World Views on Climate Change

In response to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that occurred in March, the Neue Zuercher Zeitung, a newspaper out of Zurich, Switzerland, asked several writers to contribute articles about their experiences with climate change. Now, Signandsight.com has posted English translations of essays by Swiss author Leo Tuor, who writes of disappearing glaciers in the Alps; Sri Lankan writer Romesh Gunesereka, who tells a story of a farmer’s issues with rain); and Indian Kiran Nagarkar, whose description of Bombay’s growth is telling.

Nigerian Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, who recently won the 2007 Orange Broadband Prize for fiction, also contributed a short piece about Christmas in Lagos:

Christmas falls into harmattan, the short season of heat during the day and cold in the evenings when winds whip through and cover everything with a thin film of yellow-brown, when we rub globs of Vaseline into our skin and lips to prevent cracking. But the harmattan feels different this Christmas. It is much hotter. And in the evenings, the weather seems undecided; one night it is incredibly hot so that I lie on my bed with my skin and bedsheets clammy with sweat. On another night, the temperature dips and I wear a sweater, tie a scarf around my neck. Something is happening to the weather and to the world that baffles me. I feel helpless thinking about it. I see, in my mind, a picture of Abba getting so hot that it is unbearable for anybody. Or perhaps I am imagining this change, perhaps it is because I have film images of melting ice in my mind.