In My Day

Writer Eric Roston went on a trip to talk to Indians about climate change. What they mostly wanted to talk about, he found, was the impacts of changing weather on their daily lives: "What many Indians lack in understanding 'global warming,' they make up for in the knowledge that their climate is changing." The familiar paradox is that political pressure to do something about global warming often comes from changes in peoples' daily lives. People can emotionally view their own experiences of extreme weather (Katrina, for instance, or Iowa's recent 100-year floods) as "evidence" that change is happening. This is unscientific, but it's no comment on anyone's intelligence; it's just hard to build a popular movement around numbers and graphs.