The Russian Orthodox Church may issue a new service to pray for snow
Fr. Christopher sent this out, I am particularly able to relate to my Russian brethren who lament: "We are all tired of endless mud outdoors"
Of course they have clearly not seen Al Gore's movie...but then why is it unusually warm weather is proof of global warming, but OUR unusually COLD weather is NOT evidence against it? Anyway, here is the entire interesting story.
Moscow, January 16, Interfax - This year's unusually warm winter may bring a new supplication service to pray for snow, the Moscow Patriarchate department for external church relations' secretary for church and society relations Archpriest Mikhail Dudko told Interfax.
He also agreed that many church people might believe the lasting warm weather with no snow to be a punishment from above.
`Various weather abnormalities may result in an environmental balance shift and affect negatively on the harvest. Both humans and animals often experience sufferings because of this sort of anomaly,' the clergyman said.
`There is also another problem you may call `esthetic'. We are all tired of endless mud outdoors. And what about our traditions? After forty days of fasting before Christmas day, everyone usually expects to enjoy Christmas-tide games and festivities one cannot have without snow. A no-snow winter in Russia may be rightly compared to a drought or steady rains or other weather anomalies, which have ever been thought to be God's punishment,' he added.
Fr Dudko said that the Russian Orthodox Church has special services to pray for rain or fine weather, which are reported by our clergy to be no less effective in our time than before.
`We have a tradition to take an umbrella with us when a service for rain is to be celebrated,' Fr. Dudko said. Still, this sort of supplication services, also called `need-services', have always been said when they were needed, and is was mainly parishioners who asked for them, he noted.
`We have not been asked for a service for snow so far, but that may well be due to lack of a suitable office. Though if we are asked for, we may modify existing offices in order to pray for long-desired snow. May be our children will have a chance to play snowballs and go ice-running by the Pancake-week at least,' he said.
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Comments
"Global warming" does not mean you should expect every place on earth to be 2 degrees warmer than it would be otherwise, it only means that the mean global temperature will be higher. The effect is more pronounced in polar regions and individual events or even most local trends cannot be directly pinned on global warming. In some places, the predicted climate change may result in, say, hotter summers and colder winters and perhaps not even a mean increase in temperature.
Anyways: unusually warm weather really shouldn't be taken as necessarily a sign of global warming. The only thing you should take as a sign of global warming is a rise in mean global temperature [a bit tautological]. Unusually warm [or cold] weather may be a sign of climate change, or it may just be unusually warm [or cold] that year, and the climate change [if it really is occurring] may be attributable to global warming. Hope that helps.