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 (�THE END IS NIGH�). 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. Some calculations suggest that the average English garden moves south, climatically, by a distance of sixty-six feet every day.





Granta 83: This Overheating World was first published in Autumn 2003.