Optimists may imagine a world where the overall agriculture productivity of important food crops just keeps going up and up. How close is this sort of vision to reality? Current techniques in modeling crop yields in Virginia reveal what effect weather factors have on agricultural productivity and also give us some insight as to the non-climatic factors which have gone into increasing crop yields over the latter half of this century. Maybe the future isn't quite so bleak as many had predicted, after all.

The scientific literature is replete with research results which is applying a continuous downward pressure on the reasonable estimates of potential global climatic warming due to the "greenhouse effect." Here we present eight remarkable findings which have emerged from the literature in recent months.

Sometimes it seems like weather related death and destruction are on the rise, with big news reports on such events reaching nearly daily proportions. Is it really all that bad? Our Current Wisdom section will help you put some of these reports into perspective.