James Luther Adams related the story of the oral examinations at the Harvard Divinity School when he was a student. It seems that the professors always asked "what is a prophet" and the students had learned that way to respond to that question was to begin with "one who cries doom." When I was young, doom meant thermonuclear war, a scenario that is still possible, but which requires more imagination to conjure up what would cause the final conflict. Crying doom today is to talk about the melting of the ice in Greenland.
The polar ice is melting, water in the Atlantic is becoming warmer and less salty, raising the possibility that the Gulf Stream will be degraded, bringing catastrophe to Western Europe whose people have come to depend on the heat from the Gulf Stream.
The year 2005 brought record heat waves in India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan. North Africa and Europe experienced heat and drought. Canada and Australia had record hot summers. And then there was that warm, warm ocean.
The 2005 Hurricane season officially ended five weeks ago, but there were several tropical storms in December. It was a record year, we ran out of names on the official list, and we had to resort to the Greek alphabet. Which raises the question, what about next year? Do we have Zeta II to distinguish it from Zeta I.
Being an optimist, I have a hard time crying Doom. But the evidence is mounting, we need to commit to a sustainable future. We need to rid our capitals of politicians that worship the false gods of corporate power and expediency and realize once again that the earth does not belong to us, we belong to her.
Micheal McCarthy writes a nice roundup of 2005 as a year when we came to realize that climate change was happening in a neighborhood near by.
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