Here we are, halfway through January, and I’m sitting on a midweek pass to Diamond Peak that is burning a hole in my pocket, through my underwear and into my gluteus maximus.

So I feel a deep-seated need to complain to somebody, but to whom? Well, I don’t have any names, so for now I shall settle on venting in general to the scientists who are warning us about climate injustice.

These guys and girls give us all this pervasive evidence that frogs, the canaries of our environment as they live in both air and water, are disappearing from the earth, and these scientists deliver this invaluable information on charts that put me and my granny to sleep faster than two liquicaps of ZzzQuil.

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Hey guys, these are our grandchildren we are using in this humongous lab experiment. Please speak up. Find yourself a hay bale, get holt of a megaphone, jump up on that hay bale and start shouting, “Want snow? Then stop torching our atmosphere with greenhouse gasses for _____sake!”

I’m reminded of a letter Dr. Samuel Johnson once wrote in which he pointed out so prophetically, “Depend upon it Sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.” Well, here we are, within a fortnight of hanging ourselves, yet we can’t seem to concentrate our minds.

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If ever there was a case of haves verses have-nots, this is the mother of all cases. The haves don’t want to recognize the reality of climate change because of the exorbitant costs it will require to arrest such changes. The have-nots, well, we don’t have a clue. We point to a pie chart and then sit back and watch reruns of Bonanza. (My favorite is episode five — it’s all about Mark Twain.)

Every civilization carries seeds of its own destruction, but this is ridiculous. A republic is born, flourishes and decays into plutocracy. Yet we continue to react to daily revelations of inequality regarding climate change with astonishment and surprise.

What we have today is a generation that cannot save for retirement making decisions about saving the earth. Are you kidding? This cannot be happening…but it is.

The fact that our planet is getting hot as nickel night in a Nevada brothel seems to beam off the sunglasses of oil executives like, well, like sunlight, and they keep smiling like jackasses eating cactus. These guys have good attorneys, you can believe that, good enough to keep the burden of proof on the victims. I’m reminded of a Beach Boys song, “Help me Rhonda, Help, Help Me, Rhonda.”

We are heedless children, and if we don’t wake up, we are going to be totally and irreversibly hosed. I wish I could say, “You heard it first here,” but I’m afraid I’m pundit #100,345,672.

All I know is that I care for my grandchildren far more than I care for myself, and if today’s environmental players and their lobbyists who are in favor of the status quo feel the same way, they should start making major alterations to their business plans because business as usual will not answer to unusual times any more than devolutionary thinking will dismiss inconvenient science.

We common folk beseech the naysayers to pull your collective heads out of the tar sands, smell the coffee, smell the roses and smell the fresh air. Your grandchildren will thank you. Or should we just start thinking about skiing on pine needles.

To learn more about McAvoy Layne visit http://www.ghostoftwain.com.