Could climate change herald mass migration?

The state of Arizona has more than 300 golf courses, a booming economy, endless sunshine and, at last count, at least five Saks Fifth Avenue department stores — in short, nearly everything the well-heeled sybarite would need.

There’s just one thing missing: rain.

For the past month, not a drop has fallen in Maricopa County, home to greater Phoenix, the state’s economic engine and fastest-growing hub. Over that period, temperatures have hovered five to seven degrees above the 30-year average, at one point holding steady at over 43C for 10 straight days, while hundreds of brush fires burned statewide.

"And they're still building billion-dollar houses, right in the middle of the desert," says Paul Oyashi, incredulous. "It doesn't seem rational, does it?"

In a word, no. Rational, some would say, would be a mass migration from the drought-ravaged American southwest, where Southern California just experienced its driest 12-month period in recorded history, to more verdant climes.

One such place? Cleveland, the battered hub of Cuyahoga County, where Oyashi sits as director of the department of development. "We don't have earthquakes, we don't have brush fires, we've got all the fresh water you could ever want," Oyashi says. "That's logic. But the problem is, it flies in the face of reality."

LOGIC HAS NEVER been the lone – or even dominant – factor in human behaviour. And in Cleveland, much like all the depressed cities of the Great Lakes rust belt, the reality is this: over the past four decades, the population has bled away to less than half, as it has in Buffalo and Detroit.
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