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Climate change has done more good than harm so far and is likely to continue doing so for most of this century. This is not some barmy, right-wing fantasy; it is the consensus of expert opinion. Yet almost nobody seems to know this. Whenever I make the point in public, I am told by those who are paid to insult anybody who departs from climate alarm that I have got it embarrassingly wrong, don't know what I am talking about, must be referring to Britain only, rather than the world as a whole, and so forth.

At first, I thought this was just their usual bluster. But then I realised that they are genuinely unaware. Good news is no news, which is why the mainstream media largely ignores all studies showing net benefits of climate change. And academics have not exactly been keen to push such analysis forward. So here follows, for possibly the first time in history, an entire article in the national press on the net benefits of climate change.

There are many likely effects of climate change: positive and negative, economic and ecological, humanitarian and financial. And if you aggregate them all, the overall effect is positive today - and likely to stay positive until around 2080. That was the conclusion of Professor Richard Tol of Sussex University after he reviewed 14 different studies of the effects of future climate trends.

To be precise, Prof Tol calculated that climate change would be beneficial up to 2.2˚C of warming from 2009 (when he wrote his paper). This means approximately 3˚C from pre-industrial levels, since about 0.8˚C of warming has happened in the last 150 years. The latest estimates of climate sensitivity suggest that such temperatures may not be reached till the end of the century - if at all. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, whose reports define the consensis, is sticking to older assumptions, however, which would mean net benefits till about 2080. Either way, it's a long way off.

Now Prof Tol has a new paper, published as a chapter in a new book, called How Much have Global Problems Cost the World?, which is edited by Bjorn Lomborg, director of the Copenhagen Consensus Centre, and was reviewed by a group of leading economists. In this paper he casts his gaze backwards to the last century. He concludes that climate change did indeed raise human and planetary welfare during the 20th century.

You can choose not to believe the studies Prof Tol has collated. Or you can say the net benefit is small (which it is), you can argue that the benefits have accrued more to rich countries than poor countries (which is true) or you can emphasise that after 2080 climate change would probably do net harm to the world (which may also be true). You can even say you do not trust the models involved (though they have proved more reliable than the temperature models). But what you cannot do is deny that this is the current consensus. If you wish to accept the consensus on temperature models, then you should accept the consensus on economic benefit.

Overall, Prof Tol finds that climate change in the past century improved human welfare. By how much? He calculates by 1.4 per cent of global economic output, rising to 1.5 per cent by 2025. For some people, this means the difference between survival and starvation.

It will still be 1.2 per cent around 2050 and will not turn negative until around 2080. In short, my children will be very old before global warming stops benefiting the world. Note that if the world continues to grow at 3 per cent a year, then the average person will be about nine times as rich in 2080 as she is today. So low-lying Bangladesh will be able to afford the same kind of flood defences that the Dutch have today.

The chief benefits of global warming include: fewer winter deaths; lower energy costs; better agricultural yields; probably fewer droughts; maybe richer biodiversity. It is a little-known fact that winter deaths exceed summer deaths - not just in countries like Britain but also those with very warm summers, including Greece. Both Britain and Greece see mortality rates rise by 18 per cent each winter. Especially cold winters cause a rise in heart failures far greater than the rise in deaths during heatwaves.

Cold, not the heat, is the biggest killer. For the last decade, Brits have been dying from the cold at the average rate of 29,000 excess deaths each winter. Compare this to the heatwave ten years ago, which claimed 15,000 lives in France and just 2,000 in Britain. In the ten years since, there has been no summer death spike at all. Excess winter deaths hit the poor harder than the rich for the obvious reason: they cannot afford heating. And it is not just those at risk who benefit from moderate warming. Global warming has so far cut heating bills more than it has raised cooling bills. If it resumes after its current 17-year hiatus, and if the energy efficiency of our homes improves, then at some point the cost of cooling probably will exceed the cost of heating - probably from about 2035, Prof Tol estimates.

