With his curly, salt-and-pepper hair and thoughtful demeanor, Chris West looks like just another mid-career professor as he crosses the streets of Oxford University. But West, trained as a zoologist, is more an activist than an academic these days. From his cramped office around the corner from Balliol College, he directs the government’s UK Climate Impacts Program, which educates individuals and businesses in Britain about the risks they face from climate change and the ways to cope with it. Not long ago, West says, a DuPont executive boasted to him about how well his company was now treating the environment. Jolly good, West replied, but was DuPont also prepared for how the environment might treat DuPont? ‘I asked how many of his company’s 300-odd facilities around the world were located in floodplains,’ West says. Global warming will bring increased risks to anyone located in a floodplain. ‘He didn’t know,’ West recalls. ‘I said, ‘Don’t you think you should?” For years, global warming was discussed in the hypothetical–a threat in the distant future. Now it is increasingly regarded as a clear, observable fact. This sudden shift means that all of us must start thinking about the many ways global […]