Growing populations, climactic change and natural disasters had profoundly affected agricultural productivity.

Complicating matters further are geographical and climactic disparities among constituencies. The Himalayan highlands, for example, will remain snowbound until May, by which time monsoon rains will have begun to sweep southern and northeastern India.

We're talking a 900 page book that is as weird as it is compelling, and featuring a climactic scene in which a horde of tiny people emerge from the mouth of a sleeping girl and cause a German Shepherd to explode.

Of all of the Republicans unreal beliefs, their full throated denial of human induced climate change was surely the most consequential. After all, if left unchecked, global warming has the potential to degrade and destroy the climactic conditions that underlay and made possible the rise of human civilization over the last ten millennia.

But the evidence seems to suggest that variations in climactic conditions are increasing in scale and frequency. We know that a 17 fold increase in the carbon dioxide in our atmosphere over the last century is part of the price of the surge in our prosperity, and that the world s poorest citizens will bear the heaviest burden in paying it.