Some Thoughts on Reading Factfulness by Hans Rosling

Everything you heard about this book is true. It’s educational, fun, refreshing. It helps you see and understand the world fact-fully and not through the inner biases that our environment, education and perceptions impose to us or through the overdramatised and pessimistic view presented by the media.  Hans Rosling is not an optimist painting the world in pink, what he tries to do is to fight ignorance, to offer a fact-based worldview that it is less stressful and more hopeful.

Hans Rosling was a physician, a professor of international health, a co-founder of Medicines Sans Frontières in Sweden, and a renowned public educator. He wrote Factfuleness with his son Ola and his daughter-in-law, Anna. The book has been reviewed thousands of times around the world, most notably from Bill Gates who gave it his “highest recommendation" and offered a free electronic copy of the book to every to every student graduating from a US college.

So, this not a review; just a couple of thoughts on a specific subject. That of ‘climate refugees.’ Hans Rosling recognises that climate change is one of the five pressing global risks that we need to address-the other four are the risks of a global pandemic, financial collapse, world war, and extreme poverty (a reality for 800 million people)- but he finds ‘most concerning’ the attempt to attract people to the cause by inventing the term “climate refugees.”  He writes that to his

“best understanding the link between climate change and migration is very, very weak” and that the “concept of climate refugees is mostly a deliberate exaggeration designed to turn fear of refugees into fear of climate change, and so build a much wider base of public support for lowering CO2 emissions.”  

A couple of things to get out of the way first. Climate change is real. It is happening and it is caused by humans. Fear is a useful emotion, it acts as instinct, which will tell us what our next move should or could be. But fear can also create panic, a constant sense of crises and apathy. It paralyses people.  We overcome fear by understanding reality. 

Now let’s go back to climate refugees. Climate on its own does not cause migration. But climate change can alter patterns of human movement via other things. Sea lever rise for example. As the oceans warm and the ice melts sea levels are set to go up threatening low lying locations across the world. People are already moving. The New Zealand Climate Change Minister James Shaw recently announced that the government will consider creating a new visa category for people displaced by climate change.  The length of a drought or desertification may force farmers to adapt alternative strategies or hire less workers. Some of these workers will migrate to find other work. Can we say that these people are climate refugees? Not exactly. At the same time, climate change is one of the factors that contributed to their movement. Migration, environment and climate change are interrelated.

On the chapter about The Blame Instinct, Hans Rosling writes:

 “This instinct (blame) to find a guilty party derails our ability to develop a true, fact–based understanding of the world: it steals our focus as we obsess about someone to blame, then blocks our learning because once we have decided who to punch in the face we stop looking for explanations elsewhere. This undermines our ability to solve the problem, or prevent it from happening again, because we are stuck with oversimplistic finger pointing, which distracts us from the more complex truth and prevents us from focusing our energy in the right place.”

Climate change is about changing behaviours. It is a really interesting moment for humanity to see whether or not we can respond to the pressure of the threats that the biosphere puts upon us.