Stevieslaw: Have you read it?

Marsha, Cousin Myron’s long-suffering wife, called at 10:30 this morning.

“Have you seen your bonehead cousin?” She asked.

Without waiting for an answer, she announced that she thought Myron was off to that big-deal Kosher deli we were keeping secret, to stuff himself with enough delicacies to kill a horse. You all know Myron, the high-school dropout and math savant that made a small fortune betting on the ponies.

“Something new is bothering the him,” she continued. “He’s got high blood-pressure and if he makes himself sick, I will kill him.” Then she hung up. Marsha is like that.

I high-tailed it to the Deli—which is up on Queens Boulevard—the one we are not disclosing the location of. Sure enough, Myron was there. He had three corned-beef sandwiches, four potato knishes, and enough sour pickles to lower the Ph of the city by a point or two. When I came in, he was emptying the contents of a salt shaker on a huge platter of french fries.

“Hungry?” I inquired.

“I take it you’ve read the U.N. report on climate change,” I said, coming right to the point. The U.N. report predicted a climate disaster by 2040—much earlier than we had thought.

“Yes,” he implied with a nod—his mouth was full of corned-beef.

“Damned climate deniers,” I said. “They’ve cooked us now.”

“Don’t be a dope,” replied Myron. “All the people with real money and real power believe the science,” he said, turning to a knish. The anti-science bullshit is for the political hacks and the poor dumb base—the people who need something to scream about.”

“They know,” he said, “And they’ve made the calculation that there is nothing the world can do to head off disaster. They plan to make as much money as they possibly can and hunker down and prepare to survive in luxury.”

“We’re cooked,” he said. “Have a corned-beef.” Myron’s eyes were always too big for his stomach.

Just then there was a rap on the plate glass window. Myron’s teenaged twins had tracked us down.

“We were worried about you, dad.” They said—not quite in unison.

I could see from my bighearted cousin’s face that they were not half as worried as he was about them.