Read With Speed and Violence: Why Scientists Fear Tipping Points in Climate Change for Free Online Page A

storm warnings that night, neither Lidia nor any of her neighbors took much notice. "Hurricanes never come here," she told me. Or at least they never had.
    I was in Honduras a couple of weeks after the hurricane had struck. The devastation was appalling. Huge floods had rushed down rivers and into the capital, Tegucigalpa, in the mountainous heart of the country, ripping away whole communities. A thousand people lost their lives beneath a single slide that landed on the suburb of Miramesi. Another stopped just short of the American embassy in the capital. Rivers changed their paths right across the country, obliterating towns. And flash floods on steep hillsides buried whole communities under mud. Sixty percent of the country's bridges were destroyed, along with a quarter of its schools and half its agricultural productivity, including nearly all its banana plantations. The first visitors to the southern town of Mordica reported, "All you can see is the top of the church." Ministers said the country's economic development had been put back twenty years.

    For tens of millions of people across the world, the violence of Mitch is an omen. Many climatologists believe that Mitch, a ferocious hurricane made worse by the warm seas that allowed it to absorb huge amounts of water from the ocean, was a product of global warming-and a sign of things to come for the hundreds of millions of inhabitants of flood-prone river valleys and coastal plains across the world; for those living on deforested hillsides prone to landslips; and for many millions more who do not yet know that they are vulnerable in a new era of hyperweather. People like Lidia before Mitch hit.
    Those who do not believe that global warming is a real and dangerous threat should visit places like Choluteca and talk to people like Lidia. It may not convince them that climate change is making superhurricanes and megafloods. But it will show them the forces of nature untamed and the human havoc caused when weather breaks its normal shackles. For hundreds of millions of people, these issues are no longer a matter for computer modeling or debate in the corridors of Congress or future forecasts. They are about real lives and deaths. The question is not: Can we prove that events like Mitch are caused by climate change? It is: Can we afford to take the chance that they are?
    The year 1998 was the warmest of the twentieth century, perhaps of the millennium. It was also a year of exceptionally wild weather, and few doubt that the two were connected. That year, besides the storms, the rainforests got no rain. Forest fires of unprecedented ferocity ripped through the tinder-dry jungles of Borneo and Brazil, Peru and Tanzania, Florida and Sardinia. New Guinea had the worst drought in a century; thousands starved to death. East Africa saw the worst floods in half a century-during the dry season. Uganda was cut off for several days, and much of the desert north of the region flooded. Mongol tribesmen froze to death as Tibet had its worst snows in fifty years. Mudslides washed houses off the cliffs of the desert state of California. In Peru, a million were made homeless by floods along a coastline that often has no rain for years at a time. The water level in the Panama Canal was so low that large ships couldn't make it through. Ice storms disabled power lines throughout New England and Quebec, leaving thousands without power or electric light for weeks. The coffee crop failed in Indonesia, cotton died in Uganda, and fish catches collapsed in the Pacific off Peru. Unprecedented warm seas caused billions of the tiny algae that give coral their color to quit reefs across the Indian and Pacific Oceans, leaving behind the pale skeletons of dead coral.

    All a coincidence? Not according to the IPCC. Some of the damage was caused by an intense outbreak of a natural climate cycle in the Pacific known as El Nino. Every few years, this causes a reversal of winds and ocean currents across the