articles in this issue focus on adaptation, on winners, losers and consequences of global warming. It's definitively a post-Copenhagen attitude, ready for smaller steps and a more pragmatic perspective. Climate change "won't be stopped, but its effects can be made less bad". It's no longer an alarmist rhetoric between salvation or getting burned in hell; instead the title imitates the pragmatic American "how to do " attitude: "How to live with climate change". Whatever we do, "none of this will make climate change all right. It remains the craziest experiment mankind has ever conducted. Maybe in the long run it will be brought under control. For the foreseeable future, though, the mercury will continue to rise, and the human race must live with the problem as best it can." I highlighted "craziest experiment", because this illustrates a really interesting attitude towards climate change and what to do about it. In my understanding it says that the whole world has turned into a laboratory now, and all of us are part of this experiment.
"The craziest experiment" is beautifully illustrated on the frontispiece: The farmer on his dry land underneath a merciless blue sky wears a diving helmet. This might be an allusion to rising sea levels, but I prefer another interpretation. Just like divers adapt to life underwater we have to adapt to life in the atmosphere, we have to control our air supply, the air that we breathe. Just like astronauts in their spaceship we have to control everything in our environment in order to stay alive; we are engineers of our environment, including the atmosphere. It's not easy to be a farmer these days, or a politician, or a scientist.
addendum: artists imagined life as a technological enterprise already in the 20th century. Here you can see Salvador Dali in London, delivering a lecture in a diving suit; in the sixties, it was the Beatles who imagined 'fields of green' from inside a yellow submarine, and finally you can see a vision of spacehip earth by Buckminster Fuller - a metaphor that's still with us. (for further explication, see comments 2 & 3):