The greatest benefit from climate change comes not from temperature change but from carbon dioxide itself. It is not pollution, but the raw material from which plants make carbohydrates and thence proteins and fats. As it is an extremely rare trace gas in the air - less than 0.04 per cent of the air on average - plants struggle to absorb enough of it. On a windless, sunny day, a field of corn can suck half the carbon dioxide out of the air. Commercial greenhouse operators therefore pump carbon dioxide into their greenhouses to raise plant growth rates.

The increase in average carbon dioxide levels over the past century, from 0.03 per cent to 0.04 per cent of the air, has had a measurable impact on plant growth rates. It is responsible for a startling change in the amount of greenery on the planet. As Dr Ranga Myneni of Boston University has documented, using three decades of satellite data, 31 per cent of the global vegetated area of the planet has become greener and just 3 per cent has become less green. This translates into a 14 per cent increase in productivity of ecosystems and has been observed in all vegetation types.

Dr Randall Donohue and colleagues of the CSIRO Land and Water department in Australia also analysed satellite data and found greening to be clearly attributable in part to the carbon dioxide fertilisation effect. Greening is especially pronounced in dry areas like the Sahel region of Africa, where satellites show a big increase in green vegetation since the 1970s.

It is often argued that global warming will hurt the world's poorest hardest. What is seldom heard is that the decline of famines in the Sahel in recent years is partly due to more rainfall caused by moderate warming and partly due to more carbon dioxide itself: more greenery for goats to eat means more greenery left over for gazelles, so entire ecosystems have benefited.

Even polar bears are thriving so far, though this is mainly because of the cessation of hunting. None the less, it's worth noting that the three years with the lowest polar bear cub survival in the western Hudson Bay (1974, 1984 and 1992) were the years when the sea ice was too thick for ringed seals to appear in good numbers in spring. Bears need broken ice.

Well yes, you may argue, but what about all the weather disasters caused by climate change? Entirely mythical - so far. The latest IPCC report is admirably frank about this, reporting 'no significant observed trends in global tropical cyclone frequency over the past century ... lack of evidence and thus low confidence regarding the sign of trend in the magnitude and/or frequency offloads on a global scale ... low confidence in observed trends in small-scale severe weather phenomena such as hail and thunderstorms'.

In fact, the death rate from droughts, floods and storms has dropped by 98 per cent since the 1920s, according to a careful study by the independent scholar Indur Goklany. Not because weather has become less dangerous but because people have gained better protection as they got richer: witness the remarkable success of cyclone warnings in India last week. That's the thing about climate change - we will probably pocket the benefits and mitigate at least some of the harm by adapting. For example, experts now agree that malaria will continue its rapid worldwide decline whatever the climate does.

Yet cherry-picking the bad news remains rife. A remarkable example of this was the IPCC's last report in 2007, which said that global warming would cause 'hundreds of millions of people [to be] exposed to increased water stress' under four different scenarios of future warming. It cited a study, which had also counted numbers of people at reduced risk of water stress - and in each case that number was higher. The IPCC simply omitted the positive numbers.

Why does this matter? Even if climate change does produce slightly more welfare for the next 70 years, why take the risk that it will do great harm thereafter? There is one obvious reason: climate policy is already doing harm. Building wind turbines, growing biofuels and substituting wood for coal in power stations - all policies designed explicitly to fight climate change - have had negligible effects on carbon dioxide emissions. But they have driven people into fuel poverty, made industries uncompetitive, driven up food prices, accelerated the destruction of forests, killed rare birds of prey, and divided communities. To name just some of the effects. Mr Goklany estimates that globally nearly 200,000 people are dying every year, because we are turning 5 per cent of the world's grain crop into motor fuel instead of food: that pushes people into malnutrition and death. In this country, 65 people a day are dying because they cannot afford to heat their homes properly, according to Christine Liddell of the University of Ulster, yet the government is planning to double the cost of electricity to consumers by 2030.

