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equatorial Pacific, for a few months taking rains to drought regions and droughts to normally wet areas. But as we shall see in Chapter 30, there is growing evidence that El Ninos are becoming stronger and more frequent under the influence of global warming. This is probably part of a pattern identified by the IPCC, in which, all around the world, the weather is becoming more extreme and more unpredictable as the world warms. And 1998, the warmest year yet, was the epitome of the trend.
    The heat is intensifying the hydrological cycle. Globally, average annual rainfall increased by up to io percent during the twentieth century, because warming has increased evaporation. Locally, the trends are even stronger. The floods that inundated Mozambique in 2000 occurred because maximum daily rainfall there had risen by 50 percent. In the eastern U.S., the proportion of rain falling in heavy downpours has increased by a quarter. In Britain, winter rain falls in intense downpours twice as often as it did in the 196os. There are similar patterns in Australia, South Africa, Japan, and Scandinavia. Even the Asian monsoon has become more intense but less predictable. At the same time, dry areas in continental interiors have become drier, causing deserts to spread. The year 1998 was the first in a run of years of intense drought that stretched from the American West through the Mediterranean to Central Asia.
    At the time of this writing, no other year has been as hot as 1998-and no other year so climatically violent. Unless, that is, you were caught in one of the record number of tropical storms in the North Atlantic in 2005. But if you want to know what the first stage of climate change is shaping up to be like, look no further than 1998.

     

4
    THE ANTHROPOCENE
    A new name for a new geological era
    Welcome to the Anthropocene. It's a new geological era, so take a good look around. A single species is in charge of the planet, altering its features almost at will. And what more natural than to name this new era after that top-of-the-heap anthropoid, ourselves? The term was coined in 2000 by the Nobel Prize-winning Dutch atmospheric scientist Paul Crutzen to describe the past two centuries of our planet's evolution. "I was at a conference where someone said something about the Holocene, the long period of relatively stable climate since the end of the last ice age," he told me later. "I suddenly thought that this was wrong. The world has changed too much. So I said: 'No, we are in the Anthropocene.' I just made up the word on the spur of the moment. Everyone was shocked. But it seems to have stuck."
    The word is catching on among a new breed of scientists who study Earth systems-how our planet functions. Not just climate systems, but also related features, such as the carbon cycle on land and at sea, the stratosphere and its ozone layer, ocean circulation, and the ice of the cryosphere. And those scientists are coming to believe that some of these systems are close to breakdown, because of human interference. If that is true, then the gradual global warming predicted by most climate models for the next centuries will be the least of our worries.
    The big new discovery is that planet Earth does not generally engage in gradual change. It is far cruder and nastier, says Will Steffen, an Australian expert on climate and carbon cycles who from 1998 to 2004 was director of the International Geosphere Biosphere Programme, a research agency dedicated to investigating Earth systems. A mild-mannered man not given to hyperbole, Steffen nonetheless takes a hard-nosed approach to climate change. "Abrupt change seems to be the norm, not the exception," he says. We have been lured into a false sense of security by the relatively quiet climatic era during which our modern complex civilizations have grown and flourished. It may also have left us unexpectedly vulnerable as we stumble into a new era of abrupt change.

    We have also been blind, he says, to the