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What You're Missing in Our Subscriber-only CounterPunch Newsletter Blood Diamonds: the Inside Story An amazing expose by T.R. Naylor: How the "Blood" or "Conflict Diamonds" Myth peddled by NGOs Helped a Vicious Mining Company Shore Up Its Monopoly, Made a Pile of Money for A Washington Post Reporter and Leonardo di Caprio, Served As A Propaganda Myth in the "War on Terror" and had Nothing to Do With Osama Bin Laden. Pinochet is gone, and the world is a cleaner place. JoAnn Wypijewski recalls 1988 in Santiago, when Chile lost its fear. And yes, here they are in charge of Congress again, ready to facilitate a troop hike in Iraq. Alexander Cockburn re-introduces an old acquaintance: the Democrats--Party of War. Remember, we are funded solely by the subscribers to the print edition of CounterPunch. Please support this website by buying a subscription to our newsletter, which contains fresh material you won't find anywhere else, or by making a donation towards the cost of this online edition. Remember contributions are tax-deductible. Click here to make a donation. If you find our site useful please: Subscribe Now Get CounterPunch By Email for Only $35 a Year

Today's Stories January 3, 2007 Kathy Kelly Wrapped Around a Bullet January 2, 2007 Michael Watts Oil Inferno Amina Mire Return of the Warlords: Death and Destruction for Somalis James Brooks Pushing the Wedge in Palestine Alevtina Rea The Tyrant is Dead! Long Live ... ? Al Krebs Global Food Security: a Call to Action Peter Rost Invitation to a Hanging: the Saddam Hussein Execution Video Niranjan Ramakrishnan A Deadly December John Stanton Appetites for Destruction Website of the Day Out Now: Petition   January 1, 2007 Patrick Cockburn Iron Man, Tin God: the Meaning of Saddam Hussein Uri Avnery What Makes Sammy Run? Joshua Frank Eliot Spitzer's Constitutional Hang Up: Architect of New York's Patriot Act   December 30 / 31, 2006 Weekend Edition Alexander Cockburn 2006, Hard to Call It Vintage, But 2007 Could Finally Be Bobby Byrd's Year Patrick Cockburn Iraq 2006: a Nation Soaked in Blood Tears Itself Apart Paul Wolf Dying for Our Sins: A Lawyer for Saddam Describes How His Execution on the First of Eid May Transform Him Into a Martyr Manuel Garcia, Jr. Executing Saddam, Protecting the Rackets Tariq Ali Saddam at the End of a Rope Paul Craig Roberts The New Dark Age: Official Lies, Dogma and Unaccountable Power Douglas Valentine At the End of My Rope: Hanging With Saddam Brian M. Downing The New Iraq Policy: Escalation Michael Donnelly Injustice in Black and White: the Duke Non-Rape Case Stephen Lendman Did Sharon Order the Assassination of Arafat? The Revelations of Uri Dan Fred Gardner Comes Now the Ghost of "Decrim:" Nixon and Marijuana Bailly / Caudron / Lambert Who Owns Ikea?: the Opaque Legacy of Ingvar Kamprad Ralph Nader The Prospects for Progressive Politics Nick Dearden The War on Terror Hits Africa Elizabeth Weill-Greenberg The Third Degree: an Interview with AC Thompson on the Origins of the CIA's Secret Rendition Flights Missy Beattie In Harm's Way: How Our National Coward Describes War Ron Jacobs Sigh of the Oppressed: Religion and Politics Dan La Botz Defend Illegal Immigrants: Help Them! Harbor Them! Andrew Wimmer An Act of Contrition: the Peace Movement in 2007 Dr. Carol Wolman, MD Psychiatrist: Impeach Bush for Good of Country Martha Rosenberg New Year's Resolutions for Big Pharma Dick J. Reavis News Before It Happens: Bush's 2007 MLK Day Speech Jeffrey St. Clair Listening to James Brown and His Followers Poets' Basement Grima, Curtis, Davies, Orloski and Engel Website of the Weekend Charlie Fowler's Photolog: a Life at Altitude Music Video of the Weekend "We're Winning the War on Drugs!" December 29, 2006 Bill Quigley A Tale of Two Sisters: Why is HUD Spending Tens of Millions in Katrina Money to Bulldoze 4,534 Public Housing Apartments in New Orleans? Norman Finkelstein The Dershowitz Treatment John Borowski Curb Your Environmentalism: Laurie David and Me Abid Mustafa The Re-Talibanization of Afghanistan Greg Moses World Responds to Palestinian Family's Jailing Despite Media Blackout Uri Cohen Stand Up for Herod: a Seasonal Story of Ancient Palestine Bailly / Caudron / Lambert The Secrets in Ikea's Closet Website of the Day Justice for New Orleans   December 28, 2006 Norman Finkelstein The Ludicrous