As Bjorn Lomborg has pointed out, the European Union will pay £165 billion for its current climate policies each and every year for the next 87 years. Britain's climate policies - subsidising windmills, wood-burners, anaerobic digesters, electric vehicles and all the rest - is due to cost us £1.8 trillion over the course of this century. In exchange for that Brobdingnagian sum, we hope to lower the air temperature by about 0.005˚C - which will be undetectable by normal thermometers. The accepted consensus among economists is that every £100 spent fighting climate change brings £3 of benefit.

So we are doing real harm now to impede a change that will produce net benefits for 70 years. That's like having radiotherapy because you are feeling too well. I just don't share the certainty of so many in the green establishment that it's worth it. It may be, but it may not.
Disclosure: by virtue of owning shares and land, I have some degree of interests in all almost all forms of energy generation: coal, wood, oil and gas, wind (reluctantly), nuclear, even biofuels, demand for which drives up wheat prices. I could probably make more money out of enthusiastically endorsing green energy than opposing it. So the argument presented here is not special pleading, just honest curiosity.

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Why climate change is good for the world | The Spectator

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Climate change has done more good than harm so far and is likely to continue doing so for most of this century. This is not some barmy, right-wing fantasy; it is the consensus of expert opinion. Yet almost nobody seems to know this.

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On 12 February 2014, a new species of beetle was identified. It had a head shaped like a hexagon, with a striking metallic green-blue-purple colour, and jagged antennae.

That may not sound startling: scientists describe about 50 new species every day. The Natural History Museum (NHM) in London, UK, which owns the specimen, identifies 400 per year.

But this was not just any old new beetle. It was collected by Charles Darwin himself, in Argentina in 1832, during his voyage on the Beagle. Yet despite its flashy appearance and historic origins, it was 180 years before Stylianos Chatzimanolis of the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga realised it was a new species. He named it Darwinilus sedarisi.

It's an extraordinary story, but it's one we will hear again and again. You might think we would know about most of the species on Earth by now, but in fact there are probably millions still to find.

There are as many as 7.5 million species awaiting discovery

So if you want to discover an organism that is new to science, where should you look? Are there certain types of lifeforms that are less well-known, and so make good targets for would-be new-species-baggers? And what exactly is the point of tracking down and naming previously undescribed animals, plants, fungi and other living things?

Right now there are 1.2 million or so known living species. Some 15,000-20,000 are added to the list every year. This may seem a lot but there are plenty more to find. In 2011, researchers estimated there are as many as 7.5 million species awaiting discovery.

When scientists think they have found a new species, they must first check that it has not already been described. That can mean visiting museum collections, speaking to other specialists, and studying its DNA. They must then choose a name and publish a detailed description, especially of characteristics that distinguish it from other species.
Out in the wild
When we hear that a new species has been found, the story often involves scientists in exotic locations. For example, in 2013 researchers were dropped by helicopter into a remote mountain range on Cape Melville in northern Queensland, Australia. They found several new species within days, including the leaf-tail gecko, a golden-coloured skink and a boulder-dwelling frog.

Go to a good museum and take a careful look at their specimens

Those who can make it out to remote rainforests, or collect samples from the deep ocean trenches, can pretty much guarantee to find new lifeforms.

Yet it's wrong to think that most discoveries are made instantly in the field. It does happen, but you may have a better chance, and certainly your travel costs will be lower, if you do what Chatzimanolis did: go to a good museum and take a careful look at their long-stored specimens.

"The great natural history museums themselves make up one of the last great frontiers of exploration," says Max Barclay of the NHM.

"I was really surprised because I thought the Darwin collection had been pretty well studied," says Chatzimanolis.

Don't be put off if the specimens you encounter in the museum have been gathering dust for decades. It was 182 years between Darwin collecting D. sedarisi and Chatzimanolis describing it as a new species. This is longer than normal, but not by as much as you might think.

In 2012, researchers from the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, France estimated how long it took before newly-collected specimens were described as species. They looked at 570 of the thousands of species described in 2007, and found that the average delay was 20.7 years.

It might take you three or four years to get them sorted out

Why does it take so long? Part of the answer lies through a large brown door leading off from the first floor balcony of the NHM's iconic main Hintze Hall. In a room 16m by 73m, 1,100 pale green cabinets, each with 22 drawers, are arranged in formation and stacked two high. They contain around 10 million beetles from 170,000 species.

