His face slightly flushed by the Honolulu heat, Simon Winchester, author of the New York Times best-seller “The Professor and the Madman,” now a feature film being released this month, ducked into the air-conditioned restaurant at the Hawai‘i State Art Museum.

He asked for an iced coffee and was told it wasn’t on the menu.

“Have you got ice? If you have, I can make it,” Winchester, 74, said politely in his native English accent.

The young server gave Winchester a kindly smile and said he’d make it for him.

The lighthearted interaction over ice, on a hot May day in a warming world, brought to mind the weighty reason for Winchester’s Hawaii visit — the risks of climate change. On Tuesday he will give a keynote presentation, “The Pacific: Where Geopolitics and Nature Intersect,” at Honolulu’s historic Liljestrand House.

The talk will kick off a “Margins of the Sea” preview summit on peace, global understanding and climate change at the Liljestrand House, designed by renowned modern architect Vladimir Ossipoff. Winchester will be introduced by Davianna McGregor, author of “Na Kua‘aina: Living Hawaiian Culture” and professor of ethnic studies at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

“When I was at the East-West Center researching my Pacific book (‘Pacific: Silicon Chips and Surfboards, Coral Reefs and Atom Bombs, Brutal Dictators, Fading Empires, and the Coming Collision of the World’s Superpowers’), I saw how certain natural events seemed to precipitate political and military consequences,” said Winchester, who has focused on Oceania, China, Korea and the U.S. West Coast in many of his 30-some books.

“It began with the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1990, when they closed the U.S. Naval Base and Clark Air Force Base, denying much of the South China Sea to the U.S. Navy in terms of patrolling,” which left an opening to Chinese military development in the area, he said.

Since then, natural disasters triggered by climate change — more frequent and extreme storms, crop failures, threats to coastlines and low-lying island nations and dislocation of populations — have further threatened the stability of the region. “As Adm. Samuel J. Locklear III, then-U.S. Pacific commander, said (in 2013), climate change is a much more long-term dire political threat than North Korea or China,” Winchester said.

“There’s a difference between a proximate threat like (those posed by) North Korea and China, and an ultimate threat like climate change.”

Added to the human toll are the loss of species and habitat in the Pacific Ocean. “The biggest natural phenomenon in the world is dying due to warming and acidification, and physical damage caused by ships carrying coal from Australia to China,” said the former international correspondent for The Guardian newspaper, describing the vibrant colors of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef when he first visited it in the 1970s. “Now it’s a graveyard.”

WINCHESTER’s wife Setsuko Winchester, 57, an artist and former journalist, came over to his table with tiny cubes of silver and gold she’d found in the museum gift shop. “They’re a perfect illustration of your new book,” she said. (“The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World,” is out in paperback this month.)

Winchester showed how each cube pulled apart into a pair of laser-cut earrings.

“They really are precise. I don’t suppose you’re going to buy them,” her husband teased.

Last week, as part of the Liljestrand Foundation’s ongoing “Design Conversation” series, Setsuko Winchester presented her “Freedom From Fear/Yellow Bowl Project,” a collection of 120 yellow tea bowls she made by hand and showed on the grounds of the Liljestrand House. Each bowl represents 1,000 individuals interned under President Franklin Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066 after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor.

On Monday, Winchester, who has placed and photographed her bowls at 10 U.S. internment camps, Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park on Roosevelt Island and other locations, will do so at Honouliuli National Monument, the site of an internment camp on Oahu.

“Part of my struggle with this story is I was considered the enemy,” she said, explaining that her family moved from Japan to the U.S. after the war.

On a cheerier note, the Winchesters, who live in Massachusetts, said they’d enjoyed the film of his book “The Professor and the Madman,” which they’d seen on the plane to Hawaii. It portrays the relationship between James Murray, the founding editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, played by Mel Gibson, and one of his most prolific contributors, William Minor, a murderer and insane asylum inmate played by Sean Penn.

While mostly faithful to his book, the film had taken a few liberties, Winchester said. “There’s no evidence that Minor and his victim’s wife formed a romantic relationship, but it’s implied in the film.”

HAWAII’S diversity of species is featured in Winchester’s 2015 Pacific book, along with surfing, “what one might these days fairly term the Pacific Ocean’s greatest gift to the outside world beyond,” he wrote, noting that Duke Kahanamoku “spread the message of surfing, far and wide.”

Today, Winchester said, he would include the sailing canoe Hokule‘a and its 2014-2017 Malama Honua circumnavigation of the globe to raise consciousness about the need to stop global warming and pollution. For the oceanic environment, “Nainoa Thompson might be the next Duke Kahanamoku,” he said.

Winchester expressed hope that Hawaii would build on the legacy of Hokule‘a and become a world leader in awareness and stewardship of the ocean that surrounds us. “If this ‘Margins of the Sea’ summit becomes established, it could become permanent, an independent Pacific Ocean studies center,” he said.

In a later interview at the house, Bob Liljestrand, whose parents, Betty and Howard Liljestrand, built the dwelling in 1952, agreed. “We’d like to make ‘Margins of the Sea’ an annual, international summit,” said Liljestrand, who is a co-founder, with his wife Vicky Durand Liljestrand, of the Liljestrand Foundation. The nonprofit’s mission is to “preserve and steward the house and make it beneficial to the community with charitable events,” he said.

International cooperation to cut greenhouse gas emissions is essential because ultimately, “nature wins,” said Winchester, who holds a degree in geology from Oxford University. His next book will be about the Mississippi River, which continually seeks to revert to its much-diverted course.