Biblical Climate Change

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.  This is how our history begins.  God created an environment that would be perfect for his creation; one in which they could live comfortably and have their every need met easily.  We can assume that the weather was very temperate, not too hot by day and not too cold by night.  What evidence do we have that would support this notion?

Genesis 2: 6 But there went up a mist from the earth, and watered the whole face of the ground.
Basically, we had fog developing regularly, daily, providing the water necessary to water the plants. We know that fog develops when the temperature meets the dew point.  The temperature will never fall below the dew point.  The dew point is the amount of water in the air.  Air expands and contracts with temperatures so the warmer the air, the more water can be evaporated into it.  It takes a good amount of water to sustain the plants so we can assume the temperatures stayed rather moderate. 

We can also make another assumption about the weather at creation.  We can assume that the temperatures were rather uniform throughout the globe.  Why can we assume this?

Genesis 2:5 ... for the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth...

How do we get rain?  Well, to get rain you have to have enough available moisture, which we see was plentiful, and we need a lifting mechanism.  The lifting mechanism we know of today are in the form of cold and warm fronts.  These fronts cause the air to rise up into the atmosphere where the moisture cools, forming clouds, then as the contracting cooler air condenses the water which falls to the ground as rain.  Since there was no rain, it can be assumed that there were no fronts, and no fronts would mean that the air around the globe was of equal temperature.

A number of years went by and along comes Noah. We see in Genesis 6:17 And, behold, I, even I, do bring a flood of waters upon the earth, to destroy all flesh, wherein is the breath of life, from under heaven; and every thing that is in the earth shall die.  Now, this had to be an unusual thing.  There would not have been any flooding before.  Being that everything was watered by a fog, there was never a concentration of water significant enough to cause a new puddle to form much less for water to cover the earth.  God was about to cause a major global climate change.

So for a long time Noah is up there building his ark, collecting animals, and telling people that climate change was going to come and destroy the earth with a great flood.  Nobody believed Noah.  There was no evidence that anything was going to be any different than it had always been.  There was likely not even an understanding of what a flood was.  Yet, here was Noah the prepper, getting ready for the results of cataclysmic climate change.

Science may not have the dates correct or exact processes, but they may be on the right track when they postulate that the early earth was rather warm and cooling off.  "Due to the cooling of Earth, large amount of steam escaped from its crust" 
http://www.buzzle.com/articles/how-was-the-earth-formed.html

Well, this may be exactly what happened once Noah entered the ark.  Genesis 7:10 And it came to pass after seven days, that the waters of the flood were upon the earth. 11 In the six hundredth year of Noah's life, in the second month, the seventeenth day of the month, the same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened. 12 And the rain was upon the earth forty days and forty nights.  The fountains of the deep cracked open sprayed hot steam into the air which cooled and caused it to rain as the amount of moisture far exceeded the airs ability to contain it.  This was not a local flood but a global flood.  The steam pouring out of the earth filled the entire atmosphere and caused it to rain everywhere.

This brought about massive changes to the surface of the earth.  The planet had been relatively flat before the flood.  how do we know this?  Genesis 7:20 Fifteen cubits upward did the waters prevail; and the mountains were covered.  A cubit was roughly 16-20 inches.
http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/am/v2/n2/original-cubit
So the waters covered everything at a depth of 15 cubits, about 20-30 feet.  A mountain was nothing more than a molehill it seems, not what we think of mountains today.

Now, water is heavy.  How heavy?  A single gallon is about 8 pounds.
http://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/www/subsection1_4_2_0_7.html

Now imagine how heavy this water was over the entire earth at 20 feet deep!  What would have happened?  Well, with the emptying of the water filled areas below the crust, the crust would have collapsed in some areas.  This collapse would have caused an upthrust in other areas.  This is where we get our sea basins and mountain tops.  The collapses and upthrusts then caused the water to begin to flow from the higher points to the lower points, carving out the land into the current land structures we now see.  Grand Canyon, Washington scablands, and the like around the world were formed by the flow of water into the collapsed basins.

The weight of the water also caused the earth to shift on it's axis from o degrees to the 23 degrees we now are about at.  This tilt in the earth is what causes our seasons.  It is also the cause of the new climate structure we see today.  We still have plenty of water to evaporate into the air, but we have cold and warm pockets now that roam the earth due to the uneven exposure to the sun.  The water cycle had been created. 
 "All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full; unto the place from whence the rivers come, there they return again" (Ecclesiastes 1:7)
http://holyspiritinteractive.net/youth/scientificfacts/10.asp

This is the general overview of the past of biblical climate change.  What does the future hold?  I'll touch on this in another blog.