Tomorrow’s an important day. It is when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) releases the first section of its Fourth Assessment Report. There will be no surprises: global warming is getting worse and it’s clear that our actions are responsible.

Today, the Washington Post reports that the IPCC will state that in the increase in the severity of hurricanes since 1970 – particularly Atlantic hurricanes – has been due to higher ocean temperatures that have resulted from all the carbon dioxide we’ve pumped into the atmosphere. For George W. Bush, it’s the Katrina hat trick. Not only did he fail to protect Gulf Coast citizens during the storm and failed to help them recover after the storm, it’s now clear his policies and his pre-political career helped cause the storm.

There is, of course, a dissenting scientist – Christopher Landsea of the U.S. National Hurricane Center. Dr. Landsea is employed by Mr. Bush. Earlier this week, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee heard from government scientists that Bush administration political appointees regularly change their statements on global warming, to water them down, so it’s not surprising that Dr. Landsea might want to hunker down.
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I needed to talk and write about my experience in the flood zone when I came home from the gulf coast in October 2005. I fell into silence after a few weeks, because words were unequal to the experience, but the experience stays with me. One reason is simply the horror of the devastation visited on so many people who did nothing to deserve it. A second reason was the sense I had walking through the flood zone that I was visiting America’s future, that similar devastation, delivered by other agents, would arrive in other places in my country in my lifetime. It was not unlike the feeling I had visiting Manhattan’s Ground Zero in October 2001.

It’s time to write again about New Orleans and the gulf coast, because a year and a half after the storms, the region is slipping away from us, in every sense of the word. Sports sections this week are filled with joy for New Orleans, as its professional football team, the Saints, goes to the National Football Conference Championship game for the first time Sunday. The Saints played all their games away from home in 2005 and this year’s return to the Superdome gave the Crescent City the only boost it’s had since the floodwaters receded. Sports columnists wonder how long the Saints will stay in New Orleans, which has neither the business support nor market size of other cities hosting sports teams.

By any measure, New Orleans’s future is not bright. Kanye West was right when he said, “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.” The disdain the White House has for poor black people – for poor people in general – has been made clear in the last 16 months. The Bush administration has proved capable when it wants to do something – cut taxes for the rich, invade nations, set up secret prison networks – so the lack of progress on the gulf can only be evidence of lack of will.
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The sun had just set on New Year’s day when Adrienne and I decided we needed to take some candles and go downtown. The news had earlier reported that the 3,000th American had died in Iraq on Saturday, 30 December. We knew there had been a frequent, if not daily, vigil from 5-5:30 p.m. in front of the Unitarian Church, at the top of Church Street, near the federal building, ever since – when? The Iraq invasion build-up in 2002? The Afghanistan invasion? We couldn’t remember. We didn’t know if anyone would be out there New Year’s night, but we thought we needed to go. We couldn’t stand beginning the year with passivity.

This was the same churchyard where 400 people gathered for a vigil on the Sunday before the Iraq invasion began in March 2003. We knew then the war could not be prevented, but we gathered to express our opposition.

When Adrienne and I arrived New Year’s night, just at five, people were gathering from every direction, but there were not 400 of us, there were 15. We lit our candles in silence and stood in a line. A few people held signs. The evening air was unseasonably warm. What was left of Saturday’s snowfall had been reduced to dirty slush in the gutter. Standing in silence gave us time to contemplate oil wars and global warming.
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I suppose a bit of melancholy is appropriate to the dark, bleak days of December. That, and the solstice, are probably the reason the ancients decided to celebrate the Yule holiday when they did; with wisdom born millennia before the invention of psychology or the identification of Seasonal Affective Disorder, they knew we’d need a bit of cheer to get us through.

Christian syncretists understood this and shifted the celebration of Jesus’s birth from autumn (when scholars tell us it likely took place) to the Yuletide. Going one step further, they identified that melancholy feeling as Advent, the emptiness that anticipates the birth of the savior.

Maybe it’s global warming and the concomitant lack of snow, but melancholy seems harder to shake each year, as it crowds out the sense of magic and anticipation that once carried us through December. Could it be that in sober adulthood, we now not only disbelieve in Santa Claus, but we’ve also lost touch with peace on earth and goodwill?
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