Word: rains
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...lucky ones. "My husband thought we were washed away," says Wu, a pregnant preschool teacher, sitting in a shelter for typhoon victims in the small town of Cishan in southern Taiwan. When Typhoon Morakot struck the island on Aug. 8, bringing nearly 9 ft. (around 2.5 m) of rain and the island's worst floods in over 50 years, Wu grabbed her 1-year-old son and climbed three hours to higher ground. There, she and hundreds of people from her village waited three stormy days and nights before military helicopters rescued and delivered them - along with thousands of others...
...more desperate in the later stages of war they were having to move not only the works they stole but also art from their own museums. Frames consume a lot of space, so paintings were literally pulled out of their frames. The Nazis were loading trucks in the open rain and putting art into damp mines. There are all sorts of cases of Monuments Men finding paintings with moss literally growing through the weave of the canvas like an old Chia Pet. Other paintings were loaded on to straw on open trucks and rattled back and forth over rickety roads...
Farms vs. forests - that's the usual dynamic in tropical countries, where the growth of agriculture often comes at the expense of trees. In nations like Brazil and Indonesia - where deforestation is behind the vast majority of carbon emissions - rain forests are not just cut down for logging but also burned to make room for new farms and pastureland. As more people need more food - and biofuels as well - there's a risk that we could see many of our remaining virgin rain forests wiped out completely...
...that. By putting a greater carbon value on trees planted on farmland through a cap-and-trade program that would give companies a carbon credit for growing and maintaining trees, we could encourage the growth of agroforestry. It's not a perfect compensation for continued deforestation - whole, virgin rain forests have an enormous ecological value that can't be replicated by agroforestry - but it's a realistic fallback. "This is a win-win investment opportunity for the world," says Garrity. It's also a rare bit of green good news...
...Even if it can't buy rain, there is still time for the government of India to rethink how it can start to prepare for the next drought. Sunita Narain of the Centre for the Study of the Environment in New Delhi advocates a new, national water policy to make farmers less vulnerable to the vagaries of the monsoon, encompassing more effective use of groundwater, better monitoring of weather patterns and water supply, implementing village water-security plans, and encouraging conservation and water recycling in the cities. In a recent editorial she wrote, "We must learn, fast, how to reinvigorate...