Recent columnist Peter R. Orszag lives in the rare thin air of big Wall Street advisers (“Climate change will force people to move. We need to find out where they’ll go,” Sept. 25). He thinks all decisions are negotiable and economic. The world’s climate does not negotiate. He imagines people’s decisions to relocate and renew will be personal economic not personal bodily survival. Displaying detachment from the real world, his arguments focus on the richest nations, not the poor. He quotes preposterous calculations by fellow economists. Example: a 1/10 of 1% gross domestic product effect in 80 years. No amount of research will ever find an economist’s prediction to have been that accurate over 80 days, let alone 80 years.

Climate change will force hundreds of millions, perhaps billions, to move for starvation reasons. We cannot, as Orszag says, “relocate economic activity away from more affected areas” faster than crops will fail. The more northern climates will be unable to replace that food in predictable time, if ever, as today’s farming areas experience climate stress. Any dreams that farther-north farming areas will quickly open as warming progresses ignore they were glacier stripped and will take decades to enrich.

Also, the first emigrants will be mostly dark skinned and many Muslim. We have vast experience with the racial and ethnic prejudices against the small numbers migrating today. Even an economist should be able to understand the reactions against emigrating millions will be violent all over the northern hemisphere. In addition to the African countries that will be hit first, three countries partially within the middle tropics, India, Pakistan, China, have nuclear weapons. I am far more willing to predict early nuclear war resulting from necessary mass emigration than tiny economic changes 80 years from now. Again, the world’s climate does not negotiate.

Phillip Davis

West Gardiner