If you think things bad, cast your mind back to Egypt 3,000 years ago. Pharaoh around that time held the Israelites in bondage, and nothing Moses could say or do would persuade him to let the Israelites go to seek their Promised Land. Moses, as was his wont, confided in the Lord, who sent a sequence of plagues to induce a change of mind in the Egyptian monarch.
First, the Lord sent Moses down to the waters of the Nile, where, "Lifting up his rod, he struck the water of the river, and it was turned to blood; and the fishes died and the river was corrupted, and the Egyptians could not drink the water of the Nile." But Pharaoh's heart was hardened, and he would not relent.
There followed three plagues of pests. Frogs were followed by mosquitoes, and they, in turn, by flies: "There came a very grievous swarm of flies into the houses of Pharaoh and his servants and into all the land of Egypt; and the land was corrupted by this multitude of flies." The sixth plague was an epidemic of boils which afflicted every Egyptian man and beast, and it was followed by a lethal storm of hailstones: "The Lord sent thunder and hail, and lightning running along the ground, and rained hail upon the land of Egypt.
"And it was of so great bigness as never before was seen in Egypt since that nation was founded; and the hail destroyed all things that were in the fields, both man and beast; and it broke every tree of the country."
The last three plagues - the eighth, ninth and tenth - were a plague of locusts, an alarming spell of darkness, and worst of all, the death of all the firstborn children in the land of Egypt. It was this draconian 10th plague that finally persuaded Pharaoh to allow the Israelites to have their way.
Astute readers will have noted that in this list of plagues I skipped the fifth: "The hand of the Lord will bring a terrible plague upon your livestock in the field, on your horses, asses and camels, and on your cattle, sheep and goats. And the Lord did this thing on the next day; and all the beasts of the Egyptians died."
Has all this not a familiar ring? And equally interesting is the fact that of the 10 plagues to be visited on the Egyptians, the origins or the epidemiology of no fewer than eight are rooted in the weather. Have we in our midst these days, one wonders, some meteorological Moses waiting to escape?