21st January 2011
Here, in the south east of England, although still cold it is nevertheless a fine, sunny day, for which after the heavy snowfalls and bitter cold we have had we are very grateful. So many in the rest of the world, however, are suffering dreadfully from what are called natural disasters. Disasters that may or may not be as a direct result of climate change. However, climate change is having a far reaching effect; an effect which is increasing constantly. The Independent for 15th January presented us with three significant statistics. Since 1975 2.2 million people were killed by natural disasters. And there is a predicted 50% increase in the number of people who will be affected by natural disasters between 2009 and 2015. The third statistic was that 375 million people are expected to be affected by climate related disasters each year by 2015. Later this year, in fact on 31st October, according to statistics, a boy will be born in a village in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. His birth will herald the moment when the world population will reach 7 billion.
We should also realise that the growth in population is exponential, that the growth is seen on a graph as an upwards curve and not a straight line. It builds upon itself, the result is a need for many more homes, more available work and of course a vast increase to the infrastructure. Then with so much land taken up, where is the food to come from to feed this population? A population which is already growing, it doesn’t suddenly jump to 7 billion on 31st October. The problems are with us now. We have problems now with drought, with famine and shortage of food with accompanying high cost of that which is available. We have had severe problems with heavy rains affecting much of the world and especially Brazil, Australia, Sri Lanka. To this must be added a number of severe earthquakes, the latest only yesterday. A 7.4 tremor affecting the western side of Pakistan. So accustomed are we now to these things that it was barely mentioned on television or radio.
Historically the answer has been war and a consequent decrease in numbers. Thankfully it will be the return of Jesus Christ and a new world government set up that will resolve everything. It will show mankind how much he has always needed God the Father and Jesus Christ in his life and will show him the purpose for life and Man on earth.
THE CLIMATE
The International Herald Tribune – 17th January -- Melting glaciers give up secrets. As temperatures rise, climbers along the spine of the Andes are finding, layer by layer in the receding ice, the wreckage of airplane crashes and remains from a variety of mishaps. (for instance…) on the glacier of Huayna Potosi in the Andes in November was found crumpled fuselage, decades-old pieces of wings and propellers, and, the frozen body of Rafael Benjamin Pabon, a 27 year old pilot whose Douglas CD-6 crashed into the mountain’s north face in 1990. “When I found the pilot, he was still strapped into his seat, crunched over like he was sleeping, some black hair falling from his skull,” said Eulalio Gonzalez ,49, the climber who carried Mr Pabon’s mummified body down the mountain. “There are more ice mummies in the peaks above us,” he said “Melting glaciers will bring them to us.” The discovery of Mr Pabon’s partially preserved remains was one of a growing number of finds pulled from the world’s glaciers and snow fields in recent years as warmer temperatures cause the ice and snow to melt, exposing their long-held secrets. … Scientists say the ice’s retreat is an unexpected boon for those yearning to peer back in time. “It looks like the warming trend seen in many regions is continuing,” said Gerald Holdsworth, a glaciologist at the Arctic Institute of North America in Calgary, Alberta.
Our comment: There have been similar finds in the melting glaciers of Argentina, Bolivia, California on the Darwin glacier and in the Italian Alps. Further finds are expected in the Malaspina Glacier in south eastern Alaska. It’s believed that it holds a plane that crashed near the Yukon border in 1951.
The Guardian – 14th January -- Downpours trigger mudslides killing hundreds in Brazil. Deaths in mountain towns add to toll from rain and floods in countries as far apart as Australia, Sri Lanka and Philippines. Fernando Rodrigues awoke to a bang. It was 3.30am and his mountainside home in the hillside town of Teresopolis, about 60 miles north of Rio, was at the centre of what many believe will be one of the worst natural disasters in Brazilian history. “It was terrifying,” said Rodrigues, a 41 year old bar owner, of the mudslide which tore through his home on Wednesday morning and killed many of his friends. ‘There were cars flying everywhere. It was dark. People were screaming.” Beside him a delivery truck sat in the branches of a tree. …. According to official figures, this week’s landslides, have claimed at least 350 lives. Few believe the count will stop there and the stench of decomposition in the air around Rodrigues’s home suggests the toll may rise significantly. Heavy rains on Tuesday sent violent mudslides tearing through three mountain towns. Families were buried alive as they slept.
