models and temperature data. Add the unceasing bombardment of
extreme weather events wreaking havoc all over the world.
Take 2001 as an example. At the beginning of that year, Britain
emerged from its wettest winter in more than 270 years of record keep-
ing. In early February, twenty-two successive blizzards in northern
China stranded more than 100,000 herders, many of whom starved.
In South Florida, the worst drought in 100 years decimated citrus
crops, prompted extensive water restrictions, and triggered the spread
of more than twelve hundred wildfires. In early May, some forty people
died in the hottest spring on record in Pakistan. In June, Houston suf-
fered the single most expensive storm in U.S. history when tropical
storm Allison dropped 35 inches of rain in 1 week, causing $6 billion
in damage.
In late July, a protracted drought in Central America had left more
than 1.5 million farmers with no crops to harvest—and a million peo-
ple verging on malnutrition. In Iran, a devastating drought resulted in
more than $2.5 billion in agricultural losses. The drought was tem-
porarily interrupted in August by Iran’s worst flash flooding in 200
years that killed nearly five hundred people. In October, meteorologists
documented a record ninety-two tornadoes in what is normally a quiet
period for these events. In November, the worst flooding in memory
killed more than one thousand people in Algeria. In Boston, after an
October and November of record-setting warmth, it was 71° F on
December 1—which prompted one observer to call this unseasonable
weather “gift wrapping on a time bomb.”
Why, then, is there any doubt in the public mind about the reality
of climate change? And why is this E Magazinebook necessary? Why
send reporters to 10 global “hot spots”—from New York City to Fiji—
for firsthand progress reports on the warming world? The answer lies
in the millions of dollars spent by a shrinking number of industry
players to maintain the illusion of “scientific uncertainty.” Also to
blame is the U.S. press, which, in general, has been too lazy to exam-
ine the scientific data and too intimidated by the fossil fuel lobby to
tell the truth.
Even as villagers in Mozambique buried casualties of the horren-
dous rains that swamped the country in 1999, ExxonMobil declared in
Introduction 3