This is great, informative and entertaining. I was very happy to read about the history of how Millan Millan got to where he got to, I was curious about this, having interviewed and written about him myself, and I couldnt find too much information about his background.... A point here, Millan Millan seems to think he is on a bit of an island in the climate world, being one of the few people who are saying land change affects climate, but I found a lot of papers about this in the climate science literature. It seems to me there is a whole sector in the climate science world looking at this issue, they just dont get the press.... Manabe, who won the Nobel for his work in the carbon greenhouse gas model, was also looking at how the land and soil and vegetation affected the rain back in 1969. And Yale Mintz, who developed one of the first three general circulation models, and Shukla were doing modelling of land effects on rainfall. [shukla 1982]