Attacks on Jimmy Carter's Book Anthony Cowell Highway Robbery: Privatizing New Jersey's Toll Roads John Ross Gateway to the Next Mexican Revolution? Hilaria Cruz I'm Going to Stay Right Here: Story of a Oaxacan Prisoner Greg Moses Palestinian Immigrant Jailings in Texas Brittany Bond The Blood Trail of Luis Posada Carriles, Washington's Preferred Terrorist Website of the Day Godfather of Soul and Father of Funk   December 27, 2006 Alexander Cockburn Farewell to Our Greatest President: Adieu, Gerald Ford Faruq Ziada Is There a Sunni Majority in Iraq? Christopher Brauchli Burning EPA's Books: What They Don't Want You to Read Might Save Your Life Michael Ortiz Hill Journey to Vietnam: Dare We Not Say Genocide? Nikolas Kozloff Saving Caracas Mark Schneider Why Hope? Reasons for Optimism December 26, 2006 Peter Stone Brown James Brown: Please Don't Go Tito Tricot Chile: the Ghosts of Torture Gary Leupp Cowboys Differ on Iran Attack: Cheney/Bush vs. the Baker Commission John V. Walsh Dershowitz vs. Carter in Beantown: Peace Movement AWOL, Again Reza Fiyouzat Red Christmas: Why Santa Was Hot in China This Year Ron Jacobs The Golem: a Conversation with Marc Estrin Website of the Day JB: Prisoner of Love December 25, 2006 Saul Landau A Jeep Trip with Fidel Lang / McGovern To Surge or Not to Surge? Michael Dickinson Should Stupid Thoughts Be Crimes?: Deny Santa If You Will, But ... Website of the Day James Brown, RIP December 23 / 24, 2006 Marjorie Cohn What's Going On? Jeffrey L. Gould The Capital of Salvadoran Memory: El Mozote After 25 Years Diane Christian The Rape of Iraq William Loren Katz From the Raid on "Fort Negro" to Iraq: Lessons from the First US Invasion Greg Moses This War Can't be Made Right by Winning M. Shahid Alam An Islamic Civil War: Chaos by Design? Fred Gardner Exposé as Inoculant: HRT, Zyprexa, Lilly and the Press Dave Lindorff Crime of the Century Azmi Bishara Ways of Denial Ralph Nader The BCS: a Monopoly on College Football Seth Sandronsky Fiscally Imperiled Social Security? William Hughes Cop Assaults Activists at Lockheed Protest Ron Jacobs Making Stones Weep Jeffrey St. Clair Playlist: What I'm Listening to on New Year's Eve   December 22, 2006 David Rosen Bush's Foreign Sex Policy: Imperialism's Second Front Christopher Brauchli When the Secret is the Question: Secret Prisons, Top Secret Interrogations John Ross Flashlights in the Tunnel of Hate J.L. Chestnut, Jr. Political Sell-Outs in Black and White Rahul Mahajan Dennis Kucinich: Maverick or Stalking Horse? Arthur Neslen Provoking Civil War in the Occupied Territories Peter Rost, MD The Secrets of His Success: Fired Pfizer CEO Walks Away with $198 Million Website of the Day 10 Ways to Change the World in 2007 December 21, 2006 Rosa Mariam Elizalde An Interview with Gore Vidal: "I am Jealous of Cuba" Arundhati Roy Breaking the News Brian Cloughley Poppies Rising: Afghanistan's Drug Catastrophe Daniel White Jimmy Carter in Austin: Time to Come Clean on the Shoot Down of That Itavia DC-9 John V. Whitbeck On Israel's Right to Exist Sam Smith Still Smearing Ralph Nader for 2000 Paris Reidhead GM Ice Cream: Something's Fishy in Your Good Humor Bar Kevin Wehr Denying Disaster: Katrina and the Case for Impeachment Website of the Day Pesticides and Amphibians: a Vital New Database December 20, 2006 Gabriel Kolko Rumsfeld and the American Way of War Winslow T. Wheeler The Pentagon Measures the Chaos in Iraq Tariq Ali The War is Lost Saree Makdisi Israel, Apartheid and Jimmy Carter Bruce Jackson Saying "Oh!": John Mohawk and the Power to Make Peace Dave Lindorff Democrats Walk Into a Bush Trap on Iraq Leslie Radford The Winter Harvest of the South Central Farmers Dave Jansson Divided We Stand, United We Fall: Secessionists Confront the Empire Johnny Barber Jesus is a Terrorist Website of the Day Is It for Freedom? December 19, 2006 Alexander Cockburn Democrats Prepare to Fund Longer War Jonathan Cook End of the Strongmen Greg Moses Globalized Gulag: Palestinian Refugees and Children Held in Hutto, TX Jail Sean Penn Georgie, There's a Crowd Downstairs Dave Lindorff Innocents Abroad: Cracking Down on Gitmo Detainees Despite Overwhelming Evidence Most Are Not Terrorists Ralph Nader Going Postal Laura Carlsen Latin America's Pink Tide? Carlos Villarreal The Well is Poisoned: Victory Requires an Immediate Pull-Out Website of the Day Chuck Spinney on the Pentagon