The Guardian – 14th January -- Sri Lanka –Flooding has forced more than 300,000 people from their homes in Sri Lanka, with no sign of a letup in the torrential rain on the island nation’s east coast.
The government’s Disaster Management Centre said more than 1 million people had been affected by the rains, with 325,000 made homeless.
The Independent – 15th January – Cars, houses, bodies … in rural Queensland, the scars may never heal. Of all the unspeakable things Martin Warburton witnessed from the roof of his petrol station in the Queensland hamlet of Grantham, one stands out: a house hurtling past, borne by raging floodwaters, with people inside it screaming for help. Now the house, a crumpled mess, sits in a paddock about a mile from the site where it was ripped from its foundations – a symbol of the horrors visited on Grantham and a clutch of neighbouring townships when a wall of water roared through last Monday. While most of the attention this week was focused on Brisbane as the river there peaked at its highest level for nearly 40 years, 60 miles to the west, in the fertile Lockyer Valley, a freak storm triggered flash floods that virtually wiped several small farming towns off the map.
A close-knit community of a few hundred people, Grantham is now a wasted landscape of rubble and mud. The place looks as if someone has rampaged through with a giant wrecking ball. Queensland’s prime minister, Ms Anna Bligh noted “the way that the town has been literally picked up and turned around and deposited in fields and roads.”
Our comment: A research scientist at Reading University in England, Nicholas Clingaman, said that this has all been the worst flooding we’ve seen in the last several decades. He said that one cause was a weather pattern called La Nina. He continued to say it was “the strongest La Nina that we’ve seen in several decades.” He explained that it is a cooling of the sea temperatures of the tropical Pacific Ocean, which brings about more rainfall in the western Pacific and less on the eastern Pacific side of South America. It’s the opposite to El Nino which brings about more rainfall in the eastern Pacific and less in the western Pacific. The Australian floods and those in the Philippines are linked to La Nina, but not those of Brazil. It is felt that these patterns will last for the next five years. Once more a change to the climatic pattern.
POPULATION GROWTH
The Guardian – 14th January – Little big planet. … It is only 12 years since the six billion mark was reached. And just 100 years ago, the human population stood at 1.6 billion. The urgent search for solutions to population growth has been a hot topic ever since Thomas Malthus published An Essay on the Principle of Population in 1798, stating that the “… power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man.”
It was said in a recent French report that, in fact, there are more than enough resources to feed the world, … (but) the real problem is that we see huge inequities in consumption whereby, for example, the average American has the same carbon footprint as 250 Ethiopians. The French report concluded bluntly that “the rich must stop consuming so much.” The article continued: “Stood shoulder to shoulder, the entire human population could fit within the city limits of Los Angeles. We’ve got more than enough land upon which to collectively sustain ourselves. We would like to see a gradual decline in population, but a rapid decline in consumption habits.”
Our comment: This answer is no answer! It is unrealistic! However would it be achieved? It would need an international authority with sufficient strength to be able to enforce movements. Then where would the people go? And who would go where? There’s plenty of room in North Africa, just got to all pull together to make the Sahara fertile! The Chinese say it would take 300 years at best to bring the Gobi desert to fertility. Then according to the bible in Revelation chapter 20 following the return of Jesus Christ its going to take 1,000 years to bring the world to the point where it is fertile and productive once more. In Isaiah 35:1 it says “… the desert shall rejoice and blossom as the rose.” In Amos 9: 13 we read this “… the days come, says the Lord, that the plowman shall overtake the reaper, and the treader of grapes him that sows seed … ; But then there will be the type of authority and power which is needed.
