Weather Forecast

This coming weekend promises to be a warm one here, even for a coastal winter.  On the other hand, temperatures out West promise to be much colder than normal. 

News programs headline each hour with video clips of ice in farm fields in California and people in shorts and tee shirts in Atlanta. The video voice-overs have menacing yet exciting tones:  “Wild weather covers the country!  Is this an omen of global warming?”  There was horrified glee in the headline this past week that 2012 was the hottest summer on record.  Raging fires and disastrous heat are tormenting Australia!  At the same time, children are playing in the snow in Jerusalem!    The more headlines we hear, the more exclamation points there are about the weather!!!!!

On the last headline—snow in Jerusalem—at least one reporter had the sanity to say that this snow was the first one in twenty years.  I can remember the previous reports about snow there.  Even the psalms say something about that kind of weather in the region.  The Psalmist says, as a part of praise for God’s creative gory, “He gives snow like wool; he scatters frost like ashes. He hurls down hail like crumbs—who can stand before his cold?” (Ps. 147:16-17)  Children must have been throwing snowballs back then.

In the United States, we’ve been keeping weather records since the 1870s.  We can gather only from journals and reports about the weather conditions back in the early 19^th century, or from battlefield journals of the American Revolution (where it appears that winters were quite severe).  During the summer of 1980, when I was living in England, I was humbled by the weather report that stated that the temperatures were the coldest in over 300 years.

Extreme weather is a matter of perspective.  As we all grow older, the weather conditions were hotter and colder, snowier and stormier than anyone would know today.  Hey, even I can say that I remember warm January temperatures as a child in Chicago—followed by record-setting blizzards.  Nearly twenty years ago, Illinois had its coldest temperature on record, -36F degrees. Yet, around 1970, I remember riding my bicycle on Labor Day in 102 degree heat.  Oh, no—I am starting to sound like my grandparents, who, when it came to weather, often reproved me and said, “When I was your age, we had to (fill in the blank)—and we made it.”

I’m no weather forecaster, but I can attest to two things about the conditions.  First, weather is so much more dramatic now with instant communication, which requires so much hype so that people pay attention.  Also, weather is humbling, because we have no control over what will happen.  Nature has a mind of her own.  We can and do influence the weather.  There definitely is a global warming trend that must be addressed.    In the end, though, the weather reminds us that we are beholden to what today or tomorrow will bring.

So how do I live with the weather?  I have clean tee shirts in the drawer, and clean coats in the closet.  And some days I wear both….