December 18, 2006 Luis J. Rodriguez En Lak Ech: Chicanos, Mayans and Mel Gibson Norman Solomon Washington Refuses to End the War: Powell, Baker, Hamilton--Thanks for Nothing! Uri Avnery Lebanon: War Without a Plan Ron Jacobs More Troops, More Body Bags Phil Gasper Afghanistan: Bush's Other War Unravels Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi Iran's Elections: The World Isn't Florida and Bush Isn't Its Supreme Leader William Blum The United States of Punishment Jim Goodman So What's the Big Deal If Wal-Mart Makes a Mistake? James Brooks Talking Surge: Let's Kill Some More Before We Go Maria C. Khoury Walking Into the Art World: Designing a Palestinian Academy for the Arts Website of the Day Got Powell December 16 / 17, 2006 Weekend Edition Vijay Prashad A Perilous Way to Socialism Saul Landau Filming Fidel Anthony Arnove The US Occupation of Iraq: Act III of a Tragedy of Many Parts Paul Cantor The Puppet and the Puppeteer: Pinochet and Kissinger Annie Nocenti Baluchistan's Fight: The Khan of Kalat Gathers the Tribes Nicole Colson Hard Times on the Killing Floor: Smithfield's Rotten Record Stephen Gowans Tehran's Holocaust Conference Jordan Flaherty A Catastrophic Failure: Foundations, Nonprofits and the Second Looting of New Orleans Fred Gardner Dustin Costa Faces 15 to Life P. Sainath There's No Such Thing as a Free Cow Seth Sandronsky The Democrats and Social Security: Watch What the Party Says and Does Nadia Hijab An AIPAC Shot Across Baker's Bow? Deb Reich Dear Santa, (Or Someone): Greetings from the Occupied Holy Lands Susie Day Cops Shoot Another Rich White Man! Albert Wan Why Does It Take 50 Bullets? Missy Beattie Will the Next Leader Stand Up? Please! Martha Rosenberg Kicking the Wyeth Habit Saves Women's Lives Lee Ballinger The Devil's Highway: Clinton, Border Checkpoints and the Deaths of the Yuma 14 Michael Dickinson Kingdom of Fear Jeffrey St. Clair Live/Evil: Listening to Miles Davis Poets' Basement Davies, Buknatski and Ford Website of the Weekend "I Heard It Through the Grapevine"   December 15, 2006 Eliza Ernshire Palestinian "Civil War" and the Israeli Chocolate Ration Virginia Tilley What Are You Going to Do Now, Israel? Mike Ferner Roll Call for the Choir: If They Vote for War, Occupy 'Em! John Ross Mad Mel's Mayan Apocalypse Fred Wilhelms The Flip Side of Ahmet Ertegun: Where Did You Get Those Shoes? Kevin Zeese Dennis Kucinich's Strange Mission: Can You Be a Real Anti-War Candidate in a Pro-War Party? David Severn Social Engineering Begins at Home: Jeffrey Skoll, Billionaire Philantropist Dave Lindorff Sen. Tim Johnson Death Watch: Senate Gridlock May Be Best Outcome Sunsara Taylor As American as Shopping and Torture Website of the Day June 2, 2004: When Iraq Was There For The Looting   December 14, 2006 Jonathan Cook The Recognition Trap Riz Khan An Interview with Jimmy Carter Jason Hribal Kasatka, the Sea World Orca Pennick / Gray The Plight of Black Farmers: Racism in the US Farm Program Richard Levins That Embezzled Anti-Castro Money Pat Williams The College Crisis: Universal Access, Student Loan Debts and Pell Grants Peter Rost, MD Simply Irresistible: Do Women Prefer Bad Boys? Website of the Day The Sound of Rummy   December 13, 2006 Patrick Cockburn Iraq is Beyond Repair Greg Moses The Dixie Chicks Come Home to Roost Elizabeth Schulte Hungry for the Holidays Joshua Frank Death By Coke Debra Eschmeyer Corporations Control Your Dinner Leon Hadar Baker's Rescue Mission: Too Little, Too Late Peter Rost, MD I've Been a Very Bad Boy Margaret Knapke Mow bé and Malachi, Presenté! Reza Fiyouzat Are Cows Free? Fred Wilhelms A Last Minute Appeal: If You Know One of These Musicians Let Them Know They Are Owed Money--By Friday! Website of the Day The Crimes of Augusto Pinochet December 12, 2006 Fernando A. Torres The Last Man of the Junta: an Open Letter to Kissinger from One of Pinochet's Political Prisoners Paul Craig Roberts America's Injustice System is Criminal Stephen Soldz Abusive Interrogations Uri Avnery Baker's Cake William S. Lind Knocking Opportunity: From Vulcans to Vultures in Iraq Missy Beattie Convicted for Our Convictions: Trespassing for Truth at the UN Dave Lindorff The 35-Year Long Scream: Torture, Impeachment and a Vietnam Vet's Tears George Pyle Our Perverse Farm Plan: Where Christmas Comes Every Five Years Norman Solomon Is the USA the Center of the World? Website of the Day Citizens' War Tribunal   December 11, 2006 Virginia Tilley Banning Mandela Roger Burbach The Condor Model: the Atrocities of Pinochet and the US Col. Douglas MacGregor There's Only One Option Left: Leave! Fawwas Traboulsi Lebanon on the Brink Ron Jacobs Death of a Pig: Poetic Justice for Pinochet Gideon Levy The Cruel Line into Gaza: Elbow to Elbow, Like Cattle Mary McGrane Burning Books at Harvard Law Bernardo Ruiz The Disappeared of Oaxaca: a Message from One of the Actors in Apocalypto Website of the Day La Cancion de la Unidad Video of the Day Killing Castro: Congresswoman as Contract Killer?   