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Few places on the planet are more at risk from the climate crisis than south Florida, where more than 8 million residents are affected by the convergence of almost every modern environmental challenge – from rising seas to contaminated drinking water, more frequent and powerful hurricanes, coastal erosion, flooding and vanishing wildlife and habitat.

Below are some of the biggest threats posed by the climate crisis to south Florida today, along with solutions under consideration. Some of these solutions will have a lasting impact on the fight. Others, in many cases, are only delaying the inevitable. But in every situation, doing something is preferable to doing nothing at all.

Sea level rise The threat: By any estimation, Florida is drowning. In some scenarios, sea levels will rise up to 31in by 2060, a devastating prediction for a region that already deals regularly with tidal flooding and where an estimated 120,000 properties on or near the water are at risk. The pace of the rise is also hastening, scientists say – it took 31 years for the waters around Miami to rise by six inches, while the next six inches will take only 15 more.

Joe Biden still beat him by more than seven million votes.

As important is why he lost, and for that look no further than Mr. Trump’s own pollster, Tony Fabrizio.

One stunning conclusion: Mr. Trump lost even though the electorate was more Republican in 2020 than in 2016

Energy “will give us serious and sustained problems” over the next 50 years as we make the transition from hydrocarbons — oil, coal, gas — to solar, wind, nuclear and other sources, but we’ll muddle through to a solution to Peak Oil and related challenges. Peak Everything Else will prove more intractable for humanity. Metals, for instance, “are entropy at work . . . from wonderful metal ores to scattered waste,” and scarcity and higher prices “will slowly increase forever,” but if we scrimp and recycle, we can make do for another century before tight constraint kicks in.

Agriculture is more worrisome. Local water shortages will cause “persistent irritation” — wars, famines. Of the three essential macro nutrient fertilizers, nitrogen is relatively plentiful and recoverable, but we’re running out of potassium and phosphorus, finite mined resources that are “necessary for all life.” Canada has large reserves of potash (the source of potassium), which is good news for Americans, but 50 to 75 percent of the known reserves of phosphate (the source of phosphorus) are located in Morocco and the western Sahara. Assuming a 2 percent annual increase in phosphorus consumption, Grantham believes the rest of the world’s reserves won’t last more than 50 years, so he expects “gamesmanship” from the phosphate-rich.

he rates soil erosion as the biggest threat of all. The world’s population could reach 10 billion within half a century — perhaps twice as many human beings as the planet’s overtaxed resources can sustainably support, perhaps six times too many.

The stability (and even monotony) associated with German politics under Ms. Merkel appears to be coming to an end. Her looming retirement marks a deepening crisis of the German political system that threatens not just the future of the country, but of the European Union.

Thirty years later, this society has vanished. Average real incomes declined for nearly 20 years beginning in 1993. Germany not only grew more unequal, but the standard of living for the lower strata stagnated or even fell. The lowest 40 percent of households have faced annual net income losses for around 25 years now, while the kinds of jobs that promised long-term stability dwindled.

on the surface Germany appears to be an economic success story. Its G.D.P. has grown consistently for nearly a decade; unemployment is at its lowest since reunification in 1989. In amassing trade surpluses, Germany has enjoyed several advantages: an advanced manufacturing sector; the ability to get primary products and services from other members of the European Union; and being in the eurozone, which effectively gives the country a devalued currency, making its exports more attractive.

Finland has topped an index of the happiest nations for the second consecutive year, with researchers saying the small Nordic country of 5.5 million has succeeded in generating a happiness recipe for a balanced life not simply dependent on economic and material wealth.

The index, published Wednesday, showed the other Nordic countries did well again this year, with Denmark, Norway and Iceland taking the next spots. The remaining top ten nations were The Netherlands, Switzerland, Sweden, New Zealand, Canada and Austria.

The United States dropped from the 18th to 19th plac

Each year we spew more than 100 times as much CO2 into the air as volcanoes do, and we’re currently overseeing the biggest disruption to the planet’s nitrogen cycle in 2.5 billion years. But despite this incredible effort, all is vanity. Very little of our handiwork will survive the obliteration of the ages

At the end of all their travels—after cataloging all the bedrock of the entire planet—they might finally be led to an odd, razor-thin stratum hiding halfway up some eroding, far-flung desert canyon

Unless we fast learn how to endure on this planet, and on a scale far beyond anything we’ve yet proved ourselves capable of, the detritus of civilization will be quickly devoured by the maw of deep time.

