For Some Poor Countries, Climate Science Comes Too Late

It’s easy to talk about how climate change will alter Earth’s surface in the century to come. It will raise sea levels, flood cities, and set off droughts. As this month’s dire UN report shows, decades of climate science have made the worldwide dangers of human-caused warming unambiguous.

Yet it’s far harder to talk about how these changes will play out locally. No two places will experience climate change identically: The coasts of Borneo and the shores of Great Britain, for example, will see the land and weather transform in vastly different ways. But people living in the United Kingdom have a far better idea of what those changes will look like.

Call it climate science’s data gap. When studying the Earth’s climate, researchers must understand the past before they can understand the future. But across huge swaths of the world, scientists simply don’t have the data that they need—especially the kind of in-depth, long-term observations that can place