December 9 / 10, 2006 Weekend Edition Alexander Cockburn Liberal Consensus for More Troops in Iraq Sen. Gordon Smith Out of Iraq: Cut and Run or Cut and Walk Greg Grandin Jeane Kirkpatrick, Mid-Wife of the Neo-Cons Paul Craig Roberts How Many More Will Die for Bush's Ego? Col. Dan Smith The Vietnamization of Iraq: Inside the Military Training Program Ralph Nader The Man from NAM: John Engler's Trail of Destruction Behrooz Ghamari The Donkey and the Date: Iran's Upcoming Municipal Elections Rev. Willliam Alberts Doing Unto Others: Pastor Haggard and President Bush James T. Phillips The James Gang: "Did You Kill Her?" Bennis / Leaver A Bi-Partisan Occupation Dave Lindorff A Congress of Hucksters and Pipsqueaks Nikolas Kozloff Robert Gates and Venezuela: Another Saber Rattler in Latin America Seth Sandronsky Activating White Racism Lucinda Marshall McKinney and Karpinsky: Silenced for Telling the Truth Mike Whitney Something's Gotta Give: James Baker vs. the Lobby John V. Whitbeck Recommendation No. 80 Faisal Kutty Is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights Merely a Western Construct? Hugh Sansom Smearing Jimmy Carter: an Open Letter to the New York Times Robert Gold My South American Journey: Impunity in Colombia Boots Riley Crash and Burn: an Urgent Message from The Coup Jeffrey St. Clair Playlist: What I'm Listening to This Week Poets' Basement Engel & Buknatski Website of the Weekend Alive in Mexico December 8, 2006 Patrick Cockburn The Iraq Study Group's Cautious Appraisal Leutisha Stills Just How Progressive is the Congressional Black Caucus? Norman Finkelstein The Media Lynching of Jimmy Carter Will Youmans Mr. Lieberman Comes to Washington: Brookings Hosts an Ethnic Cleanser Peter Rost, MD What Went Wrong at Pfizer? Jonathan Demme My Friend Bruce Langhorne: a Great Musician Needs Your Help! Ray McGovern Senate Democrats Give Gates a Free Pass Lucinda Marshall What She Wore Tariq Ali / Robin Blackburn The Lost John Lennon Interview Website of the Day John Lennon's FBI Files   December 7, 2006 Alex Friedman Rev. Phelps' Hate-Fueled Fanatics Find a Home in the Kansas Prison Industry Maureen Webb Risk Scoring and the National Insecurity State Paul Craig Roberts Catastrophe Still Awaits Dave Lindorff Prosecutor Admits: Mumia Abu-Jamal Had "No True Defense" Matt Vidal Drug Pushers, Inc.: Power and Profit in the Legal Drug Trade Yifat Susskind Looking for a Few Good Principles: What Should be Done in Iraq Rodriguez / Jones NYPD's Death Squads: From Diallo to Sean Bell Website of the Day 2006, Remixed December 6, 2006 Robert Bryce Omitting the Obvious with James Baker: From the S&L Crisis to the Iraq Study Group William S. Lind The Boomerang Effect: When Will the First IED Strike Cincy? Zoe Blunt The Clearcut Truth About the Great Bear Rainforest Corporate Crime Reporter The New Conventional Wisdom: Prosecute Individuals, Not Corporations Amira Hass A Regrettable Indifference: Israel's Treatment of Palestinian Prisoners Richard W. Behan The Surreal Politics of Premeditated War Sophie McNeill Why Hezbollah is Broadcasting Sunday Mass December 5, 2006 Virginia Tilley Apartheid Israel: a Beacon of Hope? Sharon Smith The New Washington Consensus: Blame the Victims in Iraq Joe Bageant Somewhere a Banker Smiles Ron Jacobs A War Washington Can't Win Norman Solomon Media Consensus, Stay in Iraq! Mike Whitney Rumsfeld's Final Snowflake: "I Was Just About to Change Everything ... " Derrick O'Keefe Regimes Unchanged: Chavez's Victory Strengthen's Cuba Julian Assange The Road to Hanoi Missy Beattie Bush, the Unhappy Helmsman Website of the Day Lessons of Suez and Iraq   December 4, 2006 Alexander Cockburn Gaza and Darfur George Ciccariello-Maher Tears of the Escualidos: Election Diary, Venezuela Ray McGovern Lame Ducks, Hold That Nomination!: a CIA Insider's Take on Gates John Ross Repression on the Menu in Mexico Walden Bello Hurricane Milton: Friedman, Bayonets and Markets Peter Rost, MD Pfizer's Clueless Executives Stephen Lendman The Withering of the Bush Dynasty Gideon Levy This Ceasefire will Go Up in Flames Website of the Day The "Babes" of Hizbullah?   