The research pointed to a likely mass migration that could dwarf anything we've seen in millennia.
But I wanted to know more.
So we decided to do what we could to change that.
It turned out, of course, to be every bit as difficult as we were warned, and far more so than I imagined.
How we did it:
His work found that as many as 143 million people would become climate migrants within their own borders
So, we hired Jones and set out to build a new model that would forecast both domestic and international climate disruption.
Like:
-What would happen if global business stays the same, borders stay relatively open, but we don't do much to stop climate change and it gets HOT?
-What if we all stop emitting carbon dioxide right now and climate change is slowed to a manageable crawl?
There was plenty of published, peer reviewed research to support those assumptions, but it had to rely on assumptions nonetheless.
The model's real value, it turns out, wasn’t the numbers it produced. It was this:
It told us:
1. More warming will lead to more migration, both domestic and international. This point was unambiguous.
But most of all, it told us:
features.propublica.org/climate-migrat…
go.propublica.org/bigstory-social