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The first snow to stick fell last night in southern New England. A low pressure system over the Great Lakes pumped spiral waves of wafting clouds into frigid air. The crystalized water must have drifted for hours, judging by the depth. It was followed today by cold sunny weather. Half-melt everywhere. Winter bit this season during Thanksgiving, it came biting. And this is only the first. Today in the journal Science we learned that the past 600,000 years of heating and cooling - a six mile deep record of ice in Antarctica - shows no atmosphere with as much CO2 and methane as ours has today. Low pressure over the Great Lakes comes from the slow release of the excess heat they receive from the greenhouse gas reflection effect. Global warming expresses itself first and foremost as warmer water. As a result, there's energy out there for more than one storm this season, and they expect they'll be heavy ones. In fact, the Lakes have been getting warmer for years. Each summer for decades, the surface temperatures are quite high. This year, the highest they have been in five years by June. The rule of gathering suggests this could only happen if heat was already stored below. The Great Lakes are one of two great storm engines for New York, New England and the Atlantic Provinces. This past summer was the most active hurricane season on record, and the Gulf States of the United States and Mexico were host to the strongest hurricane ever recorded, as well as the fourth and sixth strongest ever (Katrina, by the way, was #6 of all time). This winter, we'll be host to the product of warm Great Lakes weather systems. Already, the temperatures are above normal. And let me just quote from the article to the right, from WGN Chicago, "Explosive destabilization of the atmospere is likely to occur when Arctic air sweeps over the warm waters." The Lakes haven't been this hot in November for more than a decade, and that year was a record. Ironically, one of the side effects of global warming is stronger winter storms. What does climate change look like? Watch this winter in a western hemisphere near you.

On a brighter note, George Bush hung out in Crawford and had a happy Thankgiving with about 100 friends who want him to bring all the troop home from Iraq now. He's bound to listen... What kinds of deals are being smoothed over this holiday season? Who will show whom good will and generosity and who will be left out to dry? In the schism between the Thanksgiving break and re-adjournment next year, they are scheming up new good lies, I'm certain, and no doubt we'll hear again about "re-writing history" from the lips of men who carve rhetoric, and graft, for a living. But this time, I hope, in the blinding days of January, we will know what we are looking at, and responding as every good democracy should, slow, in gathering waves of disgust, until the critical mass of revulsion sends the criminal packing to squander other fields in other ways on other people's time. This is my holiday wish.