December 2 / 3, 2006 Weekend Edition Barucha Calamity Peller The Dirty War of Oaxaca Paul Craig Roberts Is Bush Sane?: When Denial Goes Pathological Ralph Nader The Big Boys of Financial Crime Winslow T. Wheeler Committee of Enablers: Is Gates Fit to Serve? Are the Senators? Amira Hass The Checkpoint Generation Maymanah Farhat Depoliticizing Arab Art: Christie's and the Rush to "Discover" the Arab World Dave Lindorff Fighting the Iraq War--At Home Fred Gardner Dr. Jimenez Defends His Practice Methods Col. Dan Smith The Semantics of Civil War Raed Jarrar Maliki's Monopoly of Power Seth Sandronsky US Prison Nation: Locking Up Surplus Labor K.-Y. Taylor The Bride Wore Black: the Shooting of Sean Bell and the Resurgence of American Racism Yifat Susskind Greed, Dogma and AIDS David Rosen Made in China: the Global Trade in Sex Toys Ron Jacobs All Hands on Deck!: the New Pirates of the Caribbean Nikolas Kozloff Venezuela Prepares to Vote Talli Nauman Fighting La Choya: the Secret Toxic Dump on the Border Alan Gregory Shadow Trout: Why Hatchery Fish Aren't Real Joe Allen RFK and Hollywood Mythmaking: Emilio Estevez's Beatification of Bobby Kennedy St. Clair / D'Antoni Playlist: What We're Listening to This Week Poets' Basement Davies, Engel, Ford and Orloski Website of the Day Demo for Oaxaca   December 1, 2006 Greg Grandin Midnight in Mexico: Calderón's Inauguration Behind Closed Doors Linn Washington, Jr. The Mumia Case After 25 Years: Still More Keystone Kops Antics George Ciccariello-Maher Sleeping with the Enemy: At Home with the Anti-Chavistas Brian J. Foley Taking Responsibility for Iraq Dave Zirin Rebel Athletes: Organizing the Jocks for Justice Joshua Frank The Montana Formula: Jon Tester's Neopopulism Chris Floyd Hideous Kinky: Thomas Friedman Comes Undone Ingmar Lee Atomic Porker Strikes Indian Point Nuke Plant Manuel Garcia, Jr. Dark Fire: the Fall of WTC 7 Website of the Day No Gun Ri Revisited Video of the Day Drunken Hack Goes Ape at Aussie "Pulitzers"     Subscribe Online

January 3, 2007 Money Versus the Monsoon Under the Brown Cloud By STAN COX Anantapur District, southern India. You probably haven't noticed, but days aren't as bright as they used to be. Sunlight intensity, averaged across hundreds of locations on all continents, decreased by 1.5 to 3% per decade from the 1950s to 1990s. The dulling of the sky can be traced largely to the burning of fuels, which releases soot, sulfates, nitrates, and other substances that absorb and reflect a portion of the sunlight that normally would reach the Earth's surface. When reported a few years ago [1], these findings were controversial, but subsequent research has helped confirm the reality of "global dimming." However, to paraphrase the old saying about politics, all global climate change is local. Over the past decade, clean-air laws and export of dirty industries have halted dimming and even led to some brightening (and warming) in the U.S. and Europe. Meanwhile, as we shall see, continued dimming over Asia could well mean more erratic monsoon rains and less food for 2 billion people. If that indeed happens, the chronically drought-stricken district of Anantapur here at the southern end of the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh may provide a grim preview of South Asia's future. Lying between Hyderabad and Bangalore -- the country's two great traffic-choked foreign-investment capitals and major sources of the brown haze that blankets the subcontinent every year from November to April -- this impoverished rural region never sees a very good monsoon. The area lies in a "rain shadow" from India's southeastern mountains, and as a result, its average annual rainfall is only about 20 inches, often concentrated in a few downpours between June and September. And even that meager monsoon is increasingly undependable: Of the nine years since 1930 that saw rainfall below 16 inches, six have occurred since 1980 and two since 2002. A recent study by India's National Climate Center showed that over the past century, 12 