It was a rainy Saturday morning in March.  I was 14 years old and bored out of my mind with nothing to do.  Stuck indoors, I stared through the rain-splattered window of my room and sighed.  My eyes wandered to the bookshelf nearby, and fell on a book that a friend of my father's had given me some time ago as a present.

It had remained ignored and unopened, attracting dust rather than my attention, until now.  The spine of the glossy book jacket proclaimed its title - The Complete Book of Marvels.  What was that about?  The author was Richard Halliburton.  Who was he?

I reached for the book, and my life was changed forever.

Our home was in a prosaic suburb of Los Angeles - Glendale, California.  Like most other kids, I knew very little about the world.  America was an enormous island, with the rest of the world on the other side of huge oceans, far away.

The inside of the book jacket told me that Halliburton had been a famous adventurer in the 1920s and ‘30s.  The book was 20 years old, and was a compilation of his exploits and experiences.  As I paged through the descriptions and black-and-white pictures of dozens of the world's most extraordinary places, I was transfixed. The world, it dawned on me, was a vast place of endless wonders and adventures.

What mesmerized me in particular was Halliburton's account of climbing the Matterhorn. I stared at his picture of the Matterhorn, entitled "The Tiger of the Alps," for the longest time. Then, as if I were in a trance, I found myself getting up from the chair in my room and walking down the hall to my parents' room, where I found my Dad in his easy chair, reading an Erle Stanley Gardner detective novel.

He looked up at me, waiting for me to say something.  I laid the Halliburton book over the Gardner book on his lap, open to the double-spread picture of the Matterhorn.  He looked down at the picture, then looked back up, still waiting.  I didn't consciously say anything.  I pointed at the picture and heard myself say, "Dad, I want to climb that mountain."

The Jade Steps
Chapter Thirty-One:  The Spanish Phoenix

By nightfall, the expedition reached the town of Xaltepec on the far side of the valley.  It was deserted, and everyone had to forage for food.  Malinali tried to clean the bloody gashes on Cortez's head and the deep wound in his left hand, but Cortez shook his head.  "To a man, all of us are wounded, exhausted, and hungry," he told her.  "Organize help for them, tend to them... then you may have all night to tend to me."

When Malinali returned, she found Cortez fast asleep.  At dawn the next morning, she tried to clean and bandage him as best she could, but he was anxious to get underway.  "Our only hope of safety lies in those mountains of Tlaxcala," he said, as he gazed at them looming above Xaltepec.  Slowly, slowly, the expedition trudged up into the mountains to the Tlaxcalan frontier fortress town of Hueyotlipan (way-oat-lee-pahn).

There to greet them were King Xicotencatl, Chief Maxixcatzin, and Commander Chichimecatecle.

"Malinche!  Malinche!" they cried out when they saw Cortez.  Chief Maxixcatzin threw his arms around him.  "How grieved we are at your misfortunes, and the number of our own people who have been killed with yours," he told Cortez through Malinali.  "We warned you not to trust the Mesheeka, but you went to their city and did not believe us.  Now all we can do is help with your wounds and give you rest and food.  Here you are home."

I have good news for you, Mr. Obama!  You don't have to worry about "climate change" being the "greatest national security threat our country faces" anymore! 

In your Coast Guard Academy speech on May 20, you said that "severe drought helped to create the instability in Nigeria that was exploited by the terrorist group Boko Haram." 

You can retract that now - because the latest evidence, published yesterday (6/02), is that northern Nigeria and the entire area of the southern Sahara Desert is getting greener because of more CO2 in the atmosphere.

Yes!  Rising greenhouse gases -- all that CO2 which we've been pumping into the atmosphere that's been frightening you so much - has caused rains to return to the "Sahel" or southern Sahara from Senegal to Sudan,

Aren't you overjoyed?  Absolutely thrilled for those Africans who've been starving, scraping a marginal and precarious living on the edge of the desert? 

What's that?  You're not?  You think this is terrible news - because it threatens your narrative of climate change as a national security threat bogey-man?