The global-warming juggernaut is creating climate refugees in northern settlements, where native residents once forced to abandon their nomadic ways are now faced with deserting villages where ragged wooden houses have to be adjusted regularly to level them on the shifting soil.

“We haven’t sat down as a society and said, ‘How are we going to adapt to this?’ ” said Michael Oppenheimer, a climate scientist at Princeton University and lead author of a recent report by a United Nations IPCC panel on the impacts and vulnerability presented by climate change. “Just like we haven’t sat down and said, ‘How are we going to reduce emissions?’ And both have to be done.”