THE CHINESE ASK RIVER gods for protection against floods. Each year tens of millions of Indian Hindus make pilgrimages to the Ganges to seek spiritual cleansing. In impoverished villages from Nepal to Bangladesh, waterways are the lifeblood ofsociety, relied on for everything from drinking water to industry to burial. The veneration that Asians hold for rivers was on Chu Duo's mind as he fiddled with his instruments--a bevy of thermometers, barometers, solar-radiation meters, rainfall gauges--in a small, flat field near Lhasa's Jokhang Temple, Tibet's holiest Buddhist monastery. For the past five years, Chu, a 36-year-old meteorologist at the Tibet Institute of Plateau Atmospheric and Environmental Sciences in Lhasa, has been trying to measure changes in the local climate. He found that temperatures have risen more than 1 degree Celsius since the 1960s, while rainfall has increased. The results aren't out of line with what climate scientists have been finding for other parts of the world. But for the three fifths of the world's people who live in Asia, the prognosis is especially dire.
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