Are Natural Disasters God's Way of Punishing Wickedness?

During every hurricane season without fail, I'll hear someone say something to the following effect: "It's no wonder we are having so many devastating storms; God is demonstrating His great displeasure at the fact that people have become so wicked." The sad part is that most of the people who say such things are very sincere Christians who actually believe what they are saying to be true. However, such uninformed conjecture is about as far from the truth as it can get.

You see, there are three main problems with the presumption that God uses natural disasters to punish humans for sin. One of them is biblical and the other two are derived from reason and just plain common sense.

The biblical contradiction to the idea that God would use storms as punishment for sin can be found in Matthew 5:45, which states the following: "That ye may be the children of your Father which is heaven; for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust" (KJV). This verse should make it quite obvious that God sends good and bad weather to everyone, regardless of the goodness or evilness of its recipients.

The second problem with the whole idea of God punishing sin with the use of natural disasters is the obvious randomness with which they occur. They occur in places where the majority of the people are practicing Christians just as often as they occur in places where the majority of the people are hostile to Christianity. This is consistent with the general fact that bad things often happen to good people, while good things often happen to evil people. That's just the way things work here on earth. Saying that God sends storms and other disasters because of wicked living is inconsistent with everything we can observe on a daily basis and flies in the face of logic and reason.

The third problem with the storms-as-punishment-for-evil mentality is the simple fact that, no matter how bad a given weather-related disaster is, we can usually check the record book and find one that was much worse years ago. If the world is growing more and more wicked, shouldn't calamities of nature be growing more and more fierce and intense? Wouldn't the record books have to be re-written every year or so? This is simply not the case, as we can almost always find records of worse disasters from the past, when there was supposedly less evil in the world.