of 36 regions in India, including the region that includes Anantapur, have seen decreasing annual rainfall. But despite living in the driest part of southern India, the 3.6 million people of Anantapur district -- 2.7 million of them in small villages -- continue to rely on agriculture as the foundation of their economy, indeed their existence. Now, immense, drifting brown clouds produced by the booming, mostly urban, demand for electric appliances, automobiles, and other fossil-fuel-guzzling features of twenty-first-century Indian life could undermine Anantapur's survival in way that centuries of persistent "natural" droughts have not. Playing with the dimmer switch The deepest dimming during the past half-century occurred in the Northern Hemisphere, most intensely in the most heavily populated regions [2], and especially in the United States, with its voracious energy consumption. Anti-pollution efforts in the industrialized West, along with the 1990s economic crash in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe and the large-scale relocation of manufacturing to Asia, curbed the release of pollutants in the West, and that appears to have led to overall global brightening in the last decade or so. Some analysts now say the sudden onslaught of hot years over much of the world since since 1990 actually represents a longer, more gradual warming trend that was masked back in the 60s, 70s, and 80s by a shady layer of soot and sulfates. But dimming continues across large parts of the globe, and history shows that the result can be severe drought and plummeting crop production. Recent research has shown that decades ago, sulfates from industrial Europe and North America weakened atmospheric circulation in the intertropical convergence zone, causing rains to fail in Africa's Sahel region, south of the Sahara desert [3]. The resulting Sahelian drought of the 1970s and 80s ended up killing more than a million people. Now, food production in South Asia is imperiled by phenomena known as "atmospheric brown clouds." Rapidly industrializing areas of Asia and the surrounding oceans have seen continued darkening, associated with the emergence of extensive, murky clouds with lifetimes measured in weeks. Fed increasingly by combustion of coal, diesel, and gasoline, brown clouds have been returning, darker and larger each winter, over South Asia and the northern Indian Ocean [3]. The brown clouds have cut the amount of sunlight reaching the land and ocean surfaces by approximately 8% between 1930 and 2000 [4]. While shading and thereby cooling the surface, the brown clouds absorb heat and warm the atmospheric layer in which they hover. That has several nasty consequences: reduced evaporation from the ocean surface (which means less moisture available for rain); warmer-than-normal clouds that contain more fine particles of pollution and can hold more moisture without releasing it as rain; and perhaps most ominously, a potential weakening of the climatic engine that drives the monsoon rains [4,5]. That could mean lower crop yields across much of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, and it could tip already drought-afflicted areas like Anantapur District into ecological and humanitarian crisis. Living with drought Traditionally, Anantapur's farmers have dealt with their bad draw in the climatic lottery by growing tough subsistence crops: pearl millet, finger millet, deep-rooted legumes like pigeonpea, and, on better soils, chickpea. Over the past two decades, cash-crop peanut mania swept the district, eventually covering its arable land in a near-monoculture. But drought, soil exhaustion, and a plant virus have driven peanut yields down and reduced the typical seed's oil content from almost 50% down to 36%. Because the crop is grown mainly for cooking oil production, farmers are getting lower prices for smaller crops. Fully 80% of the district's rural people are small farmers, not fat-cat landlords or landless laborers, but that relatively well-balanced farm economy is getting harder to maintain. Economic pressures, coming on top of increasingly erratic rainfall and depletion of groundwater supplies, have helped push Anantapur toward the top of the list of districts for numbers of farmer suicides, which are reported to number in the thousands. The water table has dropped as much as 15 feet in some places, and more