This Overheating World

Not so much the state we're in as the mess we're getting into. The world we were born into has gone. We shall never completely recapture its climate, its seasons, the way its plants grew and its animals lived. This is not a wild-eyed prediction, a man on the street with a placard. Respectable science knows it and says it. Nine of the world's ten warmest years since records were kept have occurred in the past fourteen years. Every month, an English garden moves south, climatically, by a distance of one hundred yards. Who is responsible? We are our habits. Can we prevent it? Too late. Can we moderate it, slow it, reverse it? Yes- if we try. This issue of "Granta" contains reports from the frontiers of environment change. Contributors include: Marion Botsford-Fraser; James Hamilton-Paterson; Matthew Hart; Thomas Keneally; Philip Marsden; Bill McKibben; Wayne McLennan; Christopher de Bellaigue; James Meek; and Nuha al-Radi in Iraq. There is new fiction from Maarten 't Hart and Jon McGregor, and a picture essay by Edward Burtynsky on our industrial landscapes.