August 7 2016
BOMBS: THE PLANET’S POSSIBLE BATTLE PLAN
But ask the animals, and they will teach you,
or the birds in the sky, and they will tell you;
or speak to the earth, and it will teach you,
or let the fish in the sea inform you. Job 12:8
Even the stork in the heavens knows her times, and the turtledove, swallow, and crane keep the time of their coming, but my people know not the rules of the LORD. Jeremiah 8: 7
We are smart in some ways, and dumb, very dumb in others. Actually technology has made us quite stupid. Anybody can learn how to drive a car or finger a computer, but handling a team of horses is a different matter. It means that we have to read their minds, get in touch with the horses’ inner voices, and relate to them on their level. There is a reason why there is an expression: horse sense. Our love for machines, for the artificial, for the man-made stuff, has alienated us from God’s Primary Word, his creation.
Question: Have you spoken to the earth lately, except, perhaps in curses? “Speak to the earth” Scripture advises us. That really means that we engage in dialogue, study its ways, ask questions, show deep concern, but considering what’s happening out there, it is apparent that, rather than treating the earth as an equal we are downright discriminating against it.
Treat the earth as an equal? What sort of nonsense is that?
In Genesis 9 it is recorded that God, the creator, made a COVENANT with the earth. You know what that means? It means that God made the earth AN EQUAL PARTNER.
No wonder Nietzsche wrote that: “Sin against creation is the greatest sin.” A sin against creation is a direct affront to the CREATOR. When we say we love God but treat Creation with utter disdain and neglect, even abuse it continuously, our love for God is highly questionable. It is high time to acquire an acute earth-awareness. That mammals disappear because of our actions, that fish vanish through overfishing, that more birds die through insecticides to promote Monsanto poison, that we further and further remove ourselves from touching base with our fellow creatures, not only humans, but trees and plants as well, all this is a direct slap on the face of the Maker of it all.
Our fascination with matters mechanical stems from the notion that we are to dominate creation, from high-functioning animals down to the lowly amoebas. I don’t want to downplay progress. But the fact is that it has come at the expense of everything and everybody, and all this has spurred our spiritual insanity.
PROGRESS
For most of human history, economic progress moved at a crawl. According to the economic historian Bradford DeLong, from the first rock tools used by humanoids three million years ago, to the earliest cities ten thousand years ago, through the Middle Ages, to the beginning of the Industrial Revolution around 1800, living standards doubled (with a growth of 0.00002 percent per year). Another doubling took place over the subsequent period to 1870. Then, according to standard calculations, the world economy took off, thanks to the use of carbon fuels.
From 1870 to 1970 growth skyrocketed thanks to carbon fuels. According to (Dr.) J. R. McNeill in his AN ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY OF THE TWENTIETH-CENTURY WORLD: “No other century in human history can compare with the 20th for its growth in energy use…. My very rough calculation suggests that the world in the 20th Century used 10 times as much energy as the 1000 years before 1900.”
In the first stage of THE PLANET’S BATTLE PLAN we only have experienced the opening salvos. Much, much worse is yet to come.
RAIN BOMBS
Rain bombs are a new breed of severe storms. Ten to fifteen cm of precipitation, or even more, pours down in a mere hour. Such storms can destroy infrastructure in a matter of minutes. This happened in several place across the globe. In the US, Texas and other southern states suffer from never-before-seen flooding. The west of the country is soaring in heat. The east coast of Australia has been repeatedly hit by rain bombs, while Tasmania had to deal with never seen flooding. Everybody has seen the pictures of flooded streets in Paris. The Loire region got six weeks of rain in three days. In Germany the region of Baden Wurttemberg was been hit by torrential rains.
This is what we have done by burning Carbon fuels in untold quantities: we now have overwhelmed the climate by overloading our poor planet with a gigantic growth of untold trillions of tons of energy calories. Not even a total stop of all carbon-based energy use will now stop the destruction of God’s precious earth.
