Tag Archives: weather

The More Things Change

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What a year it was! The weather went mad! It can only have been climate change. There was heavy snow and hail all over the UK in the first week of January. Shoppers in London collapsed from the cold while a blizzard blanketed the north of England with several inches of snow. Five foot drifts marooned a train in Scotland while in Australia bush fires raged. By the middle of the month ‘killer smog’ had enveloped London and whole communities in Scotland were buried by more blizzards.

Early in February the Hudson River froze from shore to shore for the first time in 37 years. Fresh snow covered Britain again on 20th .

Floods killed 200 people in Australia on March 3rd. A further 44,000 were left homeless and 300,000 animals also drowned.

April saw more unseasonal weather, yet by July temperatures in Scotland reached 80°F (27°C) while Buenos Aires saw its first snow for decades. On July 14th lightning killed a woman and injured 46 racegoers at Royal Ascot. July was the hottest and driest for 86 years in the UK. An earthquake in Turkey killed 4 and left 25 injured. 600 houses were destroyed and 1,000 damaged.

Large parts of the US suffered the worst drought for 46 years and there were water shortages in Britain during August. Towards the end of the month, torrential rain caused serious problems in the south of the country.

By October, 71mph winds caused problems in the north, closing Liverpool’s Speke airport. India’s Punjab meanwhile suffered 12,000 square miles of flooding. 7,000 villages were inundated. Torrential rain and gales hit the south and east coasts of England later in the month. In November the south and west were blanketed in fog and as a result central London was dark by mid-afternoon.

By mid-December dense fog, gales, floods and snow affected all of Britain. In County Durham visibility was reduced to nil while the Orkneys experienced 94mph winds. The area was still suffering from the drought that first affected it in July. Churches took it upon themselves to pray for rain throughout December. Prayers that went unanswered.

The weather was certainly messed up in 1955!

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The weather conditions described are taken from the book, The Year I Was Born: 1955 (I was!) containing newspaper reports from that year. I haven’t included all the variations the book refers to. The world population in 1955 was 2.5 billion (8 billion today), the UK population was 49.5 million (68.4 today) and the USA 166 million (340 today).

Were the extremes of weather in 1955 the result of global warming? No-one has ever said so, not even Greta Thunberg. In fact, no-one mentions how volatile the weather was in the recent past when they’re busy telling us how much more calamitous it is today.

Is it though, really?

Interlude: A word from God

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While nothing like Cyclone Idai that hit southern Africa recently, we had some terrible storms here in the north of England last weekend. The thunder woke me just after 2 a.m., each peal shaking the house, and with the flashes of lightning, it felt frighteningly apocalyptic.

And then it hit me: the Lord was sending a sign! He was angry about something we’d done! Maybe same-sex marriage, though as we’ve had that for a while now in the UK, I’d have thought he’d be used to that particular idea by now. So, maybe he was upset about abortion again. That could be it, though again, a bit late in the day. Still, with God a day is as a thousand years (and vice versa), so you never know. Maybe it’s Brexit. Perhaps the Lord’s angry we’re coming out of Europe. Or, perhaps he’s angry we aren’t coming out fast enough. Back in the 1970s, when Britain first joined the European Economic Community (as it was called then), he told his representatives here on Earth it was a Very Bad Thing, because it was like a recreation of the old Roman Empire and a sure sign of the End Times. He disapproved, but told only a few of his Chosen Ones how he felt and completely forgot to mention it to anyone else.

Christ! Don’t you just get fed up with religiously fixated nutjobs coming up with this sort of crap every time there’s a storm or a tsunami or an eclipse? Every natural disaster, every human catastrophe, every phenomenon in the night sky has to be interpreted as a message or warning from a deity who is otherwise as dumb as a rock. Only when weather does what weather is prone to do does he start communicating with us – incoherently and in code. Only a special few, those who’ve appointed themselves as his prophets and mouthpieces, are capable of telling us what he’s really saying. It’s a miracle if two or three of them ever agree about what that is.

If you need evidence there’s no God, then this is it. If he were real, we would have independent knowledge of him; knowledge that isn’t filtered through human messengers or delivered, garbled, by the weather or by a seriously flawed and obviously human book. He would be apparent; he wouldn’t need to be interpreted, explained and represented by people who give every impression of making stuff up as they go along.

What we have instead is a God who is very evidently human. It’s humans who interpret weather conditions, claim to know what God’s saying and declaim his messages and warnings. It is impossible to know anything, either about or from him, other than what humans – very often ones with very little brain and a penchant for self-promotion – tell us.

If there really were a God, I’d ask him to stop communicating with us through extreme weather, disasters and massacres, and instead to miraculously lift the curse of religion from the 7.7 billion of us here on Planet Earth. But there isn’t, so we’re stuck with it – with religion and those who have a vested interest in perpetuating its nonsense.

Christians’ Favourite Delusions 10: God cares

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dead-sparrow

@deadsparrow had just made his final Tweet.

The Bible says God controls the weather and 53% of Americans believe it. A further 17% say they don’t know or don’t want to say whether he does; evidently, they aren’t prepared to rule out the possibility, otherwise they would be among the 29% who know that he doesn’t.

I wonder what those who were hit yesterday by the typhoon in the Philippines think of God’s control of the elements? Was the destruction he brought about by sending Haiyan a mark of his love for mankind? Presumably not – destroying lives, homes, possessions and livelihoods hardly speaks of love.

Was it a punishment then? Right-wing Christians like to tell us that natural disasters are God’s judgement on human sin and our ‘shaking a fist at God‘ by redefining marriage to include gay people.  Why then does he consistently punish those in parts of the world which are already prone to extreme weather conditions? Why does he punish those who are already poor? Why does he send devastating weather to the fifth largest Christian country in the world, which doesn’t recognise gay marriage? It’s all a bit indiscriminate, wouldn’t you say? What sort of Almighty are we dealing with here, who can’t even direct his punishments at the right target? It doesn’t speak much of ‘control’.

Jesus might claim, in Matthew 10:28-31, that God cares even for the sparrows but this is another of his bare-faced lies. The evidence tells us otherwise: ‘God’ doesn’t care how many humans perish in storms, typhoons, tornadoes, tsunamis, earthquakes and all manner of natural disasters. He doesn’t care how many lose their homes, loved ones and all they’ve worked for.

The weather, in fact, is random, largely unpredictable and indifferent to human and animal needs. If God exists, then he is as indiscriminate and uncaring as the weather he supposedly creates. But of course God is not needed to explain the weather; science tells us how it occurs in terms that don’t involve him. His very superfluousness – the same superfluousness we find in evolution and all the other ‘laws’ of the universe – is all the evidence we need that he doesn’t exist.