Our Future Climate: A Journal of Migration

Global News from the Future

Q. What will happen when more people need to migrate because of the climate crisis?

A. I’m going to answer this question based on my personal experience. I don’t usually publicly talk about my private life, but I feel my story about the effects of the climate crisis needs to be shared. Privacy doesn’t seem as important when we’re in an emergency.

A Journal of Climate Migration

This post is a warning to those who have not yet been awakened by the alarming impact of a climate emergency. Listen to it or dismiss it, the choice is yours. This post is not a complaint. I am one of the lucky ones.

Why I’m Writing this Now

My relationship to the climate crisis has been accelerated due to a medical condition that causes extreme heat intolerance. I’m writing this to tell you what increasing global heating feels like for someone who has been hit by it early, and what it will most likely feel like for others at some point. I’m not a scientist. I’m telling you these anecdotes from the perspective of the future, because I’ve already been where most of us are headed. There are millions of others like me who had to move because of climate emergencies, so I am far from alone.

Migration to Delay Extinction

Global heating won’t affect every person the same way. Some will be more unable to tolerate the changing conditions than others. Depending on hereditary, environmental, medical, practical, and other factors, some people may be forced to move sooner to survive. Because of a connective tissue disorder that causes temperature regulation problems, I migrated sooner. My illness is intermittent and temperature dependent. The higher the temperature gets above 64 F (18 C) , the more incapacitated I become, and the more frequently I experience a debilitating heat illness.

I’m only able to write this now because I fled to a colder country. I am fortunate because a friend drove me 1,000 miles away so the swelling in my throat could go down, I could speak, move my muscles, and think clearly again. The almost-constant heat-induced migraines began to subside as we got farther along in our journey to a colder country. I probably won’t ever be able to move back to my home cities or states, but that’s the least of my worries.

Here is what the future of a climate crisis may look like for you, based on where I’ve been and where you may go. Of course there will be some differences in each of our experiences. We’ll all be exposed to changes in varying degrees. Here is my story.

Home in a Time of Climate Emergency

You will say goodbye to a home and a city you may have grown to love. Perhaps you, like me, will have lived there most of your life. You will know you can probably never go back because this place, once comfortable, has become uninhabitable to you. To return is to risk an early death, so better to leave as soon as possible. As you pack up the car, you suddenly realise that the only way you can safely come back would be in a coffin, because returning alive would likely kill you. Either way, you’d be dead.

Friendships in a Time of Climate Emergency

If you’re lucky, as I was, you’ll have a night or two to say goodbye to some of your closest friends. You’ll be celebrating an opportunity for a new way of life, even as you’re mourning social traditions that may never again be replicated in material form. While you’ll be able to communicate remotely, there probably won’t be any more meeting up for coffee or parties or spending another night out together. The final meal is bittersweet.

Relationships in a Time of Climate Emergency

Relationships will end. Global heating doesn’t increase at a rate that’s convenient to your schedule or your heart. Love will have to be left behind in favour of survival. It doesn’t matter how much you love this person. Survival supersedes emotional needs.

Family in a Time of Climate Emergency

Older relatives, too sick to join you, will be left behind. Before you get on the road, you’ll say goodbye to a dying relative. You know it’s the last time you’ll see your parent, and they will know it, too. You give each other one last hug, and because each of you knows there won’t be another, it will break both of your hearts in a single moment. They know they’re going to die without you there, but they’re okay with that because you’re going to survive. Your mom or dad is more happy for you than sad for themselves. They’ll kiss your hand goodbye, which they’ve never done before. That’s how you know they know this is the last goodbye.

Children in a Time of Climate Emergency

One of the most difficult parts of this move will be when you tell your younger siblings who you’re leaving behind that they can join you someday, wherever you may be. You’ll mean it. But you don’t know yet where that will be or when, so you can’t make any definite plans. Every promise depends on the weather. 

Some couples will be forced to go their separate ways, perhaps so the sicker ones can leave to survive and healthier ones can stay employed. Or maybe the healthier ones will leave to find work. As a result of these climate separations, children will either be left behind or will have to move away without you. A normal state of family will end. The children will never forget, even though you did all you could to make the best choices under the circumstances. Because heat illness affects cognitive functioning, you won’t be fully feeling yourself when you make irrevocable decisions like this. Some regrets will be inevitable.

