“The Finger of God” hits Kentucky

As a young adolescent with a passion for meteorology, one scene from the otherwise crass and corny 1996 blockbuster Twister made a lasting impression upon me. After an adrenaline-pumping day of storm chasing, a band of participants are rowdily swapping stories and appall the shell-shocked fiancée of one chaser, with the revelation that the tornadoes they saw were relatively moderate—F2 or maybe F3.

“Now an F4,” one intones, “that would relocate your house pretty effectively.” “Is there an F5?” the young woman asks. An awed and awkward silence immediately descends on the raucous group. “What would that be like, then?” prods Melissa. A veteran chaser finally breaks the silence, answering in reverential tones: “The finger of God.”

Truly, “the finger of God” characterizes the power and destruction etched over more than 160 miles of western Kentucky by last week’s historic tornado. Trees were stripped of all bark and soil of all vegetation, freight train cars had been tossed through the air, factories reduced to heaps of twisted metal, and homes were not merely destroyed, but ground literally into dust. The final rating of the twister is yet to be determined, but as one of the longest-tracked and most violent tornadoes ever witnessed, it was a stark reminder that the inhabitants of the earth are as grasshoppers (Isaiah 40:22) before the awe-inspiring power of God displayed in nature.

In the face of such terrifying signs of our powerlessness, our most natural instinct is to cast about for explanations. If we can attribute a cause to the destruction and loss of life, we can give it meaning, manage it, ensure somehow that it might not happen again.

Such were the hasty declarations in the wake of last Friday’s storms that this represents the “new normal” in a world of human-caused climate change. It is understandable that scientists and policy-makers would want to make the vague and abstract problem of climate change concrete by tying it to specific individual weather events, but few things are so apt to discredit the climate campaigner’s cause than such sloppy attributions.

The headlines pegging the tornado as a “new normal” appeared right alongside headlines declaring that it may succeed in breaking the longest F5/EF5 “drought” on record. It’s been more than eight years since such an extreme storm struck the United States. It seems hard to see how both things could be true: If such violent storms are the new normal, why has it been so long since we have witnessed one? Indeed, it is not just EF-5s that have been missing since 2013; the years 2014-21 have witnessed unusually low tornadic activity and deaths. In truth, scientists have never demonstrated any connection between climate change and tornado intensity. Unlike hurricanes, tornadoes are not fueled simply by heat, but by a complex and subtle interplay of many factors. How many factors? The answer to that question is not yet known.

Now, what was genuinely unprecedented about last Friday’s tornado was its timing. This is December, after all, and never before has such a large, severe, and northerly outbreak been observed so late in the year. As if to punctuate this point, the atmosphere unleashed another disastrous natural event on Wednesday, sending wildfires roaring across Kansas and twisters whirling through Iowa and Minnesota for the first time ever in the month of December. Perhaps worse, there is increasing evidence that climate change is shifting the focal point of most intense tornadic activity (so-called “Tornado Alley”) away from its familiar home in the sparsely-populated Great Plains and into the much more populous Lower Midwest and Deep South.

The death toll last week was heartbreaking, but, heart-wrenching though it was, the deaths might well have been multiplied if not for the warnings issued by forecasters. History records that 695 lives were lost in the similarly extreme 1925 “Tri-State Tornado.” Human ingenuity has done much to reduce the human cost of such disasters, and may yet do more. But such natural disasters should serve as a standing reminder that no work of man’s hands is a match for storms that are described as “the finger of God.”