Bogus Trend Story of the WeekWashington Post: "Climate Fears Are Driving 'Ecomigration' Across Globe."
Posted Wednesday, Feb. 25, 2009, at 5:52 PM ET
When hunting bogus trend stories, the experienced tracker rarely needs to look beyond Page One to bag his prey. Early this week, the Washington Post lofted onto its front page a doozy of a bogus trend story titled "Climate Fears Are Driving 'Ecomigration' Across Globe."
The opening anecdote is about the relocation of Adam Fier and his family from their suburban Washington, D.C., home to New Zealand. "Among the top reasons" behind the Fiers' big move, reporter Shankar Vedantam writes, is "global warming."
Having hitchhiked from the top of that splendid South Pacific nation to the bottom, I question nobody's decision to move there. But if the Fiers truly fear being burned to a crisp or drowned in a global-warming-induced flood in the next couple of decades—or if they worry that their grandchildren will suffer a similar fate in the next century—how rational was it for them to move 8,600 miles?
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StumbleUponNew Zealand stretches from approximately 33 degrees south latitude to 47 degrees south latitude. The average temperatures range from about 75 degrees in the summer to 57 degrees in the winter in the country's northernmost cities to between 57 degrees and 42 degrees in its southernmost towns.
The article doesn't say where in New Zealand the Fiers settled, but surely there exists a U.S. city or town that would have suited their ambition to find a cool, green place with a high quality of life that's "isolated from global conflicts." Scores of livable communities with New Zealand-esque climates exist in the North America: Bellingham, Wash., and Bend, Ore., on the West Coast; Shepherdstown, W.Va., Bangor, Maine, on the East Coast; and any number of places in Ontario and Quebec. According to the Post story, Fier, a former NASA computer-security worker, picked New Zealand even though he has no professional or family contacts there and never visited the country before.
Very weird for a guy who is out to protect his family. Something is motivating Adam Fier, but I don't think it's climate fear.
What exactly is an ecomigrant, anyway? The article offers the wobbly definition of anybody "on the move in search of more habitable living space." By this measure, I qualify as a lapsed ecomigrant because I once moved from Michigan to Los Angeles for the sun and surf. My Uncle Chuck and Aunt Barb would fill the bill, too, having retired to Florida from Chicago because they hated Midwestern winters. And don't forget the Chiricahua Apaches, who left the desert plains for the mountains in the summer.
According to the academic authority quoted in the piece, there were 25 million ecomigrants a decade ago—but there are many more now. Still, very few of the ecomigrants mentioned in the story are motivated by climate change. In the Philippines, the story states, about 4 million moved to the highlands because of deforestation. Droughts and famine in the Sahel—not necessarily related to climate change, either—caused 10 million to move.
The people of the Pacific nation of Kiribati are the second biggest peg for the story, but their fears haven't driven them anywhere yet. Kiribati's president only hopes to find a new home for the country's 100,000 citizens (who fret that they'll be swamped by rising sea levels). Also figuring highly in the piece are the people of Bangladesh, of whom the Post writes "about 12 million to 17 million … have fled their homes in recent decades because of environmental disasters." We're told Bangladeshis also fear rising sea levels, but the piece is mum on whether climate fears have caused any to move permanently.
In addition to Fier, two other American ecomigrants are mentioned: Lynn Lightfoot, who moved from New Orleans to Shreveport, La., and Thomas Hoff, who left Michigan for Florida about 25 years ago and may move again because he worries that climate change may have increased the frequency of violent hurricanes.
This is thin porridge. Colin Grabow beat me to ridiculing this story in his blog. New Zealand can't be considered a mecca for immigrants, he writes. It showed an average net migration of only 3.3 per 1,000 population from 1990 to 2003, compared with 3.5 for the United States and 3.8 for Greece. Meanwhile, Luxembourg's average net migration per 1,000 population was 8.8. (This New Zealand page is home to an Excel spreadsheet that compares average migration by country.)
What was it that the wise man said? The plural of anecdote is not data.