Karl Rove had a novel idea for how to organize President George W. Bush’s 2004 re-election campaign.

He and the chief campaign strategist, Matthew Dowd, decided on a “base strategy.” They reallocated the bulk of the campaign’s media budget to focus on social conservatives instead of on moderates — a decision predicated on the fact that the swing, or persuadable, share of the electorate had shrunk from one in five voters to less than one in 10.

The result was a shift that year from a traditional centrist strategy to an emphasis on anger and fear, a shift that turned out to have profound long-term consequences.

The first speech, a defense of religious liberty and religious conservatism, attacked the “growing ascendancy of secularism and the doctrine of moral relativism” and decried the “immense suffering, wreckage and misery” unleashed in “the new secular age.”

In two recent speeches, one at Notre Dame and the other before the Federalist Society, Attorney General Bill Barr infuriated people already infuriated with him by issuing extended attacks on contemporary liberalism.

from the perspective of their intended audience, conservative elites, they’re mostly striking as exercises in reassurance. The Trump era has been understood, reasonably, as a moment of discontinuity for the American right — a moment when the expiration of Reaganism became apparent, when the alienation of movement conservatism from its voters was exposed, when the diagnoses and prescriptions of 1980 were decisively rejected even if no new synthesis was yet apparent.

the most important international development on President Biden’s watch has been the erosion of America’s deterrence. The war in Ukraine and the escalating chaos and bloodshed across the Middle East demonstrate the human and economic costs when American power and policy no longer hold revisionist powers in check.

if the erosion of America’s deterrent power leads China and North Korea to launch wars in the Far East, it would be a greater catastrophe by orders of magnitude

a war over Taiwan would be far more serious for the world economy than the war in Ukraine or even a wider regional war in the Middle Eas

some eye-popping new realities about what’s really eating away at U.S.-China relations.

The new, new thing has a lot to do with the increasingly important role that trust, and its absence, plays in international relations, now that so many goods and services that the United States and China sell to one another are digital, and therefore dual use — meaning they can be both a weapon and a tool.

In the last 23 years America has built exactly one sort-of-high-speed rail line, the Acela, serving 15 stops between Washington, D.C., and Boston. Think about that: 900 to 15.

In a poll released last year by the Pew Research Center, two-thirds of Americans agreed that there were “strong conflicts between the rich and poor” — up substantially from when the question was asked in 2009

Americans are increasingly worried about the gap between rich and poor, but are hesitant to have the government do anything about it.

Our work identified a possible explanation for this seeming disconnect, and it is a sad one: the more people focused on inequality, the less they trusted the government.

Mr Mankiw begins with a thought experiment: "Imagine a society with perfect economic equality...Then, one day, this egalitarian utopia is disturbed by an entrepreneur with an idea for a new product. Think of the entrepreneur as Steve Jobs as he develops the iPod, J.K. Rowling as she writes her Harry Potter books, or Steven Spielberg as he directs his blockbuster movies." Everyone wants to buy the entrepreneur's product, which results in a hugely unequal distribution of income. Should the government shift to a progressive tax system to reduce the inequality?Obviously Mr Mankiw discovers that the answer is "no", because that's the answer he has built his analogy to produce.

Mr Mankiw's analogy sneaks in his conclusion by implying that greater inequality is the price we pay for more invention and creativity. But his own choices of hero-entrepreneurs make it clear that there's no evidence to support this claim.

Of the three Mr Mankiw proposes, only Steve Jobs plausibly had an irreducible, unique effect on material culture and the structure of an industry. Mr Spielberg and Ms Rowling are acclaimed artists, but their startling wealth and prominence are entirely due to the increasing power of network effects in mass culture over the past several decades. Mr Spielberg happened to be directing his first movies just as Hollywood was beginning to stage coordinated marketing blitzes that created round-the-block lines for top-grossing films. Ms Rowling hit the bookshelves just as a similar superstar phenomenon was taking over publishing, with sales increasingly concentrated on individual mega-bestsellers rather than spread across a few dozen authors and titles. Mr Jobs is an unusual figure in that his ability to combine engineering, aesthetics, and a vision of how users might interact with the digital universe has created a kind of integrated multi-product entity that might not otherwise have existed; it's not clear that BlackBerry, Nokia or Samsung would have been up to the task. But even in Mr Jobs's case, much of the power that accrued to Apple was due to the gradual sorting of the consumer information-technology world into integrated ecosystems

Since 1979, the one-percenters have doubled their share of the nation’s collective income from about 10 percent to about 20 percent.

