Anne and I have just come back from a month-long driving trip to my home state of Texas, and I have never been so terrified in my life. From what we experienced in Texas, the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords today in Arizona doesn’t surprise me at all. The atmosphere was completely different from the way it was when we lived there between 1994 and 2005, and light years from what it was when I grew up there.
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I have seen 65 Christmases and remember 61 of them, and yet every year at this time, I find myself deeply moved and filled with an upwelling of hope and joy that is quite unquenchable, and is as intense right now as it was when I was a little boy, looking up into the stars of the holy night, half expecting to see Jesus and half expecting to see Santa on his sleigh.
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My appearance on Coast-to-Coast AM on December 20 and my last journal entry resulted in some ferociously angry email from climate change deniers, as well as some more considered letters. Most of the ‘denier’ email had an element of hysteria about it, which I associate with fear. In fact, it was pitiful, the sound of people shrieking in terror. And why not? Nobody wants this to be true. I certainly don’t. But it is true, and we are facing a great deal of disruption both now, with the superheated summers and the violent winters we are having, and in the future, when things are going to be worse unless we end the false debate and take dramatic action.read more
We are in the early stages of sudden climate change, and unless something unexpected prevents it, the next few years are likely to see dramatic changes in the weather on Planet Earth, changes at least as great as those that led to the Little Ice Age. Paradoxically, this is an effect of global warming. There is also a natural cycle involved, but we might have been able to delay it if we had not emitted so much carbon dixoide into the atmosphere.
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