Johnny-on-the-Spot …by John Foster …

We just experienced a record warm April.

The month also started our somewhat dry but a few late-arriving storm systems got us closer to the average monthly rainfall.

Still, we had frost on the first weekend in May.

So much for drawing any long term conclusions from that.

As a “nerd’ who has studied weather since my youth, the only thing I can say for certain regarding the weather is that it is going to change.

If it didn’t, we could issue the forecast on January 1st and it would hold until the end of December.

So, are we getting warmer due to our pollution?

In the past two weeks, we’ve gone from record-breaking warmth to near record-breaking cool.

Is that a trend?

Well, for certain, it’s a difference.

I wonder how we can determine that our climate is really changing long-term based on global, reliable weather records that have only been kept since the 1880’s.

Granted, scientists have taken core examples of ice and earth for years and they can see changes that have occured.

As we look at weather today, it’s mostly conjecture backed by a bevy of evidence and experiments.

Bit it just doesn’t go back far enough for me to draw any had, fast conclusions. First of all, science and The Bible aren’t even close on how long weather records could exist.

Based on radiometric dating, the scientific team says this Earth is 4.5 billion years old, give or take 1% say the “scientific literate ones.”.

Looking at Genesis 5 and 11 in the Bible, Abraham lived 2 thousand years after the Creation.

Bible study further reveals Abraham lived about 2,000 years before Christ began his brief ministry.

If Jesus did his preaching roughly 2,000 years ago, you add all those “two thousands” and you come up with about 6,000 years according to the Bible literate.

There’s a lot of a gap between 4.5 billion and 6,000 years.

I mean with pennies going away, you can’t round that up or down that much to make the 2 numbers similar.

I do have a theory that the longer we press forward, we have and will continue to see science and faith draw nearer but right now, there’s a big gap.

Another thing that bothers me is that is just been a few years since we heard “global warming” was the threat but that has evolved into “global climate change”.

A number of years ago, many of we Midwesterners were splashing through shallow lakes and seas in this part of the world and it was somewhat tropical.

The scientific community tells us that the last great Ice Age (the Pleistocene Era) began roughly 2.58 million years ago and ended 11,700 years ago, which is twice as long as the Biblical scholars say we’re been here in the first place.

But what’s a few years between friends, right?

We are supposed to be worrying about the polar ice caps melting and flooding all the Earth’s lowlands.

But when I leave my tumbler full of ice and water out and it melts, shouldn’t it flow all over the table?

The only thing that’s different is a solid and liquid mixture became all liquid.

It occupies the same space but in a different form.

I get upset when you hear some in American cry that we (US) are the real bad guys when it comes to dirtying up the world and making the weather get hotter.(or cooler, or wetter or drier). .

But there are a lot more people in the world leaving big carbon footprints that we never read about or see in the news. After all, the United States has about 342 million people compared to the world total of 8.3 billion.

We can mess things up but not as fast as the remainder of the world can.

So, what’s this all got to do with the weather?.

Are we getting hotter?

Cooler?

Wetter?

Drier?

First of all, we have a lot more people living in parts of the country that weren’t inhabited years ago.

Folks like to live near the oceans but that’s where those hurricanes like to roam.

There are places that were having tornadoes and severe storms years ago but few, if any lived there.

My main point is we can’t over-react or under-react to today’s weather based on that happened maybe no more that 250 years ago.

We need more time to learn if it’s getting hotter or cooler, wetter or drier.

In the meantime, take a jacket with you and an umbrella just to be safe.