Charles Rotter Every so often I find a climate paper that is a pleasure to read because it is not trying to sell me anything. No policy prescription, no call to action, no press release warning that we have five years to save the planet. Just four researchers, three of them at Harvard, asking a genuinely interesting question and answering it with a method that did not exist a decade ago. The paper is "Climate and Prehistoric Migration," a June working paper from the National Bureau of Economic R...
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Migration isn’t what I would call welcome at this time.
A TOTAL of 83 asylum seekers are to be moved into £250,000 homes on an estate dubbed “Migrant Street”.
Twenty-one smart newbuild houses have been earmarked for the families.
Never mind the thousands on the waiting list.
Go to 8:20
Imagine if immigration policy was meant to benefit one’s citizens.
That would be racist…
The don’t procreate fast enough.
The councillor definitely let the cat out of the bag:
“Afghans .. er .. Ukraine”
Pants on fire
And EV charging stations- for the freebie Teslas
Who wants an EV? Not me.
Giving people stuff means they have no vested interest in taking care of it.
Goes double when people believe that whatever they break, will be replaced, also free of charge.
I believe this is the paper. https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w35371/w35371.pdf
Good point. I updated the link the actual PDF, not the description.
“Huybers is a serious climate scientist, not a man with a skeptical axe to grind.”
This is not an either/or situation, as someone can be both.
This is a fascinating topic, but what are the error bars are on the DNA analysis and temperatures?
I’m not convinced a 0.4°C change in temperature is always significant everywhere to migration.
That relatively small change has already been exceeded since 1850 while the world’s growing climates have been pretty stable, if not expanding from more CO2, warmth, and rain. Crops have not largely been displaced or decreased through the latest 0.4°C change, albeit crop production since 1850 has also been a matter of petroleum energy and technology, not just nature.
Perhaps human migrations that follow crop migrations/changes are naturally less sensitive to ‘changes’ and are more a non-linear function of absolute temperature range. Maybe the study could be made better and more useful by including absolute temperature ranges.
A growing population will inevitably diffuse outward in preferential directions as it grows, after most of the nearby lands are taken up from population growth and use. Thus many migrations will naturally follow after long periods of population growth fed by good growing conditions. This would indicate population density is a factor in migration.
I’m also not convinced South Americans are presently ‘migrating’ to North America, specifically the USA, to escape climate change in South America – it is politically and economically driven.
Or do a certain percentage of people through history always have a bad case of wanderlust?
‘Wanderlust?’, asks Mr Weber (Weaver). That word is a Germanic compound.
Long experience with those originating from the Deutsche-Sprachraum (CH, DE, AT …) confirms that —
YES, a nicht-kleine-Portion-davon have a ‘bad case’ of it.
You may find them anywhere you travel. Or migrate.
Try this query: ‘Who were the Saxons (Sachsen)?’, just one Tribe among them.
Some people always had wanderlust. The Amesbury archer’s teeth (isotope analysis) showed he grew up on the European continent–his remains were unearthed near Stonehenge in southern England. Otzi, the alpine iceman also traveled a long ways in his lifetime; according to isotope studies of his teeth.
I recently saw a documentary about studying the remains of a young woman who’s skeletan was found somewhere in France, from her teeth it was found out that she had grown up in (I believe Sweden). The time frame was prior to the Viking age.
In the past it’s not to unusual for young men to wander, much more unusual for women.
The women travelled long distances too, but often not willingly. Times were brutal back then for both men and women Outside of certain middle eastern countries, times have now improved for both.
Two comments–pre-historically, women often moved to their husband’s community, rather than the other way around; and secondly, I would expect there to have been a pretty robust slave trade pre-Viking as well.
The world is no longer driven by the need for 90% of its citizens to be producing food, so the environment is no longer the primary driver of migration.
Good point.
And today food can be moved around much more easily because of fossil fuel. So if for whatever reason crops in your area have a bad year you and your animals don’t starve to death or have to move to an other place. In those days it was different.
You read the bad stuff so we don’t have to.
You read the good stuff so we can too.
Story tip Dale Vince is upset
Dale Vince: Ed Miliband has turned net zero toxic
Labour donor calls on Andy Burnham to sack the Energy Secretary rather than promote him
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2026/07/03/dale-vince-ed-miliband-has-turned-net-zero-toxic/
“a herder who knew arid grassland could not easily run his animals through a humid continental winter.”
Chinggis Khan seemed to have no trouble there.
Story tip!
The Guardian is still measuring ocean temperatures in ‘Hiroshima’ units.
– – – – – – – – –
Ocean surface temperatures hit a record high for June
European scientists warn of consequences for weather patterns, the global climate and marine life
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jul/01/ocean-surface-temperatures-hit-a-record-high-for-june
Oceans are warmed by absorbing solar radiation.. that absorption has been on the increase.
Anyone thinking that humans can do anything to “warm the oceans”, belongs in a loony-bin. !
Marine life loves warmer oceans, like what they had for most of the last 10,000 years.
The freezing cold of the LIA drove marine species out of the Arctic region, and they are only just starting to return.
