Climate change has made Guatemala unlivable…

… which is why 20 times as many people now live there compared to 1900 when the Earth hadn’t been trashed (estimated 17.5 million today versus 885,000 before CO2 poisoned everything).

A 1960s-style famine article from the New York Times: “‘Food Doesn’t Grow Here Anymore. That’s Why I Would Send My Son North.’ A stark choice for some Guatemalans: watch crops wither, and maybe die with them, or migrate”:

I have heard from innumerable Guatemalans that the most fundamental driver of emigration is desperation — and, to an extent that most Americans don’t appreciate, this desperation often reflects drought and severe weather linked to climate change. … climate change is aggravating the desperation.

So the paradox is that American carbon emissions are partly responsible for wretchedness in Guatemala that drives emigration, yet when those desperate Guatemalans arrive at the U.S. border they are treated as invaders.

Get ready to welcome your new neighbors:

“The great majority of these kids will migrate,” Luis Armando Jiménez, principal of a rural middle school, told me as he pointed to his students in the courtyard. “There is not enough rain, so their only option is to migrate.”

The author who says that humans cannot thrive in Guatemala, Nicholas Kristof, was born in 1959. Wikipedia says that that the number of humans living in this unlivable country has more than tripled since then.

5 thoughts on “Climate change has made Guatemala unlivable…

  1. Phil, I come here for reasonable conservative observations. This post could have been scraped off my Facebook feed. Try harder.

    > Climate change has made Guatemala unlivable…
    > …which is why 20 times as many people now live there compared to 1900

    Choosing 1900 as the baseline pretty much guarantees an eye-popping population multiplier for any country. Why choose it here though? CO2 levels didn’t rise above long-term natural peaks until roughly 1950.

    https://climate.nasa.gov/climate_resources/24/graphic-the-relentless-rise-of-carbon-dioxide/

    > before CO2 poisoned everything

    I’m sure you’re aware that CO2 isn’t literally poisoning anything (other than the oceans, yet). But saying this makes you sound like a biased crank.

    > born in 1959…the number of humans living in this unlivable country has more than tripled since then.

    One of your recurring points on this blog is that immigration to the US makes the US unlivable*. This hasn’t stopped the flood of immigrants trying to get to the US. Population trends do not instantly follow current events. There’s a lot of inertia in cultural and family forces.

    *If you can use unlivable to mean that Guatemalans are having a hard time farming, then I can use it to mean that US citizens are having a hard time commuting.

  2. A few well placed nukes would open the border wall. Don’t know why the NY Times doesn’t at least give them some plutonium.

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