I JUST FOUND AL GORE IN OUR GARDEN

You've heard it too. All the pro and con about Climate Change. But in this dustup we're putting the focus on the wrong word. The issue, my fellow earthlings, is not just the "climate." It's the "change." Let me explain before the next weather disaster crowds my act...

I'm no expert but I can report Al Gore's warnings have already taken place in our backyard garden. Five summers in a row our Day Lilies and other assorted beauties have been blooming weeks earlier than ever before. Not to mention five straight summers in which the nation has been battered by record-smashing rainfalls, hurricanes, and earthquakes. And while climatologists can debate the weather, the rest of us better confront the change of which the weather is only one feature.

This hunk of rock on which we all cling, it's spinning at the same rate but changing faster than it has in centuries. However, like the lobster in the boiling pot doesn't realize what's happening to him, we lobsters may be enduring the very same deceit.

Whether you study the clouds, the Bible, or that grim Mayan calendar, we are at another of those critical cusps of history where what was is not likely to ever be again. Change is not new, but recently change has changed! It's coming faster and more furiously than ever. As Margaret Mead put it: "Our world changed more in this last generation than it did in the last 50 generations." Populations...weapons...food and water supplies...energy consumption...ideological confrontations. When these things start shifting -- crammed inside as they are a smaller more interconnected place -- something's gotta give.

Presidents, popes, CEOs and generals speak in public with calm and wisdom. But in bed at night, they cower under their covers perhaps even more than you and me. Because they know more. And today knowledge is not always power. Often it's terror.

Still....! There is this comfort. Epochal change like this has battered us before and yet we're still here. Somehow we've made it this far. Which would appear to be a testament to humanity's endurance. Still, if the Mayan Calender is right about December 21, 2012, my kid brother is going to miss that surprise birthday party we were planning.