We have just had the longest and strongest Grand Solar Maximum in about six centuries. https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20220002976/downloads/Cycle25.pdf
Just in time to post in comment here. 🙂
120 Years Of Shortwave And Longwave Flux Analysis Show Ocean Heat Changes Are Unrelated To CO2
Guardian journalists are as innumerate as the readers.
I did not know that we can tell whether a DNA belongs to a farmer or a pastoralist. Can we tell whether the owner is English, Irish, Welsh, or Scottish?
According to the paper, the intersection of ancient genetics and paleontology allows a researcher to determine whether a population (and individuals in the population) are farmers or pastoralists or foragers. The time periods covered by this study do not allow a distinction between different populations in Britain. All they can tell is the close genetic relationships between individuals whose remains are found in different places, and they did not compare DNA found close together (I think they said within 500 miles).
As neolithic groups migrated out of deteriorating regional climates into fairer lands, the fact that the in-migrated lands were fair likely means they also were already inhabited.
So, in general, there was climate-driven migration of neolithic peoples into other inhabited lands. Wonder what happened when the migrants appeared at the top of the hill.
It seems Peter Huybers, Marco Tabellini, Charles A. Taylor, and Francesco Toti have provided an inferential case that everyone alive today, whoever they are, wherever they are, live on ‘stolen land.’
Horrors!
I realize you were being at least partially tongue-in-cheek, but… The interactions could have been friendly, mutually beneficial. The new arrivals could have brought knowledge or goods the indigenous people didn’t have, and vice versa.
The new arrivals could have brought knowledge or goods the indigenous people didn’t have, and vice versa.
This does not sound anything like the current mass migration from the Third World into Europe.
That’s not what the post is about.
Knowledge and goods tend to be gradual, but archaeology suggests that tribal interactions were prominently savage and brutal.
If the land my house is on was “stolen”, why did I have to pay for it?
Try reading the fine-print that explains why you had to pay a ‘Title Insurance’ fee on the home-purchase transaction. Someone is lurking out there with a claim (and a grievance).
Throughout human history, all inhabited lands of the world have been conquered by “colonizers,” with some being conquered many times. This was true among the inhabitants of North, Central, and South America long before the arrival of European settlers, with many tribes and clans savagely killing and dismembering their adversaries and claiming their territories. In this sense, today’s radical leftist trend toward “land acknowledgments” is both ignorant and stupid. By any almost particular measure, today’s surviving descendants of early peoples are privileged to live vastly better lives than those of their ancestors.
How many generations must a people inhabit a land before they can be called indigenous? Europeans have lived in the Americas for almost 500 years. My own ancestors have been in the U.S. for about 200 years. I also qualify to be a Son of the Republic of Texas as I have ancestors who moved here prior to 1845. Maybe I should call myself an indigenous person so that I can apply for government benefits. There is a certain female U.S. senator who has tried this ploy.
As for bogus land acknowledgments, I say as did my forebears in 1835 at the Battle of Gonzales during the Texas Revolution, COME AND TAKE IT.
I have ancestors who have been in America for 400 years, and are documented to have purchased land from indigenous people. Is that in fact stolen land?
Great article! In today’s world, I can see several overlays that either exacerbate or mitigate climate related migrations.
National boundaries that present legal barriers to climate-related migration pressures.Governance and cultural/religious norms of said nations, which overwhelmingly impact the quality of life, keeping people at home or pressuring them to find greener pastures,National population growth pressures in the face of climate and weather variability that can create unsustainable national populations. Consistent with this article, this very situation is recorded in the Bible, in Genesis chapter 13. Abraham and Lot had so many herds that the land could not support them all, so they chose to separate. Lot saw a land that had more rainfall for his herds and chose to separate from Abraham and to move there.As nations and societies develop and modernize, a diminishing portion of the populace is dependent upon herding and farming agriculture. In advanced and developed countries, this is a very tiny fraction, less than 5% of the population. Most live in cities, which already have disproportionate urban heat Islands far beyond the meager effects of gradual climate change. If it weren’t for fear-based and false narratives about catastrophic climate change, city dwellers would have no perception of gradual average temperature changes and would feel no compulsion to move based on the weather. And no, you can’t just look out your window and see climate change; thumbs down to climate attribution modeling — what a joke! Most city dwellers and politicians also have no clue about the source of their food, energy, and manufactured goods. So-called “green” (I hate that word) solutions have proven to be fairy dust and unicorn farts.Improvements in agricultural technology and practice, modest improvement in growing seasons, and global greening due to CO2 have lead to dramatic and continuing increases in agricultural productivity worldwide. Coupled with open trade internationally, food, feed, and fiber supply can move about easily, decoupling cities, regions, and states from the productivity of their particular locales and the impacts of inter-annual and seasonal variability (drought, freeze, heat, disease) on yields. Today most people in developed countries can live just about anywhere they want to and not have to worry about where their next meal will come from. They can also buy and enjoy a vast variety of fresh and preserved foods at any time of year, regardless of seasonality or the suitability of their local food sources.Supplies of reliable, affordable and readily available energy, coupled with modern HVAC systems, efficient building design and appliances, along with modern sanitary water supplies, and waste water treatment practically eliminate all impacts of variable temperatures and climate. People just learn to adapt to their own micro-climates rather than migrate elsewhere.