Foreboding

The rain began Friday night around 9. Steady, hard rain but not the sort of deluge we sometimes get in New England. I woke around 3am and realized it was still raining, hard. When I rose at 7 the rain was coming down as it had when it began. I wondered if it had stopped or at least slowed. I checked my rain gauge and it was overflowing past the 5 1/2" mark. I emptied it. The rain came down at that same steady pace until around 3am Sunday morning. At dawn I emptied another 4 1/2" from the rain gauge. 10" of rain in 30 hours!

Not since I was a kid living in the Philippines have I seen rain that hard for that long.

This is not a political argument for the truth of global climate change. But it is an admission that the weather, which climatologists tell us is overdue for a dramatic change, and about which we fill our conversation even more than about sex, will one day alter the terms of our tenure on the planet.

No doubt that is why three days without sun can cause a feeling of foreboding. Climate scientists say the earth has undergone a cycle of 150,000 year ice ages followed by 10,000 year warming, for aeons. And when the change comes it is fast, years, not centuries. Could the catastrophes we have seen this year, beginning with the Asian tsunami and ending, maybe, with the hurricanes and catastrophic storms of last weekend, portend the beginning of the coming change?

Wonderfully concentrates the mind.