The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches From the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam by Eliza Griswold

covered with bites,” she said, tugging the baby’s small arm from the cotton folds so I could see the welts. His name was Cheldon, which means, “I am pleading for more from the Creator.”
    Two thousand babies in the trees—I pictured this as I stood with Fakcit beneath the harsh dazzle of the overcast sky. I pictured the babies later that night, when I was lying on a foammattress in a cheap hotel nearby. I have pictured those babies again and again; they come up behindmy eyes without bidding, in silhouette, like a woodcut, with an eggplant sky behind them, and greasy water licking at the tree trunks. Seen from a distance, the children would have clung to the limbs like strange fruit—the allusion inescapable—not swinging dead, but alive and grasping branches.According to the local Red Cross representative (one of the emir’s courtiers, who carried a clipboard and kept track of the death toll) all of those babies survived. So far, according to the information he’d been able to gather, forty-seven adults had died, but numbers in Nigeria are usually speculative at best.
    That afternoon I climbed the hill to the emir’s castle for the last time, with asudden, animal understanding of the difference high ground makes. Although he had been untouched by the flood, the emir was despondent; first the religious fighting, now the flood, and no time in between to recover. Only a few years earlier, he had gathered Muslims and Christians to pray for the end of a terrible drought. That kind of coming together was impossible now. What’s more, there was no wayto explain that this flood was a result of human action, the emir said, leaning his swaddled head against the fraying throne. Before I arrived he had been listening to a BBC radio program about the perils of the Sahel. “This flood is the first sign of climate change,” he said. Yet his people believed such curses came only from God.
    Of all seven continents, Africa is believed to be most affectedby climate change. Poverty, overfarming, overgrazing, deforestation, and increasingly erratic weather patterns all contribute to the conservative prediction that, if the world’s temperature rises as little as two degrees by 2100, as many as 250 million Africans will be left without adequate drinking water. 2 In Africa and Asia, the band along the tenth parallel is one of the most ecologically precariousin the world. Here, the inexorable southward spread of North Africa’s desert, which occurs in Nigeria at an estimated rate of between a quarter and a half mile each year, 3 meets unpredictable rains in the transition zone from Africa’s dry north to its wet south.
    Before satellite dishes and Skype, weather connected one continent to another. The intertropical convergence zone binds the northernand southern hemispheres by driving both of their high-pressure air currents toward the equator, where atmospheric pressure is lower. This system not only creates the trade winds but also carries carbon dioxide and other pollutantsproduced by the northern hemisphere toward the south. As these compounds travel south, they warm oceans and land, contributing to patterns of flooding and drought.
    These equatorial patterns directly affect North America, too. Atlantic hurricanes, such as Katrina, are born in this zone. When the two collide, they form vortexes known as Hadley cells, which move clockwise until they sweep off Cape Verde. Most of these storms dissipate while passing through the doldrums, or “horse latitudes”—named for the practice of sailors in becalmed ships tossing their horsesoverboard to save precious drinking water. But some do not dissipate, and these eventually strike America’s East Coast. This is the pattern Ernest Zebrowski, Jr., in
Perils of a Restless Planet: Scientific Perspectives on Natural Disasters
, calls the butterfly effect, borrowing the term from chaos theory. The tiniest change to the air currents in Nigeria—caused by a movement as minute as the