wells are being drilled ever-more deeply to get at ever-less water. It's also reported that 10 to 15% of farmers have fled the crisis to look for work in urban areas. I recently visited farmlands around the village of Velikonda, one of 54 watersheds in the district where farmers, assisted by the nonprofit group Acción Fraterna, are using water-harvesting methods, a more diverse array of crops, and natural pest control in an effort to sustain their communities and food supplies over the long haul. There, and in other villages in the district, it's clear that communities accustomed to surviving hard times are not going to give up without a fight. With the help of engineers, hydrologists, agronomists, and local laborers, and organizing themselves into teams of 15 farm families (of various low castes and non-castes, but none of them well-to-do), people in Velikonda and a host of other villages are planning and building large water-conservation networks. Using mostly hand labor, they have built thick, chest-high earthen berms around the downhill edges of fields to trap precious rainwater that would otherwise run off into gullies during storms. More than 100,000 acres in the district are now protected by such berms. In the same way, they are hand-digging ponds of 40,000-gallon capacity that can hold rainwater to be hand-carried to new orchards of mango or custard-apple trees. Farmers pay a percentage of the cost of berms, drainage outlets, and ponds on a sliding scale (with the rest coming from Acción Fraterna, which is a part of India's Rural Development Trust. Indian government programs are now also helping fund such projects.) They also are moving away from a food economy based on selling peanuts and buying nutrient-poor, government-subsidized rice. In an effort led largely by women, they are re-diversifying their cropping system with nutritious crops they can both consume and sell: millets, sorghum, pigeonpea, broad beans, cluster beans, chilis, coriander, and many more. They have stopped buying costly pesticides, turning instead to natural products like neem seed extract. They are growing non-crop plants like milkweed to trap insects instead of trapping themselves in debt to buy chemicals. They are growing large leguminous plant species on the water-holding berms, to be cut and spread back on the land to add organic matter and nutrients. Where these self-organized community efforts have taken root, individual despair under the brutal logic of the national and international economy has withered. The work is on a colossal scale and no doubt exhausting, but the atmosphere in the villages is electric. Velikonda and the other places where I saw such cooperative work happening are not the places that continue to be plagued by farmer suicides. Darkness on the horizon But even if the people of Velikonda and thousands other villages make every right move within their local, water-limited means, the global economy may not be finished with Anantapur. India's rapid industrialization has added 50% on top of the pollutant emissions that have come with population growth since 1930 [4]. That foul output has accelerated with the opening of the nation's economy over the past decade and a half. India's integration into the world market has meant cheaper merchandise and services for Western consumers and greater wealth for an upper slice of India's urban minority. But India's captains of industry are achieving prosperity the same way the powerhouse economies of the West were built: with products and technologies that burn every kilogram of fossil fuel that comes within reach. If the boom continues to darken and thicken the atmospheric brown clouds that, in turn, are threatening to disrupt the monsoon, it could destroy everything that the resolute farm communities of Anantapur have managed to accomplish. Moreover, it could undercut the livelihood and food supply of the rural majority all across the country. Computer models predict that nationwide monsoon droughts, which historically occur an average of two to three years per decade, could rise to as many as six years per decade under the influence of brown clouds [4]. If Anantapur is affected as badly as the nation as a whole (and the models appear very uncertain about local variations), agriculture might just become impossible. People there say they already count on drought at least six years