What we should learn from extreme weather

You realize that if you ever travel to Britain to spend a few days here, you’re going to get wet, right? Ben Franklin failed to mention it in his famous “two certainties in life” quote in his letter to Jean-Baptiste Leroy in 1789. There are actually three certainties in life: death, taxes, and the inevitability that you are going to get rained on at some point if you spend more than a fortnight in Britain!

But this winter has been exceptionally wet. I can hardly remember more than two consecutive days in the past four months where we haven’t had heavy rain, and this has caused some of the worst flooding and storm damage that this country has seen in decades.

Of course, America has also had extreme weather. Or is that an understatement? This winter seems to have seen an unusual number of massive snow storms hitting some part or other of the US, not to mention temperatures plunging to record lows.

What are we to make of it? God’s judgment? Climate change? Or just weather?

In the aftermath of the floods in Britain, a politician from the UK Independence Party (UKIP) was suspended for linking the floods to the passing of same-sex marriage legislation. “The Scriptures make it abundantly clear,” he wrote, “that a Christian nation that abandons its faith and acts contrary to the Gospel, will be beset by natural disasters such as storms, disease, pestilence and war.” He then blamed the floods on our British Prime Minister, David Cameron, saying, “It is his fault that large swathes of the nation have been afflicted by storms and floods.”

This rather reminded me of something wrongly attributed to Pat Robertson in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. A satirical piece in Dateline Hollywood reported that he said, “By choosing an avowed lesbian [Ellen Degeneres] for this national event [the Emmy Awards], these Hollywood elites have clearly invited God’s wrath. … Is it any surprise that the Almighty chose to strike at Miss DeGeneres’ hometown?” Robertson didn’t actually say this, but many chose to believe it was true because of things he apparently had said in the past.

Attributing extreme weather to specific sins is generally bad theology (not that bad theology was the reason the UKIP guy was suspended—he was suspended for daring to suggest that there might be a God, and that He might be displeased with the passing of same-sex marriage legislation). Why do I say this? Am I denying that the passing of same-sex marriage laws is displeasing to God, or that He might bring floods upon a nation for it? Not at all. He could certainly do that.

The problem is that we are not party to the mind of God, so we have no right to attribute floods in Britain or extreme cold in America to any particular sin or any particular law. Quite apart from anything else, if extreme weather patterns were due to specific sins, it could just as well have been any one of a number of things: abortion, divorce, refusal of authorities to execute justice, prevalence of adultery, governments racking up stupidly high debts, etc.

Attributing extreme weather to a specific sin is similar to the error that the disciples made in John 9 with regard to the man who was born blind. They made the assumption that his blindness must have been directly related to a specific sin that he or his parents had committed, yet Jesus tells them that this was not the case.

Some of the same people who reject the idea that severe weather is caused by God then proceed to declare that it is caused by man—not by man’s sin, but by his overuse of fossil fuels. There is not enough space in this article, or in the entire newsletter, to fully address this idea. But climate change must at least be mentioned because so many in the media and the governing classes are explicitly linking extreme weather like this to climate change. My own view on this is that explicitly linking extreme weather to “manmade climate change” has no scientific basis, but is, at best, a very dubious hypothesis.

The climate may very well be changing—as it has many times in the past—but that is a world away from asserting that the climate is changing as a result of the actions of man. If “climate change science” is as scientific as it is purported to be, it ought to be possible to make some reasonably accurate predictions about what will happen with the climate.

But the story keeps changing, moving from a coming ice age in the 1980s, to global warming in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Then when the promised warming failed to materialize (we are currently said

to be in a hiatus period), we now have settled on the rather nebulous name of climate change. Nebulous, because climate change, unlike an ice age or global warming, is an extremely broad definition. Any type of vaguely extreme weather we get—even completely opposite types of weather—can be said to be evidence that the climate is changing and urgent action is needed.

Those who believe in manmade climate change might well respond by pointing out that it is notoriously difficult to predict just what will happen, because the climate is so complex. This is precisely the point. If the climate is so complex that we cannot predict with accuracy what is going to happen—ice, heat, extreme weather or temperature hiatus—how could any attempts to predict what man’s actions will do to the climate be considered truly scientific?

Christians really ought to be immediately suspicious of these kinds of claims, since they are based on belief in a natural order without God. If there is a Creator Who made the Earth, Who “formed it to be inhabited” (Isaiah 45:18), and Who has graciously given us the provision of fossil fuels to produce energy, is it possible that God made this complex world in such a way as to be able to cope with increases in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere?

So then what should we make of the recent extreme weather? Is it just weather, without any meaning? No. If God is sovereign, then when a land is flooded or subject to huge snowstorms, it wasn’t an accident, but rather it was intentional and we are being told something. But if we don’t know if it is related to any specific sin, let alone what that sin is, what is the point of it and what should our response be?

The answer is found at the beginning of Luke 13, where Jesus said, “Do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans, because they suffered in this way? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish. Or those eighteen on whom the tower in Siloam fell and killed them: do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others who lived in Jerusalem? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish.”

In other words, when a tragedy, such as extreme weather conditions, befalls a people, we are not supposed to try to guess who committed a particular sin or to point the finger at others, to blame them for bringing it upon us. Rather, our first reaction should be to fear God and repent of our own sins. Only after we have done that are we qualified to point out to people that extreme weather is a tool God uses to make people fear His power, and to bring them to repentance. Same-sex marriage is just one of a multitude of sins for which our nations need to repent, but the main sin we need to repent of is—as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said—“we have forgotten God.”

The next time you see extreme weather, be it on your doorstep or thousands of miles away, forget climate change or attempting to blame it on this sin or that sinner. Instead, remember God, and be thankful that He sends such demonstrations of His power, so that we might repent and not perish.

Rob Slane is the author of The God Reality: A critique of Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion. A former atheist, Slane is now a member of Emmanuel Church in Salisbury, England, where he and his family live.