When I read these accounts, I flash back to a tiny village, remote even by Tibetan standards, where I visited a few years ago. A gangly young man guided me a mile up a riverbank for a view of the enormous glacier whose snout towered over the valley. A black rock the size of an apartment tower stuck out from the middle of the wall of ice. My guide said it had appeared only the year before and now grew larger daily as its dark surface absorbed the sun's heat. We were a hundred miles from a school, far from TV; no one in the village was literate. So out of curiosity I asked the young man: "Why is it melting?" I don't know what I expected -- some story about angry gods? He looked at me as if I was visiting from the planet Moron. "Global warming," he said. "Too many factories."