in ten; brown clouds conceivably could make that a perfect ten out of ten. Foreign investment and production for export in India have not come close to the levels they have reached in China, but they have played an indispensable role in creating the country's urban economic explosion (and they have dwarfed by orders of magnitude the foreign funds that have come in to support rural nonprofits like Acción Fraterna). Such upheavals never come without surprises. And no sudden, human-made climatic change in a random direction has, as one might expect, an equal chance of being either harmful of beneficial. Because life on Earth evolves toward equilibrium with its current environment - and on a long time scale - and because industrial civilization has become so complicated, fragile, and vulnerable, any rapid climatic change, including dimming, is almost guaranteed to prove a disaster with no silver lining. No one knows, for example, how the complex tug-of-war between global warming and local dimming will turn out. But the results for South Asia are unlikely to be pleasant. The leader of the Atmospheric Brown Clouds Project, Dr. V. Ramanathan of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, has said, "Some years the aerosols [i.e., the pollutants causing dimming] might win and in some years the greenhouse effect may win. So we are concerned that in coming decades the variability between the two will become large and it will be difficult to cope with rapid changes from year to year." [6] The straightforward approach to both warming and dimming is, of course, to make deep cuts in energy consumption planet-wide. The rapidly industrializing nations of the South will have to find their own ways to get the energy they need without ecological devastation. But with the average American using 10 times as much energy as the average person in China, and 24 times as much as the average Indian, it's the clear duty of the United States to take the lead in slashing consumption. Instead of that, scientists and policymakers are focusing on technological fixes like carbon sequestration, stratospheric sulfur seeding [7], and colossal, space-based mirrors [8]. Growth-dependent economies were built around the fossil-fuel power bonanza and have no way to handle the consequences of the deep energy cuts that are necessary. Global capitalism will not - indeed, cannot - give up the easy exploitation of concentrated energy that need only be mined or pumped. And with its global reach, it will probably entrap even communities like Velikonda that seem determined to wriggle free. Overall, it makes for some pretty dim prospects. Stan Cox is a plant breeder and writer in Salina, Kansas. Write him at t.stan@cox.net. You can visit Acción Fraterna's website at http://www.accionfraterna.org/home.html Notes 1. Stanhill, G. and S. Cohen. 2001. Global dimming: a review of the evidence for a widespread and significant reduction in global radiation with discussion of its probable causes and possible agricultural consequences. Agricultural and Forest Meteorology 107:255-278. 2. Alpert, P., P. Kishcha, Y.J. Kaufman, and R. Schwartzbard. Global dimming or local dimming?: Effects of urbanization on sunlight availability. Geophysical Research Letters 32: [web reference] L17802, DOI:10.1029/2005GL023320. 3. Rotstayn, L.D. and U. Lohmann. 2002. Tropical rainfall trends and the indirect aerosol effect. Journal of Climate 15:2103-2116. 4. Ramanathan, V., C. Chung, D. Kim, T. Bettge, L. Buja, J.T. Kiehl, W.M. Washington, Q. Fu, D.R. Sikka, and M. Wild. 2005. Atmospheric brown clouds: Impacts on South Asian climate and hydrologic cycle. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 102:5326 5. United Nations Environment Program, "The atmospheric brown cloud: climate and other environmental impacts" (http://www.rrcap.unep.org/issues/air/impactstudy/index.cfm) 6. Scripps Institution of Oceanography press release (http://scrippsnews.ucsd.edu/article_detail.cfm?article_num=731) 7. Crutzen, P. 2006. Albedo enhancement by stratospheric sulfur injections: A contribution to resolve a policy dilemma? Climatic Change: [web reference] DOI 10.1007/s10584-006-9101-y 8. Govindasamy, B., and K. Caldeira. 2000. Geoengineering Earth's radiation balance to mitigate CO2 -induced climate change. Geophysical Research Letters 27:2141.

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