Those who write about climate change face a banquet of awful riches: record-speed winds turning cities into three-foot high stretches of rubble; seventy-seven tornadoes touching down in one day in a single state (Illinois); Miami doomed to sink while occupants party hard and the director of the South Florida Regional Planning Council says, "We're not comfortable looking at 2100."

Meanwhile, the director's cohorts in Miami Beach emergency management focus on a dated, likely wrong projection of the ocean rising a max of fifteen inches over the next fifty years. And half a world away, in the Maldives, a president worried about the future of his nation, the flattest on the planet (high spot: an eight-foot sand dune), loses an election to a militant, old guard Islamist.

In the Philippines the Haiyan Typhoon displaces four million people, and in New Jersey the cleanup from super storm Sandy continues, with ICF International — a company whose record in New Orleans following Katrina was a disaster of its own — continuing to pull in millions of dollars for mismanagement along the battered sea shore.

Our audience reads our stories and comments, looks at the photos and videos with a mix of glee and dread, of denial and embrace, of stupefaction and satisfaction. But collectively it is a frustrated bunch. A growing frustrated bunch.

How can something this big and bad continue to be ignored, except as news we can now predict? Ignored as science piles on the data, reinforcement loops melt the Arctic and disrobe Greenland of its ice. The news often sates our hunger for disaster capture, assisted by helicopter-flying media crews; courageous pilots talking to us from centers of hurricanes, thousands of surveillance cameras showing they can take a pounding, smart phones with commentaries from threatened balconies.

Other times the truth leaves us gasping, in tears as bodies of infants and grannies slosh in the salty waves and the stunned survivors stumble by the soaked dead rotting in a tropical sunrise which, if viewed from the horizon up, is strikingly beautiful.

As these awful riches have deepened, I have found myself occasionally sinking in them. Gasping for some air, a hand hold, a big sign of hope. I go for a walk and don't listen to the high water in the brook. Instead, I feel the sun on my flesh recharging my old batteries. You can't do a damn thing for the screwed people on smashed islands in the Philippines, I tell myself. Hell, you can't even get your village selectmen to mitigate future flooding in your rinky dinky town in Vermont, a bastion of progressive thinking in many arenas.

I've been writing about the widening gyre of climate change for almost twenty years now, off and on. I can't do it without long breaks. The first thing that drew me in, electric cars, remains in slow development. The second interest, what we have done/are doing/will do to the atmosphere, turning it into a dump, has morphed into something oddly biological — for the atmosphere is a membrane around our planet, just as my flesh contains my body.

As the great biologist and writer Lewis Thomas wrote over twenty years ago, "It takes a membrane to make sense out of disorder in biology... [and] when the earth came alive it began constructing its own membrane, for the general purpose of editing the sun."

We are, alas, biological creatures, despite the increasing number of robots in our midst. Compassionate, poetic, empathic creatures, our genius lies in our empathy more than in our wit, in our knowledge, now over a half century old, that "the greatest effects come from the smallest causes," as Carl Jung put it.

As the chroniclers of a fresh truth as big as god and as mysterious as infinity, we are but gnats on an elephant's hide, rust on the hull of an ocean liner, grains of sand millions walk on and ignore. Until their huts get flattened, their crops drowned, their forests sent aloft as soot, their kids ask them where the snow has gone. Until they too know that the awful banquet grows not just for the few. That it's here for all to partake in. And that only out of collective empathy and intelligence and will do we have a chance.

Oh, often of late I've wished the deniers were right, that they aren't just sticking their heads up their whatever. I've wished that the language we scribes wrestle with could pin down the issues and explain or elaborate or becalm better than it does. I wish that the "objective press," as it is called, would stop appeasing the deniers and their supporters, because they are not right, by offsetting reports of climate-driven catastrophe with qualifications that allow those who want a way out of the terrible party to have one officially sanctioned. To turn their backs on the awful banquet even as it grows in scale, churns up our world and lays it at our leaden feet.

But, so what? Enough philosophical bitching. Back to work.

Then, this just in: Research reveals 87% of Oklahomans and 84% of Texans accept that climate change is occurring.

Please, somebody pinch me. Is that true?