We Keep Counting the Migrants. We Have Stopped Reading the Number.

There is a peculiar cruelty in a number that only rises. Past 124 million registered climate migrants this month, up from 120 in October, and the mind does what minds do with monotony — it looks away. We have built an entire vocabulary to keep the figure at arm's length: "corridors," "flows," "the pace." Each word is a small act of forgetting. I do not argue the count is wrong; Hearth Relief International and the Passage Trust keep it honestly, and it is the truest thing our instruments measure. I argue that a rising number, recited monthly, becomes a lullaby we sing ourselves to sleep with. The remedy is not a bigger number. It is a smaller one: the single family at the standpipe, the single town whose name left the map. At plus-two-point-eight degrees, the statistic is not the story. It is the story's obituary, and we owe the dead a reader who still flinches.