******
Thanks to reader John Corso for flagging the story. Seen a bogus trend story lately? Send it to . (E-mail may be quoted by name in "The Fray," Slate's readers' forum; in a future article; or elsewhere unless the writer stipulates otherwise. Permanent disclosure: Slate is owned by the Washington Post Co.)
Track my errors: This hand-built RSS feed will ring every time Slate runs a "Press Box" correction. For e-mail notification of errors in this specific column, type the word ecomigration in the subject head of an e-mail message and send it to .
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Remarks from the Fray:
Fact-free journalism is all the rage nowadays, but Jack Shafer's Feb 25 screed against my article about ecomigrants was striking because it purported to defend facts against opinion and anecdote while offering a series of personal opinions and anecdotes against the facts.
Shafer reminds me that the plural of anecdote is not data. The anecdotes in my story were not used in lieu of data but to illustrate the data – upward of 25 million human beings are currently displaced from their homes as a result of environmental changes and catastrophe. The data are so compelling – and so at odds with Shafer's conclusions – that I must assume Shafer was stuck on deadline without a piece to fit his prefabricated "Bogus Trend Story of the Week" slot.
Shafer says Adam Fier's decision to move from the Washington area to New Zealand cannot be explained by climate fears because there are lots of places in North America that offer comfortable living: "Something is motivating Adam Fier, but I don't think it's climate fear."
Fier, a risk-assessment specialist, evaluated how a number of countries might fare over the next century, taking into account their quality of life, environmental records, access to resources and the likelihood they might get embroiled in conflicts arising out of climate change. He does not represent a trend in himself: My article clearly stated he is at one pole of a phenomenon that ranges from people moving because they fear climate changes in coming decades to people being forced to move right now by ongoing disasters and disruptions. It is perfectly legitimate to disagree with Fier, but I am not sure how Shafer can speak with authority about someone else's motivations. Other people are the experts when it comes to talking knowledgeably about their own minds. (Shafer's reporting-free technique, of course, did not involve actually talking to Fier.)
Shafer calls my definition of ecomigrant – people on the move in search of more habitable living space – wobbly, offers anecdotes of people moving from the Midwest to Florida in search of better weather, and mockingly asks if they are all ecomigrants. When someone moves out of the Midwest, it isn't in search of more habitable living space. The Midwest is perfectly habitable. Several million people live there. To equate people fleeing floods and famine with a couple retiring from Chicago is perverse.
Shafer belittles the people of Kiribati, who fear their island nation is going to be inundated by rising oceans, and dismisses their concerns as fretting. Kiribati's president recently talked about buying a new homeland for his people. Separate from whether you think such fear is well-founded, surely it is newsworthy when a head of state talks about moving his entire country?
Shafer questions how the examples I give of mass migrations in the past can all be linked to global warming. It's an excellent riposte to ... a point I didn't make. My article did not say that global warming has caused every large migration in the past. That would be absurd. The point I was making is that mass migrations triggered by rapid environmental change can be enormously disruptive. I cited the example of the Dust Bowl in America – surely it was obvious I wasn't suggesting global warming was the villain in the 1930s?
Another straw man: Shafer argues that New Zealand is not a Mecca for immigrants and provides migration statistics showing other countries allow more immigrants. What does this have to do with anything? It's obvious every ecomigrant in the world cannot move to New Zealand. No one said they could, no one said they wanted to. The blog Shafer glowingly recommends to us tells us that even if 50 million people were displaced by environmental disasters "that hardly seems like a calamity." You can tell a lot about a person by the hyperlinks he keeps.
For someone who claims to be fighting for science, Shafer is curiously silent when it comes to the scientific evidence – millions of human beings are currently displaced by environmental degradation and disasters, and their numbers are growing steadily. Norman Myers, the British environmental researcher who has studied the phenomenon, told me, "It's plain that sea-level rise in the wake of climate change will inundate the homelands of huge numbers of people." Shafer may not think this is true, but to pretend his opinion matters more than the data is unscientific. To claim he is a brave warrior for science is – to take a word from his own playbook – bogus.
Shankar Vedantam
National Reporter & Columnist
The Washington Post
For More Information: www.vedantam.com
--Vendantem
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