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Comment by zaro | Hacker News Reader

> A promise by rich nations to provide developing nations with $100 billion a year to tackle climate change is only one part of the huge transformation needed, she added.

This sounds like a joke when the military budgets are in the trillions. But on the other hand when poor countries become inhabitable and people start moving military will be needed to push them back .

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You mean uninhabitable?

Yeah, my biggest worry about climate change isn't that we're going to cook the planet. It's that we're going to burn it way before that, as migration pressures start causing wars.

Zaro might be a native romance-language speaker.

abitare/habitar/habiter is "inhabit" in english, while inabitabile/inhabitable/inhabitable is "uninhabitable", the "in-" being privative (compare: in-sufficient, in-secure etc).

English played us bad :)

Don't forget inflammable!

What a country!

Yes, I am not an native speaker, but I know the difference very well.

Typing from the phone very late and feeling sleepy causes your brain to perceive things in a different way though :)

Yes. I meant uninhabitable of course.

Fun fact: GHG emissions by the military were explicitly excluded under the Kyoto agreement. It's like they don't exist, since their cause is so noble.

Unless you're happy to have your sons and daughters kill people fleeing their uninhabitable countries, military solutions won't help.

Actively kill? Probably not, or at least not widespread. Passively watch them die (while denying life-saving care)? That is already reality, and in no way hypothetical.

It's already happening in Europe [1] and the Sahara Desert [2]. This situation is already in large parts due to climate change, as the entire Syrian war, for example, can be seen as being caused by climate change [3], and the patterns of migration in Africa are driven by desertification, among other things.

In all of these cases, a large military can secure a border, creating a fortress few, if any refugees can enter. And climate change is going to be the main driver of refugee migration.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jul/03/mediterranean-...

[2] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/06/walk-die-algeria-aban...

[3] https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2015/03/150302-syri...

There is a case of Israeli-Egyptian border.

Israeli don't have to actively kill Egyptians because they, for almost all purposes, can't enter.

Nothing much wrong in having my daughter participate in some wall building.

In all current cases there aren't very many people trying to cross the border at once. If Egypt became uninhabitable there'd be 100 million people trying to leave. If it was even just 5% of that trying to get in to Israel then a wall or an army isn't going to stop them unless that army is willing to actively murder innocent people. I don't think any army on Earth would be willing to do that. Consequently a military solution isn't ever going to work.

You're talking about Egypt suddently becoming uninhabitable. That's not the case here. The case is that first it will be capable of hosting 100 mln people, then shrink to 90, then to 80, etc... Each transition will probably take five years. Of course there's a possibility of disasters there a wave of "sea people" may hit your wall.

Unfortunately it seems increasingly inevitable. You only have to look at what my country is happy to put faceless brown asylum seekers through rather than take a (comparatively minuscule) compromise in their living conditions to recognise that, when it comes to it, probably this results in war or genocide. When it comes down to it, faced with hundreds of thousands or millions of people coming to Australia in boats, threatening an already shaky lifestyle, the most likely outcome I can see is that we kill them, as sick as that makes me feel.

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