In the end, more people will have to move than not. And even if you get out, you’ll lose the ones who refuse to leave.

Economy in a Time of Climate Emergency

At this point, you might be thinking that none of this applies to you, maybe because you don’t have children or you live far away from family. Perhaps your home is in a colder region and you look forward to the “relief” of an eternal summer. If that’s the case, consider that there’s one more loss in all of this that none of us can do without: the material funding necessary to stay alive. As resources become increasingly scarce, many smaller corporations will shut down, one by one. They’ll either have to move to adapt, declare bankruptcy, or go out of business. Larger corporations will generate layoffs to stay in business. Some will move overseas.

Jobs will end. Industries will end. Plans for retirement and savings will be disrupted because of a need to move to survive.

Incomes will end, sometimes abruptly. And when they do, don’t count on help from your government when you very well may have to migrate to another country. There won’t be time to sell the furniture. You may only bring what you can carry in your hands, unless you’re lucky enough to be able to drive or take a train to the next destination. Even then, you can only bring what will fit in the trunk. 

Health in a Time of Climate Emergency

On top of this, the hotter it gets, the slower you’ll become. Increased temperatures will weaken your muscles until you spend most of your time in a semi-comatose state of muscular paralysis accompanied by brain fog. You will ask doctors for help, and they will tell you, as many GPs, specialists, and professors at some of the leading teaching hospitals in the U.S. have informed me, that there is no drug or treatment to mitigate heat illness, heat exhaustion, or even heat intolerance. Doctors may tell you what they told me: the only option is to move somewhere cold.

Feedback loops will only accelerate the stakes of the crisis. At some point, nobody’s going to be able to implement climate solutions when their bodies are barely moving and minds are hardly functioning. Frequent heat exhaustion diminished my ability to think clearly and temporarily took away all my short-term memory. When I was in Los Angeles, I spent most of the year with the blinds closed to keep out the heat of the sun, sitting under the coldest air conditioning vent in the house, and wearing ice on my head day and night. It was still too hot.

I only escaped with the help of a friend who probably saved my life, and thanks to an institution that took me in. I also survived because I already had some resources, a small business that I brought abroad, and the privilege and opportunities of a higher education. Most people won’t have exactly the right combination they need to get to a healthy, safe environment. Despite these recent improvements, my heat intolerance will continue to increase in direct proportion to the progression of global heating. I’m running out of places to go. Each cold place gets hotter every year. Even under the best of circumstances, there is no permanent solution.

Strutting, Fretting and Circumnavigating Extinction

After all the movement and speech throughout the history of humanity, all our collective “struts and frets…upon the stage”*, will we allow the powers that be to arrest our bodies and minds in time and space, never to be unfrozen again? Why should the human greed of a few condemn the rest to becoming mere skeletal statues that serve as a homage to previous civilisations? We’ve already lost so much, and we’re losing more species every day. There will be no time to experiment with solutions as we have in the past. No second chance at human life. There is no backup copy of Earth.

Some of the places we might think of escaping to, as in the coldest and rainiest of the world, are northern island nations and cooler coastal regions which are more vulnerable to flooding. The places we have to go might be underwater by the time we most need to get there. Where will we end up then? The time to solve the greatest problems humanity has ever faced is now or never. Time is running out.

I am not so different than you, I am just further along in the process of migration. My illness has given me the gift of being able to live in the future sooner and come back to tell you about it. I am asking you to listen to what the human consequences of an ongoing climate crisis will look like. These times might not be as far away as we think. For me, it is only a recent memory. Of course I have hope. I wouldn’t bother writing this otherwise.

What Next?

At present, I am on an island off the coast of Canada. I’m exactly where I want to be, doing what I want to be doing, and happier and healthier than I’ve ever been. But I also know this can’t last forever. At the same time as I’m enjoying my new life, I’m waiting for my next move while watching the weather app with every passing day.

If this post even helps one person prepare, it will have been worth whatever I went through to get here.

The End

…or is it?

* Macbeth, Act V, scene v, l. 24-28

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