Global warming --

Too warm today -- March weather is often freaky. It's not possible to dress comfortably, too hot, too cool, no rain gear with it starts pouring ... carrying around a silly umbrella with the sun blazing. On the sidewalks, at the corner Korean delis are buckets of daffodils and bunches of roses all kinds of beautiful colors. Unopened hyacinths look promising and cyclemen are SO beautiful ... some place it's spring ... perhaps only inside long plastic green houses. One cannot believe in nature from what is available for sale. Who knows where all those flowers came from or under what conditions they were grown?

How, for that matter are we to have any solid knowledge about much of anything. Over the weekend I read a about an international panel's report on global warming: It predicted lack of water for large parts of the world, esepcially in Africa and some parts of Asia, much starvation ... within fifty years. This report wasn't given in the US so it got little coverage. Then yesterday's paper had a major, long article saying, pooh-pooh to Al Gore, he's exaggerating. He's not a scientist so we must not believe anything in his movie/book. In other words, relax everyonoe, go on worrying about the stock market but don't forget to keep on shopping ... using up whatever resources you can afford, gas, electric, all that stuff in the supermarkets, and malls. Go to keep the GNP churning.

Maybe the earth has undergone such warming cycles before; but it can't be denied that there has never been so many people on the earth, all needing food and water and reasonably clean air. That alone changes how we can think about what is happening. Also never before have so many forests and jungles been cleared, never have so many emissions gone into the atomsphere. Doesn't anybody feel any responsibility? Well, apparently not. While one group of theoretical scientists are muttering about possibly never being able to understand dark matter or dark energy [since they haven't quite figured out what gravity is yet], the wo/man in the street, like me today, just fusses that it's not possible to dress comfortably in this changing weather. No, there's no moral to this story ... except that we have such small thoughts, small concerns. Can't we just maybe a minute or two a day think about the bigger world ... we earthlngs may be alone in the universe but as individuals we are far from alone on this one small planet.