[TAG] Weather

[Mike Orr]

This morning I woke up to news of tornadoes in Missouri and wildfires
in Texas.  "The University of Kansas suspended classes on Monday after
about 60% of the buildings on its campus were damaged."  (BBC)  Hmm,
it's not every day you lose your university.  This on top of the
hurricanes last year, the tsunami a year before, and a bona fide
plague of locusts sometime or other.  I thought of my evangelical
friends from the 80s saying, "See!  This really is the end times." 
Natural disasters everywhere, check.  Plagues of locusts, check.  Wars
and rumors of wars, check.
So, looking for a secular explanation, and one not based on climate change...

Are these natural disasters really happening more now or am I just
paying more attention?  Certainly, wildfires in the west happen every
year.  And tornadoes aren't unknown in the midwest.  I think there was
a little girl in Kansas who was taken to Australia in one.

Then I thought, why doesn't Europe get these things?  Or do they and
we just don't hear about them due to the news blackout here on
anything international?  I remember earthquakes in Armenia and Georgia
and Iran, but can't remember any kind of natural disaster western
Europe.  Is it just that people are more pious and worship God
correctly there?  Or is the terrain too hilly for tornados and stuff? 
Or the news blackout?

--
Mike Orr <sluggoster at gmail.com>
(mso at oz.net address is semi-reliable)