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Climate change could produce a refugee crisis that is “unprecedented in human history”, Barack Obama has warned as he stressed global warming was the most pressing issue of the age. Speaking at an international food conference in Milan, the former US President said rising temperatures were already making it more difficult to grow crops and rising food prices were “leading to political instability”. He said the United States was currently experiencing “floods on sunny days”, increased wildfires and, in Alaska, increased coastal erosion as the ice melts and no country was “immune” to the problem. If world leaders put aside “parochial interests” and took action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by enough to restrict the rise to one or two degrees Celsius, then humanity would probably be able to cope. Failing to do this, Mr Obama warned, increased the risk of “catastrophic” effects in the future, “not only real threats to food security, but also increases in conflict as a consequence of scarcity and greater refugee and migration patterns”. "If you think about monsoon patterns in the Indian subcontinent, maybe half a billion people rely on traditional rain patterns in those areas,” he told the Seeds & Chips conference, in remarks previously reported by Business Insider. "If those rain patterns change, then you could see hundreds of millions of people who suddenly find themselves unable to feed themselves, because they're already at subsistence levels. “And the amount of migration, the number of refugees that could be resulting from something like that, would be unprecedented in human history.” He noted that some of the worst effects of climate change would be “borne by people in poor nations that are least equipped to handle it”. The current refugee crisis, which has seen hundreds of thousands of people from war-torn Syria and other places affected by conflict and poverty, travel to Europe would be “just the beginning of the kinds of problems we would see”, Mr Obama said. “Some of the refugee flows into Europe originate not only from conflict, but also from places where there are food shortages that will get far worse as climate change continues.” He dismissed sceptics’ claims that climate change is still a matter for debate. “The only real controversy is ‘how much warmer will it get?’ There’s really no controversy that the planet is getting warmer and the human activity is contributing to the warming,” he said. “And what is also the conclusion of almost every scientist is if the planet warms at the far end of the potential estimates that it would be catastrophic and at the low end it would still be disruptive.” Current climate models produce a range of possible outcomes as a result of the doubling of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, from about 1.5C to 5C of warming. So far CO2 has risen from about 280 parts per million – a level that had remained fairly constant from the end of the last Ice Age to the 1800s – to more than 400ppm today.
Keywords
Climate change, refugee, unprecedented, human history, global warming, international , instability, political, immune, catastrophic.
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