To date, there have been two proposed responses to climate change: mitigation, aimed at stopping the buildup of greenhouse gases, and adaptation, focused on accommodating ourselves to a warmer world. There is a third option, however, that is increasingly relevant: suffering.

According to NASA and a team of scientists from the University of California, significant portions of the West Antarctic ice sheet have begun an unstoppable slide towards oblivion, slowly melting in warmer-than-usual ocean currents that have been eating away at their bases. [Video Below]

Will climate change cause conflict? That question, which has sparked heated debates in academia and the media, resists simple answers. But is climate change already contributing to conflict in some places? If so, how exactly? And more importantly, what should be done about it? These questions were the focus of a 2013 preliminary report produced for USAID by international development firm Tetra Tech ARD, which examines the climate-conflict nexus in Uganda, Ethiopia, and Peru.

China leads the world in installed wind power by a wide margin, but last year, when it came to actual generation, China produced 20 percent less electricity from wind than the United States.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s fifth assessment, which has been rolling out in stages since last September, confirms a crucial divide in current climate thinking: efforts to adapt and mitigate to climate change are often considered separately from the vulnerability of people.

You might wonder what the Cold War has to do with climate change, but as I listened last month to historian James Graham Wilson talk about the “triumph of improvisation” that ended the nearly 50-year stare-down between the United States and the U.S.S.R., I was struck by the parallels. The idea of individual leaders escaping the momentum of conventional approaches and adapting on the fly to solve a major global issue deeply resonated with me. It’s exactly what international climate change negotiations desperately need.

The latest report by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) brings new evidence to bear on the real and potential impacts of climate change, emphasizing the need to manage risks and build resilience. In a dramatic, slickly produced video accompanying the much-anticipated Working Group II contribution to the report, released on March 30, several of the working group’s dozens of authors discuss key issues addressed in their section, which covers “impacts, adaptation, and vulnerability.”