A year ago Billmon wrote: When the Levee Breaks
As a living, functioning city, then, New Orleans has ceased to exist. Even if it can eventually be resuscitated, the patient’s long-term prognosis is grim. Just as yesterday was a catastrophe in slow motion, the future of the Crescent City is likely to be a slow, lingering death by drowning: the environmental equivalent of pulmonary edema. In that sense, New Orleans is the canary — peacock might be the more appropriate bird — in the mine of global climate change. If melting ice caps continue to push sea levels rapidly higher, its death may also await many of the world’s other low-lying cities.
The death will not only come to such cities.
Global warming will induce huge migration waves away from the low-lying coasts and new deserts. For Katrina refugees the experience and situation is sad and uprooting. But there are means for them to survive without violence. The conflict for and over Katrina refugees is a soft one.
The skirmishes resulting from desertification in Darfur are deadly. A one meter rise in sea levels will result in a loss of 16% of land, densely populated, in Bangladesh. Whereto will those people flee? Throughout this century hundreds of millions will have find new homes.
The levees the U.S., the EU and others are building on their boarders will break when that wave arrives. Populists will declare this new migration period to be an invasion of barbarians and the fighting will be fierce, deadly and on a very large scale.