable to climate change’ – in order words, there is some negative form of climate change going on where they live. It does not, however, speculate on how many of them will at some point have to flee their homes.
Others, however, have made predictions which include a number similar to that quoted by the Archbishop. The closest match appears to be a report published in 2015 by a group of scientists calling themselves Climate Central. That forecast that ‘carbon emissions causing 4 degrees celsius of warming (7.2 degrees Fahrenheit) – a business as usual scenario – could lock in enough eventual sea level rise to submerge land currently home to 470 to 760 million people globally’.
Climate Central was not saying that these people would be driven from their homes by 2050 (indeed, the IPCC’s central estimate is for 32-62cm of sea level rise over the course of the 21st century, which would not cause mass evacuation of land anywhere save for marshlands, and communities built on marshland without sea defences). What it was saying was that were global temperatures to rise by 4ºC – which itself would only happen if the world took no action on climate change whatsoever – then eventually (which could mean several centuries’ time) sea levels would rise to flood land currently inhabited by between 470 and 760 million people.
That is somewhat different from the Archbishop’s alarmist claim of mass exodus by 2050. But will anyone notice? Or will Welby prove yet again that prominent figures rarely get into trouble by making exaggerated and scientifically-illiterate claims about climate change.
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