which is now commonplace: Zach Wichter, “Too Hot to Fly? Climate Change May Take a Toll on Flying,” The New York Times, June 20, 2017.
Every round-trip plane ticket: Dirk Notz and Julienne Stroeve, “Observed Arctic Sea-Ice Loss Directly Follows Anthropogenic CO2 Emission,” Science 354, no. 6313 (November 2016): pp. 747–50, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aag2345.
From Switzerland to Finland: Olav Vilnes et al., “From Finland to Switzerland—Firms Cut Output Amid Heatwave,” Montel News, July 27, 2018, www.montelnews.com/en/story/from-finland-to-switzerland--firms-cut-output-amid-heatwave/921390.
670 million lost power: Jim Yardley and Gardiner Harris, “Second Day of Power Failures Cripples Wide Swath of India,” The New York Times, July 31, 2012.
13 degrees Celsius: Burke, “Global Non-Linear Effect of Temperature,” https://doi.org/10.1038/nature15725; author interview with Marshall Burke.
Already-hot countries: World Bank, “South Asia’s Hotspots.”
up to 20 percent: Hsiang, “Estimating Economic Damage from Climate Change,” https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aal4369.
“economic ripple effect”: Zhengtao Zhang et al., “Analysis of the Economic Ripple Effect of the United States on the World Due to Future Climate Change,” Earth’s Future 6, no. 6 (June 2018): pp. 828–40, https://doi.org/10.1029/2018EF000839.
negative $26 trillion: The New Climate Economy, “Unlocking the Inclusive Growth Story of the 21st Century: Accelerating Climate Action in Urgent Times” (Washington, D.C.: Global Commission on the Economy and Climate, September 2018), p. 8, https://newclimateeconomy.report/2018.
growth consequences of some scenarios: Marshall Burke et al., “Large Potential Reduction in Economic Damages Under U.N. Mitigation Targets,” Nature 557 (May 2018): pp. 549–53, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-018-0071-9.
Climate Conflict
for every half degree of warming: Solomon M. Hsiang et al., “Quantifying the Influence of Climate on Human Conflict,” Science 341, no. 6151 (September 2013), https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1235367.
elevated Africa’s risk of conflict: Tamma A. Carleton and Solomon M. Hsiang, “Social and Economic Impacts of Climate,” Science 353, no. 6304 (September 2016), http://doi.org/10.1126/science.aad9837.
393,000 additional deaths: Marshall B. Burke et al., “Warming Increases the Risk of Civil War in Africa,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 106, no. 49 (December 2009): pp. 20670–74, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0907998106. This would represent a 54 percent increase.
The drowning of American navy bases: Union of Concerned Scientists, “The U.S. Military on the Front Lines of Rising Seas” (Cambridge, MA, 2016), www.ucsusa.org/global-warming/science-and-impacts/impacts/sea-level-rise-flooding-us-military-bases#.W-pKUuhKg2x.
its islands will be underwater: “We show that, on the basis of current greenhouse-gas emission rates, the nonlinear interactions between sea-level rise and wave dynamics over reefs will lead to the annual wave-driven overwash of most atoll islands by the mid-21st century. This annual flooding will result in the islands becoming uninhabitable because of frequent damage to infrastructure and the inability of their freshwater aquifers to recover between overwash events.” Curt D. Storlazzi et al., “Most Atolls Will Be Uninhabitable by the Mid-21st Century Because of Sea-Level Rise Exacerbating Wave-Driven Flooding,” Science Advances 4, no. 4 (April 2018), https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aap9741.
the world’s largest nuclear waste site: Kim Wall, Coleen Jose, and Jan Henrik Hinzel, “The Poison and the Tomb: One Family’s Journey to Their Contaminated Home,” Mashable, February 25, 2018.
From Boko Haram to ISIS: Katharina Nett and Lukas Rüttinger, “Insurgency, Terrorism and Organised Crime in a Warming Climate: Analysing the Links Between Climate Change and Non-State Armed Groups,” Climate Diplomacy (Berlin: Adelphi, October 2016).
23 percent of conflict: Carl-Friedrich Schleussner et al., “Armed-Conflict Risks Enhanced by Climate-Related Disasters in Ethnically Fractionalized Countries,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 113, no. 33 (August 2016): pp. 9216–21, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1601611113.
“extreme risk”: Verisk Maplecroft, “Climate Change and Environmental Risk Atlas 2015” (Bath, UK, October 2014), www.maplecroft.com/portfolio/new-analysis/2014/10/29/climate-change-and-lack-food-security-multiply-risks-conflict-and-civil-unrest-32-countries-maplecroft.
What accounts for the relationship: Christian Parenti, Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence (New York: Nation Books, 2011).
the forced migration that can result: Rafael Reuveny, “Climate Change–Induced Migration and Violent Conflict,” Political Geography 26, no. 6 (August 2007): pp. 656–73, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2007.05.001.
seventy million displaced: Adrian Edwards, “Forced Displacement at Record 68.5 Million,” UNHCR: The U.N. Refugee Agency, June 19, 2018, www.unhcr.org/en-us/news/stories/2018/6/5b222c494/forced-displacement-record-685-million.html.
Egypt, Akkadia, Rome: William Wan, “Ancient Egypt’s Rulers Mishandled Climate Disasters. Then the People Revolted,” The Washington Post, October 17, 2017; H. M. Cullen et al., “Climate Change and the Collapse of the Akkadian Empire: Evidence from the Deep Sea,” Geology 28, no. 4 (April 2000): pp. 379–82; Kyle Harper, “How Climate Change and Disease Helped the Fall of Rome,” Aeon, December 15, 2017, https://aeon.co/ideas/how-climate-change-and-disease-helped-the-fall-of-rome.
six categories: Center for Climate and Security, “Epicenters of Climate and Security: The New Geostrategic Landscape of the Anthropocene” (Washington, D.C., June 2017), pp. 12–17, https://climateandsecurity.files.wordpress.com/2017/06/1_eroding-sovereignty.pdf.
linguist Steven Pinker: For Pinker’s case for the world’s improvement, see Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (New York: Viking, 2012); for his argument about why we can’t appreciate that improvement, see Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress (New York: Viking, 2018).
increases violent crime rates: Leah H. Schinasi and Ghassan B. Hamra, “A Time Series Analysis of Associations Between Daily Temperature and Crime Events in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania,” Journal of Urban Health 94, no. 6 (December 2017): pp. 892–900, http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11524-017-0181-y.
swearing on social media: Patrick Baylis, “Temperature and Temperament: Evidence from a Billion Tweets” (Energy Institute at Haas working paper, November 2015), https://ei.haas.berkeley.edu/research/papers/WP265.pdf.
a major league pitcher: Richard P. Larrick et al., “Temper, Temperature, and Temptation,” Psychological Sciences 22, no. 4 (February 2011): pp. 423–28, http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0956797611399292.
the longer drivers will honk: Douglas T. Kenrick et al., “Ambient Temperature and Horn Honking: A Field Study of the Heat/Aggression Relationship,” Environment and Behavior (March 1986), https://doi.org/10.1177/0013916586182002.