Barclay, who manages the beetle collection, slides a large blue canvas shopping bag from beneath a table. He unzips it and pulls out a box containing a neat grid of about 400 beetles, each carefully labelled in tiny writing. There are dozens of other boxes in the bag, and dozens of similar containers piled on and under tables, or stacked on shelves around the room.

"If you come back from an expedition with 20,000 beetles, it might take you three or four years to get them sorted out and mounted," he says. Then they have to be sorted into the right family groups, and finally into species.

You may not fancy your chances of finding new species in a museum, with experts like Barclay and his team already on the case. In fact the competition is not as stiff as it might appear. The biggest bottleneck is finding specialists in each group, who can identify the species.

Roger Booth is visibly excited by a featherwing beetle

"There are 400,000 beetle species," says Barclay. "With so many you can't guarantee there is going to be an expert alive in every generation to cover all the different groups. We have four or five beetle specialists at the museum but we all have other responsibilities, so really we have the equivalent of one person working on the taxonomy of 400,000 beetles."

The species identification that Barclay and his team are able to find time for is carried out on the floor above the storage room. Here they wield their entomological forceps over cases of specimens, watched over silently by terracotta clay wild boars, owls and antelopes set into the building's roof pillars

In one of many cubicles, entomologist Roger Booth is visibly excited by a featherwing beetle he is examining. At 0.3mm in length it is barely visible to the naked eye. With the aide of a microscope it looks brown and, well, not all that exciting - to the uneducated eye at least.

If you don't fancy spending hours in dusty museum storage cupboards, there are other options. Sometimes, new lifeforms are discovered right under our noses.

Bryn Dentinger, Head of Mycology at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, in London, for example, discovered three previously-undescribed species of Boletus fungi in a packet of dried porcini his wife bought in a shop.

The patch-nosed salamander was discovered some 20m from a country road in Georgia, US, in 2007, and the Atlantic Coast Leopard Frog was first identified the following year on Staten Island, New York.

If you do want to find a new species, it might be worth bearing in mind that some life forms have received much more attention than others. The 2011 study of undiscovered species concluded that, while about 14% of the 8.7 million living species had been described, the proportions already identified varied widely by kingdom. So while 70% of plants are known, that figure drops to 50% for algae, 22% for single-celled protozoa, 12% for animals and just 7% for fungi.

This is partly because we have tended to focus on species we can eat or otherwise use, and partly because some types of organisms are just easier to spot. For instance, many fungi are microscopic and live inside their food source, whether that is soil, wood or leaves. Even if you find them, the filaments of different species often look identical.

There is no hard-and-fast definition of a species

At this stage, you might be asking yourself "what's the point?" Do we really need names for all those millions of elusive undiscovered species? Is all this trekking through remote jungles and rummaging through museum storage cupboards actually worth the effort?

This question becomes even more pressing when you consider that there is no hard-and-fast definition of a species. In general, we say that two organisms belong to the same species if they have more characteristics in common with each other than they do with organisms of different species, and if they can breed to produce fertile offspring.

But sometimes different breeds of a species can vary enormously, as anyone who has looked at domestic dog breeds will know. Also hybrids, the offspring of two species, can sometimes be fertile. So deciding whether an organism is different enough to be a new species is inherently subjective.
Magic, er, fungi
The first thing to say is that those unknown species may well have amazing abilities that we would find useful. That is particularly true of all those unidentified fungi.

"Fungi are fundamental to our world," says Dentinger. "We rely on them heavily for foods and medicines, they are responsible for most decomposition of dead matter, and virtually all plants depend on fungi for water and nutrients. All these important roles come from just 1% of the 100,000 known fungi, so we can only imagine the potential we could derive from the species that are yet to be described."

But beyond that, some of the biggest breakthroughs in science could never have happened without a detailed understanding of the differences between species. For one thing, Barclay says, Darwin might never have discovered that species evolve by natural selection.

