Gaia Vince. Nomad century.

 The book is a compendium of disjointed observations, some brilliant, some less than, some simply misinformed. I attribute the last to the haphazard uses of questionable sources. 

But, unlike most books on the public policy these days, there is no obvious malice in her narrative. The principal idea is that inevitable climate change will cause a gigantic peregrination of the world population, mainly from the equatorial regions, which quickly become uninhabitable into more temperate zones. 

The previous Great Migrations caused warfare, the fall of the civilizations on an enormous scale (the first documented "Dark Ages" in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Fertile Crescent around 1100 BCE, the fall of the Roman Empire and the subsequent Dark Ages, conquests by the Arabs and Mongols, or European expansion into Americas). Vince is right to suggest that a careful planning is needed to avoid catastrophic results. 

There are some fantastic figures, suggestions and conjectures. For instance, on the eve of Italian unification, only 2.5% of the population of peninsula spoke Italian (p. 58). Which languages were spoken by the rest 97.5%? Similarly absurd is her suggestion that only 10% of the French population used French before the French revolution, if not later. Syrian refugees are mostly middle-class professionals (p. 138). But these are lies by the British and German press having no connection to reality. Poland and Hungary are not undesirable destinations for the immigrants, just vehemently opposed to arrival of other ethnic groups. Stern Catholicism in Poland does not help either. And immigrants cannot populate future Estonian cities -- where? Probably, under water because populated areas of that country are low-lying beachfronts. Furthermore, Estonians are among the most racist people on the planet Earth, even if we throw Japanese and Vietnamese into the mix. And who told her that the "Sea Peoples" whose raids caused the destruction of the Ancient Middle East were Philistines? 

Remembering Nansen passports is good. Yet, the post-World War I Russian immigrants -- for whom they were initially designed -- described them as practically worthless.