"Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it."*

The other morning I took my automobile to the trusted mechanic for its regular maintenance and thought myself virtuous for walking the 1� miles home. When it was ready to be picked up, my wife and I, in a display of further virtue, walked the 1� miles back to retrieve it instead of her driving me to the garage in the other car. (Two environmental flaws here: two cars; one made a round-trip.)

It was the second walk of the day in my effort to preserve good cardiovascular health. Next day, I read a report in The New York Times, which, were I 50 years younger, would mock the effort to remain fit. Why work so hard to achieve and maintain good health only to die from breathing the air or drowning in a flood that would make Hurricane Sandy's depredations look like your kid's sand castle being washed away by a gentle seaside wave?

The report from the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warns that, as soon as 50 years from now, the buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere might reach levels that would bring on catastrophic rises in sea levels. Such coastal cities as New York, London, Shanghai, Venice, Sydney, Miami and New Orleans would be inundated, disrupting commerce and imperiling the lives of millions of people.

Predictably, the report is already being denounced as subversive, hysterical and overblown by that all-too-familiar breed of cats known as "climate-change deniers."

Notwithstanding, it appears that rising sea levels would not only cause major damage to those world cities, but as well along the coastlines of Third World nations, which are crowded with severely poor populations already having trouble with the salinization of their arable land. Further, it is possible, says the report, that rather than the earlier predicted rise over the next few decades in global temperatures of 2.7 degrees, it could be as much as 5 degrees. The widely agreed upon number is now 3.6.

Warming the planet by that much would add startling bursts of energy to severe weather systems, producing monster storms and extreme heat waves far beyond the ability of existing electricity grids to mitigate by air conditioning. Food growth and distribution would be severely affected with possible extinctions of plant and animal species adding to the catastrophe. So says the panel's report.

It is clear that the scientists whose work is quoted in the report have been very deliberate in their testing, experiments and observations. Some would say even conservative. The panel is not an organization of tree huggers with too much time on their hands. They constitute, rather, the human version of a siren warning of approaching disaster.

Because a great many people get their weather information from nervous-news TV channels, whose meteorologists focus on what happened yesterday and what is forecast for tomorrow, the public is largely unaware of the other weather science: climatology.

Climatology looks at the bigger picture and a longer time span, providing information that can help people alter the weather.

If climatology could be taken out of the science sections of such newspapers that still make room for them, if its sober long-term predictions could lead national news reports, if TV weather reporters would be permitted to tell the truth along with the temperature, we might begin to hear what we could and should be doing about the weather -- not today's or tomorrow's, but the weather that will affect our children and grandchildren.

The panel's report is actually being celebrated by certain types of evangelical preachers who herald the warnings as a welcome sign that Christ's return to Earth is imminent. They wonder why you would want to make a better world for people to go to hell from. A-a-c-c-k.

Here are examples of what we're now doing about that future weather, but only to make it worse:

• The present Congress as well as many state legislatures clearly demonstrate a bias against public transportation, the elections and re-elections of their members often being generously underwritten by the oil and highway construction lobbies -- meaning that more efficient fuel-saving means of getting people and goods from almost any Point A to Point B are foregone in favor of a zillion cars and trucks with their internal combustion-producing CO2 emissions;

• The fracking procedure that supports the oil boom in western states and in Alberta is made out to be a messianic salvation from dependence on foreign oil, when in reality it is the mechanistic version of digging one's own grave an inch at a time;

• The vast coal mines of West Virginia and Wyoming are filling up 100-car trains that are dispatched several times a day to coal-fired electric power plants. The irony is that many of those trains are powered by new highly fuel-efficient and low-emission locomotives.

Many states have made assisted suicide a crime, and their justice systems are vigilant in the prosecution of those who have been party to it. Why is the slow suicide we are committing right now by ignoring climatological warnings about the dangers of fossil fuels and their toxic effluent not considered a crime?

So we go on yearning for the smiley weather guys to issue fair-and-warmer forecasts for our tomorrows. And some of those tomorrows may well be fair and warmer. Absent quick and sustained action, though, it will not be so fair and a hell of a lot warmer in 50 years. Which means that now is the time to do something about the weather.

*Generally attributed to Samuel Clemens, although that has never been verified by Twain scholars. Charles Dudley Warner, a friend of Clemens, is widely credited with a version of this well-known remark. Warner was an editorial writer at the Hartford Courant in the late 19th century.

What reviewers said:

"Important and heart-warming ... Cook's keen insights into the most familiar of old-time gospel hymns ... help you do theology like a grownup."
--Robin Meyers, author of Saving Jesus from the Church

"A compelling look at centuries of Christian theology and practice, at how particular hymns have shaped American faith and religious thought."
--Richard Webster, Director of Music and Organist at Trinity Church, Boston

"A call to integrity in worship ... This exciting, penetrating and provocative study explores the theology we sing, which re-enforces the dated and pre-modern theology from which the Christian faith seeks to escape."
--John Shelby Spong, author of Re-Claiming the Bible for a Non-Religious World