内容摘要：Trina Martin, left, and Toi Cliatt sit for a portrait inside the home the FBI mistakenly raided in 2017, in Atlanta on Friday, April 25, 2025. (AP Photo/Sudhin Thanawala)

Trina Martin, left, and Toi Cliatt sit for a portrait inside the home the FBI mistakenly raided in 2017, in Atlanta on Friday, April 25, 2025. (AP Photo/Sudhin Thanawala)

Still, the world has yet to officially recognize climate migrants or come up with formalized ways to assess their needs and help them. Here’s a look at climate migration today.FILE - Members of a family visit their home devastated by a landslide triggered by hurricanes Eta and Iota in the village of La Reina, Honduras, June 25, 2021. (AP Photo/Rodrigo Abd, File)

FILE - Members of a family visit their home devastated by a landslide triggered by hurricanes Eta and Iota in the village of La Reina, Honduras, June 25, 2021. (AP Photo/Rodrigo Abd, File)WHO ARE CLIMATE MIGRANTS?Most climate migrants move within the borders of their homelands, usually from rural areas to cities after losing their home or livelihood because of drought, rising seas or another weather calamity. Because cities also are facing their own climate-related problems, including soaring temperatures and water scarcity, people are increasingly being forced to flee across international borders to seek refuge.

Yet climate migrants are not afforded refugee status under the 1951 Refugee Convention, which provides legal protection only to people fleeing persecution due to their race, religion, nationality, political opinion or particular social group.DEFINING CLIMATE MIGRATION

While worsening weather conditions are exacerbating poverty, crime and political instability, and fueling tensions over dwindling resources from Africa to Latin America, often climate change is overlooked as a contributing factor to people fleeing their homelands. According to the UNHCR, 90% of refugees under its mandate are from countries “on the front lines of the climate emergency.”

In El Salvador, for example, scores each year leave villages because of crop failure from drought or flooding, and end up in cities where they become victims of gang violence and ultimately flee their countries because of those attacks.The first and most frequent natural suspect is the sun. The sun is what warms Earth in general providing about 1,361 watts per meter squared of heat, year in year out. That’s the baseline, the delicate balance that makes Earth livable. Changes in energy coming from the sun have been minimal, about one-tenth of a watt per meter squared, scientists calculate.

But carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels is now trapping heat to the level of 2.07 watts per meter squared, more than 20 times that of the changes in the sun, according to the U.S.Methane, another powerful heat-trapping gas, is at 0.5 watts per meter square.

The sun’s 11-year cycle goes through regular but small ups and downs, but that doesn’t seem to change Earth’s temperature. And if anything the ever so slight changes in 11-year-average solar irradiance have been shifting downward,with the space agency concluding “it is therefore extremely unlikely that the Sun has caused the observed global temperature warming trend over the past century.”