it melts away, more water and more land are exposed, both of which are darker, and both of which absorb still more heat. This in turns melts more ice, creating a feedback loop that can accelerate quickly.

But after the rise of the Tea Party movement in 2009, which was backed by Koch Industries, the fossil fuel empire run by GOP funders David and Charles

Technology gives us power, but it also enfeebles us.

Globally, more than one billion people live in what demographers call low-elevation coastal zones. A fair percentage of these people are in poor countries with little money to help with adaptation. As the waters rise, where will they go? What are their legal rights?

A few billion years ago, Florida was part of Africa. When the Atlantic Ocean opened up, Florida was left behind, stuck onto the North American continent. It was just a big chunk of rock. Sea levels rose and fell over Earth’s history, covering Florida with hundreds of feet of ocean water for millions of years, then exposing it again.

This statistic—the coastlines are growing, not declining—is sometimes used by climate skeptics to argue that sea-level rise is not such a big deal. If we lose some land to the sea, we can just build more. But simply to say that the total landmass on the planet is growing and not shrinking doesn’t tell you where the land is increasing or what it is

Climate change is not an issue the US military can afford to ignore. Drought contributed to the rising food prices that triggered the Arab Spring revolt in Egypt in 2011; it may have helped trigger the civil war in Syria. In northern Nigeria, a region destabilized by extreme cycles of drought and flooding, Boko Haram is terrorizing villages and

“To make calculating easy,” Gerrard wrote, “let’s assume that 100 million people will need new homes outside their own countries by 2050. Under a formula based on historic greenhouse gas emissions, the United States would

And it wasn’t just in Miami where flimsy construction proved to be dangerous. The 1926 hurricane pushed water through a poorly built earthen dike that held in Lake Okeechobee in the central part of the state, flooding the farmlands below the lake and killing four hundred people. Two years later, another hurricane hit, taking out an even bigger part