Charita Goshay: Lest we forget, Mother Nature is still the boss

On Christmas Eve, NASA and an international partnership launched the James Webb telescope, the most powerful apparatus ever built for space exploration.

The telescope is named after NASA administrator James E. Webb, who led the agency's golden age Apollo program from 1961 to 1968.

According to the experts, the telescope has the capacity to see light we humans can't — light that's in a longer wavelength, which could enable it to see what the universe looked like as far back as 100 million years ago.

The James E. Webb telescope is said to be 100 times more powerful than the Hubble telescope, which treated us to spectacular and breathtaking images of the universe. But the Hubble is like David's slingshot compared to the James E. Webb, which can see into God's TV room.

It's a testament to humankind's ingenuity.

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Snow daze

But there probably are people who didn't make it into work at the NASA Glenn Research Center in Cleveland on Tuesday because Northeast Ohio was taken hostage by a snowstorm.

We've dropped-kicked motorized, selfie-taking probes onto the surface of Mars without so much as a dent in the bumper, so, naturally, there are moments when we chest-thump and forget ourselves.

That's why every now and then, nature feels the need to swoop in and slam shut our daily doings like a lid on a trunk.

People in the Midwest learn early that life doesn't stop because of the weather. You dress in layers and get on with it. Some folks don't even bother to do that. One of the best photos our staff ever took was of a guy in Canton operating a snow-blower while wearing a parka, shorts, and flip-flops ... while smoking a cigarette.

But this latest storm wasn't your normal, winter-wonderland-in-January moment: It was a snow bomb.

On Monday night, downtown Cleveland looked like a disaster scene out of one of the Avengers movies shot there.

It's a reminder that for all of our progress and technological brilliance, Mother Nature is still the boss of us.

We're told endlessly that technology is the Big Fix, even when it doesn't work, which is a lot more often than we're willing to admit.

Stormus interruptus

Though technology has enabled us to predict when bad weather is coming, we still seem unable to develop coherent contingency plans to deal with it.

Isn't it something? We won two world wars but all it takes is a few unplowed side streets to undo an American city.

Unlike our forebears, we possess the medical technology to identify and fight infectious diseases. Thanks to the creation of mRNA medical technology, we were able to develop a vaccine for COVID-19 in months instead of years.

Whatever your opinion, that we have been able to vaccinate 150 million people despite all the chaos is still impressive.

Perhaps an occasional "Snowmaggedon" is Mother Nature's way of protecting us when we don't have enough sense to do it for ourselves by slowing us down a little; by making sure we stay put, whether we want to be isolated or or not.

We appear to be in the throes of an era in which storms are becoming more extreme and aggressive so that in addition to snow, we now must also deal and prepare for the threat of tornadoes wiping out communities in winter.

Mark Twain said: "Everybody complains about the weather, but nobody ever does a damned thing about it."

But Twain didn't know about climate change, which is something we can mitigate.

If we don't, nature is making it quite clear that we can't outsmart consequence.

Charita M. Goshay is a Canton Repository staff writer and a member of the editorial board. Reach her at 330-580-8313 or charita.goshay@cantonrep.com. On Twitter: @cgoshayREP

This article originally appeared on The Repository: Charita Goshay: Storm is reminder that we're always at nature's mercy