Unfortunately, I think the United States will take exactly the wrong message from its internal climate refugees.

Lifeboat ethics.

“We have to close our borders and deport refugees from other countries so we can help our own climate refugees.”

Most people won’t take climate change or global warming seriously until it directly affects them.

In a sane functioning world, our political leaders should be sounding alarm bells and reigning in big major corporations to try to gain some control over the problem. Because even if we did shut down everything right now and started actively working towards cooling down the planet, it would take a generation or two before everything went back to what it was a hundred years ago.

The biggest effect that most of us will feel in the coming years is mass migration. We’ll start seeing people moving around to places where they are unwanted and uninvited, first temporarily and later permanently … and then we will start seeing how we will all live with global warming.