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Way back in 1911 an Australian adventurer named Douglas Mawson decided that he wanted to be the first man to fly an airplane over the South Pole. If successful, Mawson’s feat would have been incredible given the fact that it had been just 8 short years since the Wright Brothers made their legendary “first flight” at Kitty Hawk, NC. But alas, it wasn’t meant to be.

Upon arrival in Antarctica, Mawson quickly discovered that the engine on his Vickers monoplane simply wouldn’t start in the extreme cold. Dejected, he removed the engine from the fuselage and headed back home to Australia, leaving the doomed plane sitting on the ice near the bottom of the world. During the century that followed, snow and ice built up around the abandoned plane until it finally disappeared from view beneath a blanket of white.

Researchers have been searching for the remnants of Mawson’s plane for decades, and they recently uncovered it after spotting sections of the tubular frame sticking out of the ice. Global warming proponents insist that the find backs up their claim that the earth is heating up due to human interference with nature. I couldn’t disagree more.

If the plane became covered with ice after it was abandoned in 1911, wouldn’t that mean that the place where the plane sits had less ice then than it has now? Did Mr. Mawson instruct his crew to dig a huge hole in the ice and bury the plane? I think not.

The fact of the matter is, our planet goes through cycles of cooling and heating, and some of those cycles are quite severe. There have been at least two ice ages that we humans know about during which most of North America was completely covered with a thick sheet of ice. What caused the “global warming” that melted all of that ice each time? Somehow I doubt that the people who inhabited the planet during the ice ages drove around in gas guzzling SUV’s and mowed their ice-encrusted lawns with Briggs & Stratton powered lawnmowers.

I find it quite ironic and amusing that Al Gore’s speech at the recent “Climate Change Summit” in Copenhagen, Denmark was delayed due to a blizzard. And it’s even more ironic that he returned home to a United States of America that has just seen many parts of the country break the all-time record for the most consecutive days below freezing!

Folks, climate change is indeed real – make no mistake about it. Weather patterns and ambient temperatures have been changing for eons, sometimes to great extremes. These cyclical changes are entirely natural, and they are to be expected by anyone who has ever read a 6th grade textbook on natural history. Was Mr. Gore absent on the day when the teacher covered the ice ages, or does he simply enjoy raking in millions of dollars by perpetrating a fraud of global proportions? My guess would be the latter.

If you’ve been living on planet earth long enough to be able to feed yourself, you have no doubt been shocked and disappointed by the actions or words of someone you thought you knew really well. As we get to know the people around us, we begin to get a handle on their personalities and attitudes. When we finally get to the point where we’re real close to someone, we tend to believe that we know pretty well how that person will react in any given situation. But sometimes that belief turns out to be based on a false assumption.

Over the course of my lifetime I have seen a number of close friends and loved ones catch me completely off guard with the way they handled situations that seemed to me to be rather routine (and I’m sure it’s happened the other way around as well). It’s natural to be shocked and even disappointed when that happens, but it really shouldn’t come as a surprise. After all, each of us is an individual who brings our own assumptions, biases, personal experiences and memories of past injustices along with us as we interact with the people around us, and as such we all have our own ways of dealing with situations and circumstances as they arise. And that doesn’t make us bad people, it just makes us different.

Human nature being as it is, most people will treat others well, follow the rules established by society, and act in a more or less predictable manner in most areas of their lives. But each of us has the ability – maybe even the propensity – to catch others off-guard with our actions and reactions to situations that arise from time to time. We’re only human after all, and humans are prone to cause each other grief on occasion. But we also have the God-given ability to empathize and forgive. May God give us all the wisdom to know when it’s best to do just that.