There are many speculations about what’s going on with the weather these days. While some have become fearful of a global warming melting our glaciers, others are not alarmed at all. They say global warming is a natural occurrence caused by sun spots. Gloom and doom prophets say the end is coming in the form of another “ice age.” We watch in wonder as droughts in one area of our nation keep crops from flourishing, while too much rain in another region causes flash flooding. Lives are lost and crops are destroyed. Tornadoes, hurricanes and tsunamis wreak havoc across our lands. What does it all mean?

We can’t make scientific judgments about recent weather patterns without having something with which to compare them. Scientists are looking at recorded weather patterns over several decades, but recorded weather patterns are a relatively recent phenomenon. We have roughly 150 years of data against the backdrop of millennia. Still, we can learn quite a lot about our changing climate by monitoring earth’s weather patterns from space. We know, for instance, that if it weren’t for the “greenhouse effect” of our atmosphere, our world would be a frozen wasteland.

For as long as mankind has inhabited the earth, natural disasters have been around. Hurricanes and tornadoes are no more or less destructive in our day than they’ve been in past centuries, but we have learned how to predict them with some degree of accuracy. It is the sun, not mankind, which causes all our weather. Weather changes, because the sun heats our world unevenly, due to the presence of cloud-cover. It is this uneven warming and cooling that produces changes in air pressure, which causes winds to form. Winds blow rain clouds over one area and not another, causing the inconsistencies in our weather.