To the untrained eye, the satellite photos of north-west Ethiopia on July 10th may have seemed benign.

A widely read cover story on the impact of global warming in this week’s New York magazine starts ominously: “It is, I promise, worse than you think.” It goes on to predict temperatures in New York

Not that long ago, the world wondered whether clean energy could survive without lavish government support. Now the question is how far it can spread.

Can Europe carry the Paris agreement on climate change forward now that America has left?

AT THE start of a 4am shift, gold miners scan their fingerprints and squeeze into tiny “mantrap” turnstiles, designed to prevent thieves from slipping through.

Ask Anesi Chishiko about fertiliser, and she points to her goats and her trees. Manure and leaves are all that she folds into the earth on her family farm in Zambia.

Introducing genes for herbicide resistance into a crop permits it to be sprayed with weedkiller that really does then kill nothing but weeds.

TANG DONGHUA, a wiry 47-year-old farmer wearing a Greenpeace T-shirt, smokes a cigarette and gesticulates towards his paddy fields in the hills of southern Hunan province.

AFTER Donald Trump said on June 1st that America would pull out of the Paris accord on climate change, many people congratulated China for sticking with it.

In 1931 Mahatma Gandhi ridiculed the idea that India might have universal primary education “inside of a century”. He was too pessimistic.