And between 2009, when the Great Recession ended, and 2011, the one-percenters saw their average income rise by 11 percent even as the 99-percenters saw theirs fall slightly

This dismal litany invites the conclusion that if we would just put a tight enough choke chain on the 1 percent, then we’d solve the problem of income inequality. But alas, that isn’t true, because it wouldn’t address the other half of the story: the rise of the educated class.

Since 1978, the Chinese Communist Party has built the largest higher educational system in the world with upwards of 30 million students; its 2,400 institutions of higher learning produce roughly eight million graduates per year, about five million more than American colleges and universities.

A thirty-year run of neoliberalism (a universalized logic of competition that justifies the transformation of institutions established for the public good into business enterprises) is depleting the American academy of its intellectual capital. The symptoms of that deterioration include the influx of corporate managerialism, administrative bloat, the erosion of shared governance, the near-disappearance of the tenure system, skyrocketing tuitions, the diminution of the humanities in favor of vocationally oriented STEM programs, and the deprofessionalization (or adjunctification) of the faculty as a cost-saving measure to compensate for exorbitant executive salaries.

the American academy has lost its way by jettisoning key features of its own historical and cultural heritage, including the disinterested pursuit of knowledge, academic freedom protected by tenure, and the importance of faculty oversight of the curriculum.

In its final days, the Obama administration has expanded the power of the National Security Agency to share globally intercepted personal communications with the government’s 16 other intelligence agencies before applying privacy protections.

new rules significantly relax longstanding limits on what the N.S.A. may do with the information gathered by its most powerful surveillance operations

the government is reducing the risk that the N.S.A. will fail to recognize that a piece of information would be valuable to another agency, but increasing the risk that officials will see private information about innocent people.

I couldn’t help noticing the contemporary resonances of some Roman history — specifically, the tale of how the Roman Republic fell.

Here’s what I learned: Republican institutions don’t protect against tyranny when powerful people start defying political norms. And tyranny, when it comes, can flourish even while maintaining a republican facade

On the first point: Roman politics involved fierce competition among ambitious men. But for centuries that competition was constrained by some seemingly unbreakable rule

Trump’s election as president is an existential moment in American history. His candidacy, campaign, victory and actions halfway through the transition to governing, heretofore unimaginable, pose a genuine threat to the well-being of our country and the sustainability of our democracy.

our constitutional system provides an elaborate set of checks and balances designed to frustrate any would-be autocrat. The critical question is whether they and the essential norms that have in the past worked to make them effective, will be up to the challenge of a Trump presidency

Here I discuss briefly several key elements: the rule of law, a free press, an institutionally responsible Congress, a vigorous federal system, and a vibrant civil society.

a clear majority of American adults no longer live in the middle class, a demographic reality shaped by decades of widening inequality, declining industry and the erosion of financial stability and family-wage jobs

hile much of the attention has focused on communities hardest hit by economic declines, the new Pew data, based on metro-level income data since 2000, show that middle-class stagnation is a far broader phenomenon.

The decline of the American middle class is "a pervasive local phenomenon," according to Pew, which analyzed census and American Community Survey data in 229 metros across the country, encompassing about three-quarters of the U.S. population. In 203 of those metros, the share of adults in middle-income households fell from 2000 to 2014.

The Center for Responsive Politics estimates $6 billion will be spent in the U.S. elections by campaigns, political parties and corporations hoping to propel their candidates into the White House and what writer Mark Twain once called the "best Congress money can buy."

The projected price tag of the 2012 U.S. election dwarfs that of other nations, but corruption monitors from Transparency International (TI) say it's not just how much will be spent but where the money is coming from that threatens the integrity of politics around the world.

While the trajectory for spending in U.S. elections is soaring, total party spending in the 2010 general election in the United Kingdom was actually 26% less than in 2005.