Richard Condon was a writer of best-selling, high-toned thrillers such as The Manchurian Candidate. He lived the last part of his life in Dallas, and above his desk he kept a saying which, paraphrased, went like this: Think of the worst you can imagine and it's probably even worse than that.

It has not been a good season for science. Dr. Rajendra Pachauri head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change at the United Nations, has come under attack because the IPCC issued a report three years ago saying that the Himalayan glaciers could be all but gone by 2035. This came from an interview with an Indian glaciologist in1999, according to press reports, and never was put to the test of a peer- reviewed study. Other experts have insisted that those glaciers might hold up for hundreds of years. Indeed, another working group that contributed to the IPCC survey has attributed the problem to a sloppy error by "social and biological scientists" who allowed a faulty prediction to slip into their study. Some trace that mistake to a transposition of figures in the date 2350, a forecast to which many, apparently, can repair.

The Most Reverend Katharine Jefferts Schori came to Dallas this month to spend a weekend at St. Michael and All Angels, where I am a member. During her three years as presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church of America, she has ridden a whirlwind of acrimony with a steady, determined drive to bring calm to chaos and to dispatch those who would rather be elsewhere anyway, or so they say.

President Obama has warned Wall Street that it must be a part of the change regime that he inaugurated when he came to office last January. And indeed, some of the big banks are changing -- from one dubious operation to another. If sub-prime mortgages won't work any longer, they seem to be saying, let's try life settlements instead.

Green -- there is no doubt about it -- is the color of the era. Certainly it has gone through wildly disparate iterations, dating back to the early 1860s when Lincoln issued $450 million in new bills to finance the War Between the States. They were printed in green ink, to distinguish them from other notes, according to one account. Hence the name, greenbacks.