Book review of ‘Nomad Century: How Climate Migration Will Reshape Our World,’ by Gaia Vince

First, Vince demands that we must immediately decarbonize energy production, shifting from fossil fuels to solar, wind, geothermal, tidal, and nuclear power, while electrifying transportation, heating, and all energy-intensive activities.

So far, so inconspicuous, even if many would disagree with their enthusiasm for nuclear power.

Your remaining recommendations are less routine, to say the least. An international agency must oversee the orderly migration of hundreds of millions or billions (different parts of the book give different numbers) of climate refugees. With a warming of 4 degrees Celsius, “the vast majority of humanity will live in areas with high latitudes”. That would be at least 5 billion people.

These refugees have to leave warmer latitudes in Asia, Africa and Latin America and settle in Alaska, Canada, Greenland, northern Europe and Russia, as well as Patagonia, Tasmania, New Zealand and Antarctica. Someone has to build archipelagos of new cities in the far north and far south of the planet to house them. Meanwhile, to stabilize the climate, we must abandon squeamishness and embrace various forms of geoengineering. Finally, to do this properly, we must empower a “global government agency” to set the planet’s thermostat.

“Nomad Century” is an odd mix of apocalyptic planetary pessimism and boundless optimism about the better angels of human nature. Vince examines scenarios for the unfolding climate crisis and selects those closer to the alarming end of the spectrum, while remaining within the bounds of plausibility in my opinion. There is one notable exception – where she writes of “a few degrees” of warming [Celsius] every decade”, which is far beyond the realm of scientific projections.

She foresees massive tragedies in the tropics and subtropics from sweltering heat, water shortages and crop failures. She might be right – the climate crisis is likely to be the dominant problem of the 21st century. She believes that Asians, Africans and Latin Americans cannot adjust to the scale of these challenges. Maybe she’s there too.

However, Vince’s recipe for assisted mass migration is a recipe for political disaster. She envisions that a “UN migration agency with real powers to force governments to take in refugees” could persuade or force Russians, Scandinavians, British, Greenlanders, Canadians, Alaskans and New Zealanders to move hundreds of millions (or billions) of poor foreigners into to their country and to help them with jobs, health care and language classes.

But such gigantic flows of refugees, especially if their resettlement were overseen by an international body with “compulsory” powers, would provoke a storm of outrage. Vince’s vision calls for every country in the high latitudes to take in refugees in numbers that would swamp the local population. A new generation of Orbans and Bannons – and worse – would be eager to foment and exploit anti-migrant fears. Pogroms would spread.

She points to the history of the Nansen Pass, developed in the 1920s to help stateless refugees, as proof of the feasibility of her plan. But only about 450,000 Nansen passports have been issued in the 16 years of its existence. Had hundreds of millions been spent, no country would have honored them.

Vince recognizes some of the difficulties, realizing that for their plan to succeed, people must first abandon racism, chauvinism, and nationalism and become citizens of the world. Like John Lennon and Yoko Ono, you can’t blame her for a lack of imagination.

Their recipe also implausibly assumes that building hundreds of new cities in the higher latitudes is feasible. The boreal landscapes have thin soils that were scraped bare in the last Ice Age and could barely support crops even in a warmer world. She recommends paying for the urban and refugee settlement tide with “an international tax” or “public-private partnerships.”

Vince’s optimism also extends to geoengineering. She considers it “morally unacceptable” not to use the tools at our disposal to cool the planet. Her toolbox contains the standard ideas: She recommends fertilizing the oceans with iron to encourage plankton growth and thereby remove carbon from the atmosphere. She is pushing for the creation of an international agency to oversee the injection of sulfate aerosols into the stratosphere to reflect sunshine back into space. Deploring the “taboo” against geoengineering, she chooses a word that makes caution seem like an irrational fixation on a deranged tribe. She is unconcerned about the risks of experimenting with large Earth systems and says we could just stop if geoengineering had nasty side effects. It does not take into account non-linear responses or tipping points that can throw complex systems like climate into a new state from which it is extremely difficult to return.

Vince’s approach to geoengineering also includes political optimism. Any “global government agency” able to set the planet’s thermostat would quickly find irreconcilable differences. It’s hard enough for a family to agree on the right thermostat setting for a home. She is aware of this issue, but her only answer is that the agency should be put to work immediately.

Vince has read a great deal, but often fails to mention her sources. Readers who want to know where she got the idea that the ancient Greeks descended from nomadic steppe warriors or that 40 percent of East Africa’s rainfall came from groundwater extraction in India are left in the dark. This makes it more difficult than it should be to assess the quality of the science on which it is based.

Vince’s wrong recommendations come from having her heart in the right place. She is deeply and rightly concerned about the likely plight of billions of the world’s least fortunate as our climate continues to warm. And she rightly emphasizes the dangers of climate change. But “Nomad Century” recommends cures that could easily prove worse than the disease. Their proposals for internationally monitored mass migrations and large-scale geoengineering require faith in the widespread sacredness and wisdom humanity has yet to show.

JR McNeill is Professor of Environmental History at Georgetown University.

How climate migration will change our world