It's a mad world - and who can save us?

摘要

The world's weather is showing symptoms of weird-ness that seems only one step away from madness. Droughts are afflicting areas where they are not normal and lasting longer in areas where they often happen: hurricanes, floods, and tsunamis are more frequent and more intense those recorded in the past century or so. Global weirding is replacing global warming as the topic on which everyone has to have an opinion. It may be the product of humankind's pollution of the atmosphere as research on global warming seems to suggest, but more urgent than what causes all this is the question of how we cope with it. In particular what do we do about the terrible harvests that have followed the weird weather in so many parts of the world, including not only the vulnerable agro-systems of large parts of the developing world, but also the rich and consistently productive farmlands of the Ukraine or the American Mid West?