Hey, it's NPR's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbaugh. You know that chaos theory

quote that's like, if a butterfly flaps its wings halfway across the world, there'll be a huge

storm. It's a cute line in all, and maybe, you know, it's a little more nuanced than that.

But what if you started with the storm? You know, what possible unforeseen effects

could that have? Well, it's not something that's completely unknowable. In 1970, one of the world's

deadliest storms hit what was then East Pakistan. What happened next included political unrest,

genocide, it changed to the world map, and, of course, a U.S. involved proxy war.

Scott Carney co-wrote a book about all of this called The Vortex, which specifically focuses on how climate catastrophes can change the world in unpredictable ways.

And he told NPR Steve Inskeep that while he may have been writing about the past,

he was thinking about the future. In the U.S., national security news can feel far away from daily

life. Distant wars, murky conflicts, diplomacy behind closed doors on our new show, sources

and methods. NPR reporters on the ground bring you stories

of real people helping you understand why distant events matter here at home. Listen to sources and

methods on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. What's the changing climate mean for

the stability of the countries of the world?

Storms and climactic events don't just land on coastlines. They also land in the center of

political systems with all of the chaos that that entails. The writer Scott Carney was curious

about what those extreme events will mean. Massive storms are going to become more and more frequent in the future.

And every one of those storms is a roll of the dice.

And as you get more and more storms, you're rolling those dice more and more frequently.

And that can spiral out of control in completely unpredictable ways.

To understand what a storm can do to an unstable political situation,

...