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Human meddling with Mother Nature has progressed for millennia. But never quite so effectively as now. In recent years the combined effects of global warming and other such ecologically unsavory practices as pesticide-heavy factory farming, suburban sprawl, and the draining and paving of wetlands, have magnified a string of natural disasters -- from the flooding in Mozambique and Honduras to the wildfires at Los Alamos -- into major human catastrophes.