A Gloomy Forcast. By New York Times Syndicate-The Economist.

A report on global warming paints a grim picture for some Latin American countries. More destructive hurricanes, shrinking forests, melting glaciers, disappearing animals: the prospective damage to Latin America and the Caribbean from climate change makes for grim reading. A new World Bank report, timed to coincide with a United Nations conference in Poland, tries to put numbers to the potential economic cost. ("Low Carbon, High Growth: Latin American Responses to Climate Change" by Augusto de la Torre, Pablo Fajnzylber and John Nash.) By taking the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's predictions for what the planet might feel like in 2100 and then overlaying data from several thousand farms situated in regions of varing heat and dryness, it is possible to make some informed guesses about what the effect on crop yields, and therefore on GDP, would be if temperatures rose and rainful fell. Some places in the southern cone of Latin America would gain from such a change. But more would lose out: The authors reckon that left unchecked, climate change might cause a fall of 15-20 percent in far revenues by the end of the century. According to another study, this could mean an annual cut in GDP of 0.23 to 0.56 percent. This would worsen rural poverty. It would also entail the shrinking of a number of habitats, whose eventual disappearance would in turn speed up the process of global warming. Four are in the front line: Mexico's Gulf Coast wetlands; the Andean glaciers; parts of the Amazon; and Caribbean coral reefs (they expel tiny algae when sea temperatures rise, which eventually kills them). An increase in malaria in rural areas and dengue fever in cities completes a gloomy picture.

The simple solution to stop all of the above problems from transpiring. Stop or reduce by a significant number the space launchings by NASA, Russia, the European Space Agency an the other 43 countries launching staellites. As I suggested in my book, if all 46 space agencies stopped launches for one year, the ozone hole would close from 10 to 25 pecent. This would reverse the global warming effect.