Every year, about 20 million people are made homeless by floods, storms, and other disasters—roughly three times as many as those displaced by conflict or violence, according to a report by the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, an independent organization that provides information and analysis of the world’s displaced people. No one knows fo

Technology gives us power, but it also enfeebles us.

In the world as it is, evidence that climate change is an engine of conflict is clear. The best example is Syria. In 2015, an exhaustive study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that rising CO2 pollution had made the 2007–2010 drought in Syria twice as likely to occur, and that the four-year drought had a “cataly

And it’s not just active bases and military installations that are in trouble. The headquarters of the US Southern Command, which is in charge of military operations in South and Central America as well as the Caribbean, is located in a low-lying area near Miami International Airport that is already vulnerable to flooding. The United States Naval A

“The good thing about science is that it’s true whether or not you believe in it”).

Although reflecting away some sunlight before it hits the Earth could slow the melting of the ice sheets on the surface, it would be a very long time before this had any impact on the warming of the oceans, which is the most immediate threat to the big glaciers in West Antarctica. Nor would it do anything to reduce ocean acidification, which is cau

A few years ago, Mohamed Nasheed, the former president of the Maldives, confronted Western polluters with the following options: “You can drastically reduce your greenhouse gas emissions so that the seas do not rise so much.… Or, when we show up on your shores in our boats, you can let us in.… Or, when we show up on your shores in our boats, you ca

Globally, the thermal expansion of the oceans caused by the Earth’s rising temperature has contributed about half of the observed sea-level rise in the last fifty years. In the future, that percentage will decline as thermal expansion is dwarfed by increasing melt rates in Greenland and Antarctica.

The public health risks of drinking water polluted by human waste are well documented. In 2010, some 10,000 people in Haiti died and hundreds of thousands more were sickened by cholera, in an epidemic resulting from the mishandling of septic tanks at a UN Peacekeeper camp and dumping into a river. As late as the 1920s, before the advent of modern s