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GELFAND’S WORLD - A number of years ago, I was able to see a living coral reef up close. It was a remarkable sight. In fact, I remember walking into the water off the beach and there, right under my eyes, was this amazing, colorful world. It was one that was not and could not be available anywhere in the rest of the world, which is to say above the surface. It was full of angel fish and the odd spotted moray eel, along with other sorts of tropical beings. And supporting that cast of colorful characters was the coral itself, a branched and lobed wonderland of its own, sometimes looking like the horns of a stag, and other times looking like some giant brain. There was coral that created a hot, slightly painful sting if you touched it with your bare fingers, hence “fire coral.” The problem for the underwater visitor of today is that increasing miles of coral are being killed off by increasingly warm ocean temperatures. It’s nothing new. A colleague of mine was observing the rot and doing warnings – apparently unheard by politicians – a quarter of a century ago.
But there’s more.
This next part is about a television program I watched the other night. It was on local broadcast channel 11.2, the Fox Weather channel. It was a year-end special of its own, in which the network’s weather forecasters did a countdown of the biggest weather events of 2025. A lot of these involved tornados. For example, the year 2025 had a class 5 tornado (in this case the winds went up to 260 mph or thereabouts), something we haven’t seen in this country for 20 years. There was pi-day (you know, March 14, aka 3.14) with its own dozens and dozens of tornados. Of course, the Los Angeles area January fires were part of the list. The number 1 event, according to Fox Weather, was the flooding along a Texas river that killed so many school children.
In other words, climate change provoked by human-caused global warming is here, and it is having recognizable effects right here in the USA.
Now I am going to talk a little about that Fox Weather report, not because it was a big 2025 event by itself, but because it is so illustrative of something else, another kind of “climate change,” that we are witnessing. You see, not one of these people – who referred to themselves as meteorologists – could manage to put together the terms “climate change” or “global warming.” They talked about tornados and fires and floods and how 2025 was a banner year for all sorts of damaging weather, but there was not one thought or word about Why. Perhaps one of them could have talked about global warming as a theory and then done his/her best to debunk it, but we didn’t hear any such thing. It was simply a case of the statement of an obvious fact being made taboo.
Here’s my take on that performance by these self-proclaimed meteorologists: The term meteorologist implies that one is a weather scientist. But if you cannot bring yourself to even consider the prevailing scientific explanation for a frighteningly real, worldwide phenomenon, then you are not quite a scientist. You are just an entertainer. This is not to say that the Fox Weather channel is bad at reporting on the weather. To the contrary, it is very good at showing the map, explaining what is happening, and predicting what sort of weather is about to happen. I have no problem saying this. But I do have a problem with the whole mass of Fox money and power giving out this half-truth, that global warming does not exist.
This suppression of scientific facts for political reasons is the other, more figurative sort of “climate change” that we also have to talk about as one of the defining characteristics of 2025.
And another topic from 2025: One couldn’t consider the year without mentioning the ICE raids, both here and in other parts of the country. I think that these raids are going to provoke a very different response compared to what the Trump administration would like to achieve. I think the ultimate result will take 5 or 6 years, but the likely resolution will be another blanket amnesty of the same kind that we saw under the Ronald Reagan presidency.
The reason that this is gradually becoming inevitable is that most Americans are not happy about our fellow residents – particularly the children – being forced to live in fear. Eventually, when there are enough Democrats in the congress and in the White House, the situation will be resolved by dusting off the law enacted during the Reagan administration. Yes, there will be promises made just like they were made back then, saying that this will be the last and final such amnesty, but the very existence of Amnesty II will negate that claim.
Let’s get in just one more brief little nag about climate change.
This was the year that global climate change caused by global warming became particularly evident via weather events that happened here in the United States. It’s not just the big stuff – the hurricanes, tornados, and atmospheric river events – it’s the fact that American farmers in the midwest have recognized that the dates for the growing season have moved, with warm weather coming earlier and winter coming later. This is not a completely good thing for lots of reasons, and it has required that farmers rearrange all those plans -- like contracting for harvesting services and rescheduling the dates for herbicide and pesticide treatment. But if the trend continues, then the result of the sustained freezing temperatures of a midwestern winter will be negated, and this will result in the intrusion of warm weather pests and diseases and intrusive plant species.
These things are literally true. Now let’s talk a little about a figurative version of the term “climate change” and how it is affecting the United States.
We are now in a presidential era in which the national government not only looks the other way regarding corruption, it openly celebrates it.
We are now in a presidential era in which lies are not only accepted, they are the lingua franca of this administration and of the supporting political class which enables it. The current presidential press secretary is, if anything, surpassing previous Trump press secretaries in her ability to conjure up an excuse for the inexcusable.
We are now in a presidential era in which major American corporations are coming up with bribe money in order to get the OK for the next merger. We have also seen those same companies bow to Trump and punish their late-night television stars.
One comment about a possible response to this evolution: When (and if) Colbert goes off the air, I will lose a lot of motive for watching that network. It has already corrupted its news reporting process. I wonder how many of my fellow Americans will feel the same way.
We are now in a presidential era in which war crimes – such as murderous attacks on small boats – have become common.
We are now in a presidential era in which surprise after surprise is the new normal, where international trade is subject to such surprises, and in which the businesses that live on international trade are buffeted around.
We are now in a presidential era in which Ukraine is increasingly without the sort of support that it could most use from the United States. It should be free from foreign empire building, yet this administration tries to get it to give up its ancestral lands to the foreign invader.
This is the summary of the year 2025. We have a president who has done everything he possibly could do to weaken the United States, from the imposition of the ruinous tariffs to the actual and literal destruction of part of the White House itself. If he is not actively working for Vladimir Putin, he might as well be.
He has unleashed masked bandits onto our streets to grab people going about their daily business. He has claimed powers that do not belong to the elected leader of a democracy. Perhaps the best we can say about him is that he is weak and vacillating, but even in that vacillation he can do real harm and has certainly done so.
The year 2025 is one in which we have once again lost valuable time in combatting global warming. It is a year in which we have failed to work on developing a system of universal health care. And perhaps equally outrageous, it is a year in which our most important news media have failed to call out the president for his lies. At what point, when the president refers to a true fact as “a hoax,” will the reporters who are present call out the president for the lie? How many hurricanes and tornados and lethal floods will it take?
(Bob Gelfand writes on science, culture, and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected])
