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This is a completely legitimate concern that such a concerted effort was needed to address the political will to our future generations. However, we only focus on the rising sea level and overlooked heat greater threat: drought. Why is this strange fault? Certainly, the tsunami victims in Southeast Asia, Hurricane Katrina in 2004, reinforcing worried that next year, floods and extreme weather events. However, these two events are the next two years warm last ice age, the message is issued as a means of blood up to more than a century of rain, no less. Then another reality: the majority, if not all, people in the severe drought in the future is expected to be living in developing countries, but we, the United States is busy dealing with the flooding caused by Hurricane           Dry Spell     What would happen if the melting Greenland ice sheet partially shut down the Gulf Stream? Would Europe be plunged into a near-Ice Age, as indeed happened some twelve thousand years ago during the climatic episode known as the Younger Dryas, named after a polar flower?   What would happen to the Low Countries and to some Pacific atolls if sea levels rose as much as a foot (0.3 meters) or more by century's end as a result of partially melted ice sheets?   These are perfectly legitimate concerns, which will require concerted political will to solve in coming generations. But our preoccupation with heat and rising sea levels ignores an even greater threat: drought. Why this surprising neglect? Undoubtedly the devastation of the Southeast Asian tsunami in 2004 and Hurricane Katrina the following year reinforced fears about extreme weather events and flooding in particular. But these two events, coming in two of the warmest years since the Ice Age, seem to have delivered a message that warmer centuries mean more rain, not less. Then there's another reality: most, though not all, of the people likely to be affected by severe drought in the future live in the developing world, and we in the United States are still much preoccupied with the flooding brought by Katrina.   … Evidence is mounting that drought is the silent and insidious killer associated with global warming. The casualty figures are mind numbing. About 11 million people between Kenya, Somalia, Ethiopia, and Eritrea were in serious danger of starvation as a result of multiyear droughts in 2006. The International Institute of Tropical Agriculture in Nigeria estimates that by 2010 around 300 million people in sub-Saharan Africa, nearly a third of the population, will suffer from malnutrition because of intensifying droughts. (Relatively few people die of hunger during a drought. They perish from epidemics of dysentery and other diseases spread by poor living conditions. For instance, 1.6 million children a year die today because of a lack of access to good sanitation and clean drinking water.)   The long-term future is even more alarming. A study by Britain's authoritative Hadley Centre for Climate Change documents a 25 percent increase in global drought during the 1990s, which produced well-documented population losses. The Hadley's computer models of future aridity resulting from the impacts of greenhouse gas emissions are truly frightening. At present, extreme drought affects 3 percent of the earth's surface. The figure could rise as high as 30 percent if warming continues, with 40 percent suffering from severe droughts, up from the current figure of 8 percent. Fifty percent of the world's land would experience moderate drought, up from the present 25 percent. Then the center ran the model without factoring in the impact of greenhouse gases, which they assumed were the temperature change villains. The results implied that future changes in drought without anthropogenic warming would be very small indeed.   In human terms, the United Nations Environment Program reports that 450 million people in twenty-nine countries currently suffer from water shortages. By 2025, an estimated 2.8 billion of us will live in areas with increasingly scarce water resources. Twenty percent of the world's population currently lacks access to safe, clean drinking water. Contaminated water supplies are a worse killer than AIDS in tropical Africa. If the projected drought conditions transpire, future casualties will rise dramatically. The greatest impact of intensifying drought would be on people already living in arid and semiarid lands—about a billion of us in more than 110 countries around the world. And those who would be hit hardest are subsistence farmers, especially in tropical Africa. Seventy percent of all employment in Africa is in small-scale farming, and completely dependent on rainfall.   The number of food emergencies in Africa each year has already tripled since the 1980s, with one in three people across sub-Saharan Africa being malnourished. The Nigerian institute's projection for 2010 is just the beginning. Future drought-related catastrophes will make these preliminaries seem trivial and could affect more than half of tropical Africa's population.   … It's been easy for us to forget that millions of people still live at the subsistence level and use basically medieval technologies to wrest a living from the soil. We can no longer afford benign ignorance, for the long-term perils of chronic drought connect all humankind in ways that we are only just beginning to understand.           — Brian Fagan, The Great Warming: Climate Change and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations, Chapter 13 – The Silent Elephant                           Indexes/19