So, I was rummaging through the garbage pile that is Twitter and I found this shiny thing:
People from all over the world are being forced to migrate because the climate crisis is affecting their livelihood. The migrant caravan from Central America is a recent, startling example. This @FT video connects the dots in a profound way. https://t.co/pGZwiUeIRZ
— Al Gore (@algore) December 17, 2018
I watched the whole video. It centers on a tomato farmer who says the climate changed in 2016 and he lost his crop and can’t afford to pay back a loan, so he’s migrating to the U.S.
Now, one can agree 100 percent with Al Gore on the problem of climate change and still think this is terrible argumentation. For starters, Gore says the migrant caravan is a “startling example” of climate change driven migration. Except, the farmer in this video doesn’t join the caravan. Gore says that the Financial Times “connects the dots” but there’s only one dot! There aren’t dots, plural. There’s just a man who says his tomato crop failed because of climate change. Maybe it did. But we get no data, no aggregate picture of changing climate, or even weather. We just get the assurances of one farmer telling a reporter what she clearly wants to hear and maybe what he wants to believe because it’s a better excuse. And again, it might be true. But I am pretty sure that crop failures occurred even before the Industrial Revolution started belching out C02.