scarcely a day passes without new reports of ominous scientific discoveries about the pace of environmental destruction. It is not too comforting to read that “in the middle latitudes of the Northern hemisphere, average temperatures are increasing at a rate that is equivalent to moving south about 10 meters (30 feet) each day,” a rate “about 100 times faster than most climate change that we can observe in the geological record”—and perhaps 1,000 times faster, according to other technical studies.
