What Came First: The Weather or the Weatherman?

Environmental "scientists", such as Al Gore, Sheryl Crow, and Laurie David are fond of pointing to our wacky weather as evidence of man-made global warming. The headlines have been trumpeting ecological armageddon with the tornado that destroyed Greensburg, KS and the heat wave that has hit California. Today, the first named hurricane to form in the Atlantic this season is causing the drive-bys to embrace their inner Chicken Little.

I have a question for the "experts": did the Native Americans name hurricanes, too? How long have we been actually keeping records of weather trends here in the U.S.? If they had paid attention in junior high and high school western civ class, they would realize that we humans have not been around very long on this earth. In the lifetime of the earth, our existence has been the equivalent to the blink of an eye. We have always had extreme weather on this continent. That is how tall tales such as the stories of Paul Bunyan and Pecos Bill came into being; they were the American equivalents to the gods of Greek and Roman mythology. Weird natural phenomenon was explained by these tall tales.

When I took a class in state water policy and law, we had to read Marc Reisner's Cadillac Desert. While I did not agree with much of what was stated in his book, he made a few interesting points. One of which was the exploration of the Southwest from the conquistadores to the Americans. The Spaniards, and later Mexicans, discovered that weather in the western part of the continent was erratic at its best, and deadly at its worst. The San Joaquin Valley, home to the vast majority of farming in California, was by turns a lush valley and a flat desert surrounded by mountains (depending on the amount of annual precipitation). Sudden torrential rains would wash away villages (and trees) sending the debris toward the Pacific Ocean. Father Junipero Serra, the man responsible for founding the system of missions on the coast, made sure to locate each mission near a reliable source of water and space them within a day's ride of each other. John Wesley Powell, a former military engineer who served has chief of artillery in the Union Army's 17th Corps, led an expedition on Green and Colorado Rivers, even rafting through the Grand Canyon. During his expedition, he encountered nature's beauty and its cruelty. Rapids wreaked havoc on the group and seasonal flooding from snowmelt and monsoons swelled the Colorado River to monstrous proportions.

The notion that we, insignificant mortals that we are, can irrepairably damage the earth is born of two ideas. The first is that this life is all that there is; there is no Creator, and this all happened by chance. The second idea is that because there is no Creator, it is we who are all powerful and we can make or break the "delicate balance" of nature. What the global warming experts fail to recognize, however, is that nature is adaptable and the forces of nature will work, whether we like it or not.

Looking at the planet as a thermodynamic system, we go through a cycle of heating and cooling. Because the planet does not change in mass, the pressure, temperature, and volume of the atmosphere must change in order to maintain equilibrium. The earth absorbs energy in the form of heat and radiation from the sun; however, only half of the earth is exposed to the sun. The other half is experiencing night and facing away from the sun. Just as the earth can absorb heat, it can also release heat (which is why temperatures are always lowest right before dawn). Also, consider this: the entire planet is the system, so any rain or snow that occurs anywhere on the planet is part of the heating and cooling process. Just because we don't experience it doesn't mean it is not happening. Nature has its own way of healing itself. Saying that that is purely coincidence is a greater leap of faith than belief in God.