Climate change, global warming?

  The world is all a twitter about what has been labeled lately as "climate change." At least it's a more fitting than the dreadful "global warming." You see, the problem is that this great big ball of iron and silica has been drastically warming and cooling on a relatively short cycle for billions of years. But that relatively brief cycle, in geological terms, lasts far longer, and longer in between, than our fledgling civilization has since we first started walking upon the Earth.

  Yes, climate change is real. Can we really alter the natural progression of nature? Maybe, but there are far more pressing issues than the cash-cow known as Global Warming. Clean, potable water. To us, in America, we treat it like it's our birthright. 20-30 minute showers, wash the cars twice a week, fill our 10,000 gallon swimming pools and water our 100-acre golf courses.

  Only 2-3% of the water on the Earth is freshwater, the stuff we can drink. And of that precious 2-3%, we, as Americans, consume the lion's share. Because we've the good fortune of possessing the largest freshwater lake in the world, and seemingly plentiful rivers coursing through and across our fertile lands, the issue of water rarely crosses our short-sided minds.

  In many parts of the world, nations wage war over water, because they don't have any. 40,000 years ago, the Sahara was a tropical paradise. About that same time, the entire central portion of north America was under water, and the geyser at Yellowstone was part of a super-volcano whose cataclysmic eruption of magma blanketed everything from Ohio to Idaho.

  The point is that all we can really do is be aware, because this world we live in is nothing like the world we're so fortunate to know. It's alive, and its wrath is blind.