While Climate Treaty Negotiators Dance on with Their Slow Give-and-take, the Climate Itself Is Running Amok

T HE WORLD’S CLIMATE RARELY SENDS CLEAR SIGNALS. THE INTERACTIONS of hundreds of variables—of sunlight, ocean currents, precipitation, fire, volcanic eruptions, topography, and the respiration of living things—produce a complex system that scientists are just beginning to understand, and that defies precise forecasts. In any given year, some regions are warmer than normal while others are cooler. Almost any short-term climatic phenomenon, even an extreme one, can be explained as something that falls within the enormous range of natural climatic variability. Until this year. Even before 1998 comes to a close, it is clear that this year is one for the meteorological record books. Although annual temperature records have become routine recently—all 14 of the warmest years since 1860 have occurred in the past two decades—the record is usually broken by a couple of hundredths of a degree. But the average temperature for January–August 1998 was a full four tenths of a degree warmer than the average for 1997, the previous record-setting year (see figure, page 12). In fact, six of the first eight months of 1998 set an all-