Fact-free journalism is all the rage nowadays, but Jack Shafer’s Feb 25 screed against my article about ecomigrants was striking because it purported to defend facts against opinion and anecdote while offering a series of personal opinions and anecdotes against the facts.

Shafer reminds me that the plural of anecdote is not data. The anecdotes in my story were not used in lieu of data but to illustrate the data – upward of 25 million human beings are currently displaced from their homes as a result of environmental changes and catastrophe. The data are so compelling – and so at odds with Shafer’s conclusions – that I must assume Shafer was stuck on deadline without a piece to fit his prefabricated “Bogus Trend Story of the Week” slot.

Shafer says Adam Fier’s decision to move from the Washington area to New Zealand cannot be explained by climate fears because there are lots of places in North America that offer comfortable living: “Something is motivating Adam Fier, but I don’t think it’s climate fear.”

Fier, a risk-assessment specialist, evaluated how a number of countries might fare over the next century, taking into account their quality of life, environmental records, access to resources and the likelihood they might get embroiled in conflicts arising out of climate change. He does not represent a trend in himself: My article clearly stated he is at one pole of a phenomenon that ranges from people moving because they fear climate changes in coming decades to people being forced to move right now by ongoing disasters and disruptions. It is perfectly legitimate to disagree with Fier, but I am not sure how Shafer can speak with authority about someone else’s motivations. Other people are the experts when it comes to talking knowledgeably about their own minds. (Shafer’s reporting-free technique, of course, did not involve actually talking to Fier.)

Shafer calls my definition of ecomigrant – people on the move in search of more habitable living space – wobbly, offers anecdotes of people moving from the Midwest to Florida in search of better weather, and mockingly asks if they are all ecomigrants. When someone moves out of the Midwest, it isn’t in search of more habitable living space. The Midwest is perfectly habitable. Several million people live there. To equate people fleeing floods and famine with a couple retiring from Chicago is perverse.

Shafer belittles the people of Kiribati, who fear their island nation is going to be inundated by rising oceans, and dismisses their concerns as fretting. Kiribati’s president recently talked about buying a new homeland for his people. Separate from whether you think such fear is well-founded, surely it is newsworthy when a head of state talks about moving his entire country?

Shafer questions how the examples I give of mass migrations in the past can all be linked to global warming. It’s an excellent riposte to ... a point I didn’t make. My article did not say that global warming has caused every large migration in the past. That would be absurd. The point I was making is that mass migrations triggered by rapid environmental change can be enormously disruptive. I cited the example of the Dust Bowl in America – surely it was obvious I wasn’t suggesting global warming was the villain in the 1930s?

Another straw man: Shafer argues that New Zealand is not a Mecca for immigrants and provides migration statistics showing other countries allow more immigrants. What does this have to do with anything? It’s obvious every ecomigrant in the world cannot move to New Zealand. No one said they could, no one said they wanted to. The blog Shafer glowingly recommends to us tells us that even if 50 million people were displaced by environmental disasters “that hardly seems like a calamity.” You can tell a lot about a person by the hyperlinks he keeps.

For someone who claims to be fighting for science, Shafer is curiously silent when it comes to the scientific evidence – millions of human beings are currently displaced by environmental degradation and disasters, and their numbers are growing steadily. Norman Myers, the British environmental researcher who has studied the phenomenon, told me, “It’s plain that sea-level rise in the wake of climate change will inundate the homelands of huge numbers of people.” Shafer may not think this is true, but to pretend his opinion matters more than the data is unscientific. To claim he is a brave warrior for science is – to take a word from his own playbook – bogus.

Shankar Vedantam

National Reporter & Columnist

The Washington Post

For More Information: www.vedantam.com