[POST] Pole-ward bound

Climate change puts everything in motion in a North-South world

Thomas PM Barnett

Aug 12, 2025

Jim Nuttle illustration from “America’s New Map”

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You know the drill with climate change: adapt, move, or die.

From the game show Let’s Make a Deal, it’s the old Monty Hall problem (from Google AI):

The Monty Hall problem
This statistical paradox involves choosing one of three doors, with a prize behind one and goats behind the others. After you make your initial choice, the host (who knows where the prize is) opens one of the other doors, always revealing a goat. Then, you're given the option to switch to the remaining unopened door or stick with your original choice. The counterintuitive answer is that you should switch to the other door because it doubles your chances of winning the prize.

The Monty Hall problem with climate change tends to unfold as follows:

You, species, pick door #1 (adapt) and give it a go, but it’s too hard. Your food supply disappears or maybe your home insurance company bails on your state, so …
You are presented with the secondary choice: you either try and “gut it out” and eventually lose (die), or you move on to better, safer ground.

Staying put just won’t work for the vast majority of species. From America’s New Map:

Like evolution on steroids, climate change demands that all species—including us—adapt to environmental shifts that used to unfold over hundreds of thousands of years but now proceed in mere decades. Asking animals and plants to speed up their evolution ten thousand times is a nonstarter for most. That means a stunning number of species are disappearing across Earth’s current and sixth mass extinction era—due to human activity.

Adaptation is hard — really hard. Extinction is thus the default mode. That which survives is that which moves.

For many species, migration is the only answer. For decades, species have been moving toward the poles at an annual rate of two kilometers. They also annually shift one meter to higher elevations. To us house dwellers, that seems minor. For nature, these rates are three times the normal pace.

Humans have fought over sacred lands for millennia; now we’re going to fight over sacred climates as they shift.

That is your Northern fear of being overwhelmed by Southern peoples put on the move by climate change. It’s not everybody moving but it’s a lot of people moving and it forces the decision: resettle or repel?

From my brief:

This is why Trump’s biggest military deployments are along our southern border.

This is also why America naturally covets Canada to the north — however crudely expressed to-date.

Right now we’ve living — and acting — mostly in fear:

We pretend climate change isn’t real.
We cast climate migrants as invading murderers, rapists, and lunatics.
We conflate our drug addiction problems with their desire to ruin our civilization — a true gaslighting.
We build a wall.
We deport en masse.
Some of us in the North have already started killing them in numbers, either directly (Saudis) or paying somebody closer to the problem to do it on their behalf (EU paying North Africa).
We retreat into religious and racial homogeneity (White Christian Nationalism).

We are clearly afraid of the future.

But this is what inevitability looks like

This is the natural world’s response to shifting climates: species of all types simply going with the flow.

You want to know why eventually everybody in the Western Hemisphere is going to covet Canada? This is why.

Same holds for the southern half of our hemisphere — just in different directions:

You note two trends here:

Westward movement up in elevation from Brazil to the more mountainous regions of the Pacific coastline, and
The commensurate poleward movement toward the Southern Cone.

This emptying-out phenomenon is well underway throughout nature. It’s just humans who, in our power and arrogance, aren’t yet quite getting the message Earth is sending us.

From ANM:

Two inevitabilities arise from the scientific community’s increasingly firm projections of climate change: First, higher latitudes (closer to poles) will experience significantly greater weather volatility—temperate zones made intemperate. Second, lower latitudes (closer to equator) will experience a harshening of their climes with increasingly frequent and extreme droughts accompanied by unlivable temperature ranges. In sum, the North’s climate grows frighteningly erratic while the South’s grows depressingly predictable.
Scientists have long warned of catastrophic outcomes if the world warmed merely 1.5oC (2.7oF) above preindustrial levels. Earth will hit that mark by 2040, with worldwide sea levels rising by one foot a decade later. For advanced Northern countries, we can anticipate monumental public expenditures and all manner of political controversy over how best to raise those funds. As for the South’s most vulnerable states, it is not hyperbole to state that many of them should anticipate the end of life as they have long known it.
The South, except for South America, is far less urbanized than the North, reflecting a reliance on farming for jobs. With droughts, floods, fire, and heat making agriculture that much harder to conduct, rural masses will head for cities typically lacking both the infrastructure and opportunities to sustain them economically. Once there, these internal migrants are often trapped within the informal economy (black markets), rendering them both a burden to the state and prey to exploitation by criminal networks. Sufficiently oppressed, this displaced population is ripe for radicalization leading to extreme political paths.
Among the most ambitious or abused populations (take your pick), emigration becomes the next best option—no matter the dangers encountered. This is why environmental refugees risk dying on the high seas or in deserts in their attempts to access Northern states: they spot better odds in endangering their families than in toughing it out in their increasingly stressed-out homelands.
By midcentury, both the wider world and those peoples located along Earth’s middle band will recognize that, in many instances, it no longer makes sense—politically or economically—to sustain independent nation-states there.
I am not stating that it cannot be done, only that, in many cases, it will not be practicable. The North, with its rapidly aging populations, will not readily pay for it. Meanwhile, fragile Southern governments will find it hard to afford amidst persistent weather disasters and depopulation triggered by departing environmental refugees.

So, yeah, they are coming … not to ruin us but to survive.

Either route (keeping them down there or letting them come up here) will be expensive. So, if racial purity is your thing, be prepared to pony up mucho dollars to preserve it.

The two great models of resistance to such “mongrelization” are North Korea (the hard, nasty way) and Japan (the expensive, high-tech way). Judging by Trump’s return to power, I’d say we lean DPRK right now.

I myself don’t believe in hunkering down and holding off the Southern hordes, killing them all as need be. That option may attract the alt-Right crowd, who, in combination with the aghast Boomers and Xers (This is not the America I grew up in!), form sort of a xenophobic quorum right now. But I just don’t see the upcoming Millennials, Zs, and Alphas picking up this “civilizational” war, particularly because we, in the Western hemisphere, share a unique, pre-mixed-by-imperialism civilization that, while it may remain unrecognizable to older Americans (and flat-out racists) is far more widely recognized and casually accepted by younger generations.

Millennials, Gen Z, and Gen Alpha of the Western hemisphere are far less invested in a civilizational war over cultural purity compared to older generations because they have grown up in environments shaped by widespread cultural mixing, globalization, and everyday multicultural experiences, such as bilingual education and normalized diversity.

Everyday practices like learning Spanish in grade school and common bilingual public services (e.g., “press two for Spanish”) exemplify the normalized cultural mixing and adaptive identity forming in the Western hemisphere — a capability and experience unique in its depth compared to most other world regions.

This generational distance from older paradigms is reflected in polling that shows younger generations do not see cultural mixing as a threat to identity, but as a reality and opportunity.

In short, younger generations, being digital natives and “globalists” from birth, on average treat diversity as an unremarkable baseline rather than a point of contention — much less some ideological hill to die on. South-North integration is their lived reality. To them, it does not signify a civilizational identity under siege.

The solution then?

North America adapts while much of Latin America is put on the move.

What dies?

What dies is the present domestic resistance.