When the Beagle arrived at the islands of Madeira and the Canaries, Darwin saw beetles that couldn't fly. The theory of the day would suggest a benign creator had made them this way as otherwise they would have been blown out to sea. But Darwin thought otherwise.

Darwin was focusing on very fiddly differences between small insects

He had read Principles of Geology by Charles Lyell, which explained that the islands had only recently emerged from the sea as a result of volcanic activity. This led Darwin to wonder whether the beetles' ancestors had flown over from Spain and Africa. However, the mainland species were different from those on the islands, suggesting that the beetles had changed over time.

The key point is that Darwin was focusing on very fiddly differences between small insects. "It's only when you look at the details of individual species that you start to see the patterns," says Barclay.

"Darwin and Wallace were both beetle collectors," adds Barclay. "To me it is no coincidence that these two men, who were looking at a very large group with minute variations, made such fundamental breakthroughs. If you look at a large group like beetles in detail, you are able to see a world that has a lot more pixels than you might otherwise see."

Species-collecting can also help us preserve the natural world. Many species are enormously useful to us: not just by supplying food or wood, but by cleaning our water supply or pollinating our crops. If we understand the variations between species, we can figure out the ways in which they each benefit us, and preserve those benefits. It's hard to save what you don't know about.

Fortunately, Bornemissza knew his dung beetles

And sometimes, it can just be immediately useful. When the Hungarian entomologist George Bornemissza arrived in Australia in 1951, he noticed that cattle dung hung around for unusually long periods on Australian farms. All this poo meant there was much less land available for grazing. The question was, why was it there?

Bornemissza figured out that Australia's native dung beetles were adapted to deal with the small, hard dung of kangaroos and wombats. They couldn't cope with the large, splatty poo of cattle, which had only been introduced in the 1880s. Fortunately, Bornemissza knew his dung beetles. After a series of experiments he helped develop, around 50 species of foreign dung beetle were introduced over 20 years to clean up the cows' mess.

"It was an astonishing example of the massive economic effect of detailed examination of entomology," says Barclay. Bornemissza's dung beetles might not have been as pretty as Chatzimanolis's rove beetles, but they proved to be thoroughly important.

And if that doesn't persuade you to go take a close look at a seemingly dull lifeform, we don't know what will.

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On 12 February 2014, a new species of beetle was identified. It had a head shaped like a hexagon, with a striking metallic green-blue-purple colour, and jagged antennae. That may not sound startling: scientists describe about 50 new species every day. The Natural History Museum (NHM) in London, UK, which owns the specimen, identifies 400 per year.

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06022017

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"I've seen people get their hands cut off, a ten-year-old girl raped and then die, and so many men and women burned alive ... so many times I just cried inside my heart because I didn't dare cry out loud."
-14-year-old girl abducted by the Revolutionary United Front in Sierra Leone

You're lying in your bed and slowly drift off to sleep. Suddenly, you are awakened by violent screams. You are frozen with fear. The door of your room bursts open, and before you know it, you have been picked up by strange men in uniform and are being dragged out of your house and thrown into a truck with twenty other teenagers your age. It is still dark outside and difficult to see exactly what is going on. But you already know what's happening.

You are about to become a "child soldier".

For thousands under the age of eighteen, this is their reality. More than 300,000 child soldiers are fighting in armed conflicts in more than thirty countries worldwide.

According to one group commander in the Democratic Republic of Congo, "[children] make good fighters because they're young and want to show off. They think it's all a game, so they're fearless."

A large number come from disrupted family backgrounds, economically or socially deprived families, or are children who come from conflict zones themselves.

Widely perceived to be a cheap and expendable commodity, child soldiers tend to receive little or no training before being thrust into the front line. In the early 1980s, during the Iran-Iraq war, thousands of Iranian children, many straight from school, were sent with popular militias to the front line, often given a symbolic key to the paradise promised them as martyrs.

