The mountain man, Jim Bridger, met with Brigham Young on 28 June 1847 as the Saints were headed to the Rocky Mountains.  Brigham Young was anxious to learn all he could about the destination which he’d never seen.  Jim Bridger was reputedly the first white man to see the Great Salt Lake in 1824, and had spent the intervening 23 years exploring and trapping in the Rocky Mountain area.

Bridger thought it foolish to try to bring a large population into the Great Basin.  He told Brigham Young that he’d “give $1,000 for a bushel of corn raised in the basin.”

Erastus Snow, who listened to the conversation, reported that Brigham replied, “Wait a little, and we will show you.”

Bridger knew the area and its inhospitable climate.  Brigham knew God.  Bridger knew that the area’s growing season was too short for agriculture.  Brigham knew that God could change things, and that it was God’s will that the Saints should go to the Rocky Mountains.

Indeed, as early as 1842 Joseph Smith prophesied that the Church would go to the Rocky Mountains and there become a great people.

Marjorie, in hearing this story said, “Thank goodness for climate change.”

Climate change is currently a matter of great controversy.  It is said that the planet is warming, and that human activity is to blame.  That is possibly so; but the fact of the matter is that climate change has been going on for a long, long time, and that God is in control.  He controls the elements, and bends them to suit His purposes.

The Saints’ settling in the Great Basin is a case in point.  They needed a place where the Church could grow and strengthen as God prepares the world for Christ’s second coming.  That growth and strengthening wasn’t possible back east.  The Church was successively driven out of New York, Ohio, Jackson County Missouri, then Clay County, and Nauvoo, Illinois.  The Church’s fifth move was to leave the nation completely.  It left for an uninhabited region owned by Mexico, and the Lord tempered the area’s climate to make the translocation possible.  Not only did the Saints successfully grow corn, but peaches, too.

Another case in point where the Lord used climate change to suit His purposes was in moving the family of Joseph Smith senior from Vermont to western New York.  The Lord needed the young boy in that family to be positioned near the Hill Cumorah so that he could fulfill a special purpose and calling.  The means used by the Lord to effect that move was the year without a summer when all the crops in New England froze.  There were frosts in every month, causing the Smith family to lose their farm.

The year without a summer was occasioned by a huge volcanic eruption in Indonesia, half a world away.  So much material was blasted into the atmosphere that sunlight was blocked out worldwide causing famines across China and Europe, and crop failures in New England.

Again we might say, “Thank goodness for climate change.”  Without it we might not have the Book of Mormon.  Without climate change the Church might not be so strong.

If the climate is changing, and my observations are that it is, I’m sure that God’s purposes are being fulfilled, and that He is in control.