While more important things are happening in the world of weather these days, I just wanted to note that it is raining and thundering today in Palo Alto. And thundering not just once or twice, but often!
In my however many years of being in Palo Alto for the second half of September, it has never rained even once. And for my however many years of going to Stanford, it has thundered at most once a year, always faint and fleeting.
What does this mean? Nothing at all probably, but it is very exciting to let the imagination run wild (in a Day After Tomorrow sense); maybe this global warming thing is actually going to change our climate… How long can we hack away at our ties to the earth before it comes back to bite us?
2 replies on “Strange Weather We’re Having…”
I’ve been frustrated as I’ve heard “experts” talk about these hurricanes. Some are blaming global warming, but many are just saying this is a normal phase of weather. That depresses me. I wish it were global warming, because then we could repent and change our ways and hope that we could somehow do something about it all. But to think that this is simply a cycle that is unrelated to our actions of which we can do nothing to change seems so impersonal.
Global warming personalizes what is happening. It gives us someone to blame–ourselves. The impersonal cycle is far more daunting and challenging to me. It takes the rhyme and reason out of it all. Global warming keeps us in control on some level. The cycle theory simply puts us at the mercy of what feels like pointless destruction.
On top of all that, as a Reformed Christian, I’m supposed to believe that God is ultimately behind the impersonal forces. This both helps and hurts. It helps because it again personalizes these impersonal forces. What looks like pointless destruction somehow fits into a larger providential plan. But it hurts because it naturally puts me in the face of the problem of evil. I think I’ll take the personal and trust that it will work out for good one day, but man that’s hard to see.
I like the global warming theory. Plus I don’t want to get into a discussion of how much God is behind the “impersonal” forces. 🙂
Global warming or natural phase, though, it does look like hurricanes are happening more frequently. That’s bad news for a lot of places.