Most prevalent are child soldiers in Africa and Asia, but across the globe it is a growing phenomenon. One of the reasons behind this growth is the shortage of male recruits in countries at war. And with the technological development of smaller, more lightweight weapons, children are able to load, carry and fire deadly arms.

One former child soldier from Burundi stated that, " My first role was to carry a torch for grown-up rebels. Later, I was shown how to use hand grenades. Barely within a month or so, I was carrying an AK-47 rifle or even a G3."

Once recruited, the children are often treated brutally, and punishments for mistakes or desertion are severe.

'Susan', a 16-year-old soldier abducted by the Lord's Resistance Army in Uganda, recalls, "One boy tried to escape [from the rebels], but he was caught... His hands were tied, and then they made us, the other new captives, kill him with a stick. I felt sick. I knew this boy from before. We were from the same village. I refused to kill him and they told me they would shoot me. They pointed a gun at me, so I had to do it. The boy was asking me, "Why are you doing this?" I said I had no choice. After we killed him, they made us smear his blood on our arms... They said we had to do this so we would not fear death and so we would not try to escape ... I still dream about the boy from my village who I killed. I see him in my dreams, and he is talking to me and saying I killed him for nothing, and I am crying."

Not all child soldiers are forced to kill, yet the horrors they suffer will continue to haunt them for the rest of their lives. One Peruvian woman recruited by The Shining Path at the age of 11 recalls, "They beat all the people there, old and young, they killed them all, nearly 10 people ... like dogs they killed them ... I didn't kill anyone, but I saw them killing ... the children who were with them killed too ... with weapons ... they made us drink the blood of these people ..."

Besides the risk of death or injury in combat, child soldiers suffer disproportionately from the rigours of military life. Younger children collapse under heavy loads; malnutrition, respiratory and skin infections and other ailments are frequent.

Child soldiers may also be at additional risk of drug and alcohol abuse (these substances are often used to recruit children or desensitize them for violence), sexually-transmitted disease including HIV/AIDS, and unwanted pregnancies.

Harsh training regimes and other forms of ill-treatment often lead to casualties and even deaths among young recruits. Emilio, who was recruited by the Guatemalan army at age 14, says, "The army was a nightmare. We suffered greatly from the cruel treatment we received. We were constantly beaten, mostly for no reason at all, just to keep us in a state of terror. I still have a scar on my lip and sharp pains in my stomach from being brutally kicked by the older soldiers. The food was scarce, and they made us walk with heavy loads, much too heavy for our small and malnourished bodies. They forced me to learn how to fight the enemy, in a war that I didn't understand why it was being fought."

In 2000, a dramatic breakthrough was achieved in efforts to end the use of children as soldiers. On January 21, after six years of negotiations, governments from around the world agreed on a new international treaty to prohibit the use of children as combatants.

The new child soldiers protocol establishes eighteen as the minimum age for direct participation in hostilities, for compulsory recruitment, and for any recruitment or use in hostilities by non-governmental armed groups.

By late May 2001, a year after its adoption, 79 countries had signed the treaty..

Despite the endorsements made, more than half of the countries that signed have not followed them in practice. It is apparent that protocols and proposals offer little help to the children who are brutally forced into the violence of war. Political pressure from the international community is needed to help the situation. Evidently, there is still much work to be done until no child soldiers are used in war.

As you drift off to sleep tonight, give some thought to those children who are dragged out of their beds and conscripted to fight in armed conflicts and treasure the fact that you are safe under your covers.

For more information on child soldiers visit:
The Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers:
www.child-soldiers.org
Human Rights Watch: www.hrw.org
UNICEF: www.unicef.org
Warchild Canada: www.warchild.ca

...and check out UNICEF Canada's www.giveitup4kids.ca to see how you can help those less privileged.

Photos courtesy of UNICEF Canada

Even More Stories You May Like (courtesy of Google)

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Forced To Fight: Child Soldiers In The Third World | Faze

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"I've seen people get their hands cut off, a ten-year-old girl raped and then die, and so many men and women burned alive ... so many times I just cried inside my heart because I didn't dare cry out loud."

