Andy and I were standing around in our kitchen Wednesday night after dinner talking about the whole Foley thing, and about the whole political “shift.” I made the point that in America, it’s always sex: you can send thousands of troops off to die for an absurd war, you can collect bribes from a lobbyist, but in the end it’s a good old-fashioned American sex scandal that’s going to bring you down. It’s sickening.

Then I started thinking out loud about ten years from now, and how meaningless all this scurrying will appear when the effects of global warming have accelerated, and the earth is suddenly a very different place. Maybe it’s already a very different place. No one really remembers what it like even a hundred years ago; maybe if Einstein could see it all now he’d be shocked. Perhaps not even he could have imagined something more destructive than the atom bomb.

So I was just thinking out loud and I told Andy that probably by the time mankind gets around to doing something of any real effect on global warming, it will be too late: not too late to save humanity but too late to preserve the world as it is, even today.

Glacier National Park will be a place where a glacier once was instead of a place where there IS a glacier. And maybe parts of Manhattan will already be underwater, and Florida too, or maybe there will be advanced dike systems in place. The kind of dikes that could give way. And the earth will be livable, but even more fragile (for life) than it was before. It’s like one of the astronauts in “For All Mankind” says, about what it was like seeing earth from space (paraphrasing), “You realize that it’s just a tiny blue marble, and there’s darkness all around, a black beyond black.”

All I know is this: if it does take a sex scandal to change things in politics then we’re doomed. “The Drowned World” by J.G. Ballard won’t just be speculative fiction.