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Amanda and her cousin Amy - Mary Ellen Mark

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Amanda and her cousin Amy - Mary Ellen Mark

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06022017

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A good photograph can speak volumes about its subjects, yet still leave you wanting to know more.

The acclaimed and prolific American photographer Mary Ellen Mark, who died May 25 at the age of 75, was known for her humanist portraits: homeless children in Seattle, prostitutes in India, a family living out of its car. In 1990, she took one of her most memorable shots, titled Amanda and her cousin Amy. The location is listed as Valdese, N.C.

"This photograph raises a lot of questions and leaves me with a slightly uneasy feeling," says Jeff Jacobson, a New York photographer and a friend of Mark's. "That, I feel, over and over again is the hallmark of her best work."

In light of Mark's death, NPR sought to find out more about the two children in the photograph, particularly Amanda: Why was she smoking and wearing makeup and fake nails at age 9? What does she remember of the photo shoot? And what has happened since that sunny afternoon in 1990?

She now goes by Amanda Marie Ellison - her surname was Minton at the time of the photo. She is 34 years old, lives in Lenoir, N.C., and indeed still remembers the photo.

"Never forgotten it. Never in my life have I forgotten it," she says.

Ellison says Mark formed a bond with her over multiple photo shoots, but after Mark left, Ellison lost track of the photographer's name and phone number. For 25 years, she says she searched for the photo to no avail. Then last month, after Mark's death, her cousin posted the picture to Facebook and tagged Ellison.

"I cried. I cried. Because ... all at once, there it was," Ellison says.

In 1990, Mark had been sent to rural North Carolina by Life magazine to cover a school for "problem children." Ellison was one of those children. "She's my favourite," Mark told British Vogue in 1993. "She was so bad she was wonderful, she had a really vulgar mouth, she was brilliant."

Mark added: "I was something of a problem kid. I was emotional, wild, rebellious at school. I'm very touched by kids who don't have advantages; they are much more interesting than kids who have everything. They have a lot of passion and emotion, such a strong will."

Ellison openly concedes she was a "wild" child, but she says she was just emulating the adults in her life, all of whom by her memory were drug-addicted, residing in a low-income housing complex nicknamed "Sin City." It was around that time that she began to smoke.

"If I couldn't get [cigarettes], if somebody wouldn't give them to me, yes, I'd steal a pack of cigarettes and be gone," she says. "I'd sit in the woods and smoke 'til they were gone."

Two years after the photo, at age 11, Ellison says, she was taken into foster care and later lived in group homes. She says she developed an addiction for hard drugs when she was 16.

Amy Minton Velasquez, Ellison's cousin and the other child in Amanda and her cousin Amy, corroborates much of her account.

"I mean, I had a rough childhood," Velasquez says. "But I will say this: That young'un, she was put through things that would probably make the hair stand on your head if you really knew."

Ellison says at age 9 she knew there were deep problems with her childhood; she viewed Mark's photos as not just a fun diversion but as a possible solution.

"When she came along and took those photos, I thought, 'Well, hey, people will see me and this may get me the attention that I want; it may change things for me,' " Ellison says. She thought someone would see the images and come rescue her. "I had thought that that might have been the way out. But it wasn't."

Jacobson, the New York photographer, says Mark was not the type to give her subjects false impressions. But he says, "In any photographic encounter, the one person that always benefits and always is in a more powerful position and always knows more is the photographer."

By her own admission, Ellison's adulthood is still tumultuous. She has served time in prison and says she is still "surrounded by crazy people and drugs." But she says her life has improved, and she wishes she could talk again with "that photographer lady."

"If I had to guess," Ellison says, "I would say she would be, I don't know, overwhelmed with joy that I have made it this far."

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What Happened To The 9-Year-Old Smoking In Mary Ellen Mark's Photo?

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A good photograph can speak volumes about its subjects, yet still leave you wanting to know more. The acclaimed and prolific American photographer Mary Ellen Mark, who died May 25 at the age of 75, was known for her humanist portraits: homeless children in Seattle, prostitutes in India, a family living out of its car.