WIND BOMBS
We also experience more and more tornadoes, which are WIND BOMBS. They suddenly form in the sky and traverse with nuclear force on unsuspecting and unprepared regions. There is no antidote for these angry utterances who no longer are sporadic but ravage the earth with increasing ferocity.
POLITICAL BOMBS
Then there are POLITICAL BOMBS. Donald Trump is an excellent example of this new political expression, the man who can’t say SORRY, who, seeing already that he’s not going to become President, now says the game is rigged, a man spoiled from infancy, who simply cannot cope with a degree of adversity, upset by a baby crying. Cry-baby himself.
In Britain nobody expected that a majority would vote for Great Britain to leave the European Union. Other elections are coming up in Europe, which might further detonate the status quo.
STUPIDITY BOMBS
Not for nothing Television is called THE BOOB TUBE. Neil Postman in his AMUSING OURSELVES TO DEATH has been very prophetic there. Television not only leads to intellectual stupor, but physical death as well.
Gone is any commonsense; gone is a mature opinion on matters religious, political, natural or material. It now is becoming plain that a world out of kilter through distorting the climate also has infected our minds.
The entire world is a unity: with one part in chaos, everything else and everybody else has become contaminated. Polluted air and polluted water leads to polluted minds.
Proverbs 29: 18 hits it on the nose: WHERE THERE IS NO VISION THE PEOPLE PERISH. Harold Bloom in his THE AMERICAN RELIGION calls the Fundamentalists the KNOW-NOTHING Christians. That in the USA education is funded locally, where poor areas are deprived of decent schools and qualified teachers, has caused entire regions to suffer from a mental deficit and has seen a large segment of the population flock to TRUMP, taken in by his demagoguery, a man who even praises his adherents for their lack of mental skills. Unbelievable!
YES, WE LIVE IN INTERESTING TIMES THANKS TO CLIMATE CHANGE.
Sociologists call it implicatory denial. The reason why Republicans never ever uttered the word CLIMATE CHANGE during their convention (which I watched from the beginning to the end, and where my loathing for that party increased exponentially) was that uttering the word CLIMATE would imply that something be done about it. That would mean government action – taboo for the TRUMP Party – so the word CLIMATE was banned from the vocabulary.
I see a similar situation in the church, where the KINGDOM concept too is avoided, because making it a priority – as Jesus recommended in SEEK FIRST THE KINGDOM – means that we must deal with its root-meaning.
Actually the two concepts: CLIMATE CHANGE AND KINGDOM SEEKING are intimately connected.
But ask the animals, and they will teach you,
or the birds in the sky, and they will tell you;
or speak to the earth, and it will teach you,
or let the fish in the sea inform you. Job 12:8
Ever heard a sermon on that passage?
There is a close correlation between the disappearance of animals – birds, mammals, fish – the warming of the earth and the seas and Gospel preaching. God, when he created the cosmos, made a perfect world. He gave the seas the exactly correct temperature, the right size of forests, the perfect CO2 count in the air. But in the last 200 years – with the excessive use of oil and coal – matters changed and with it the human perspective. J. R. McNeill, in the book I mentioned above gave it the subtitle: SOMETHING NEW UNDER THE SUN. There is indeed something new that has not happened before in history: massive die-off of species and massive temperature change. Somehow the church has failed to see creation as GOD’S PRIMARY OR DIRECT WORD, while the Scriptures, the church’s sole interest, is GOD’S SECONDARY OR INDIRECT WORD. No wonder matters are screwed up.
THE WAR IS HEATING UP: LITERALLY
And that is just the beginning. The stage is set for all sorts of long vanished diseases to suddenly emerge and for which all resistance is long gone. All these and more are:
THE UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES OF THE CARBON AGE
Five weeks ago, thunderheads exploded into the skies, raining more than 330,000 bolts of lightning down upon the European continent in the course of just 8 hours. The blasts hammered a wide region stretching from Portugal through France and the UK, into the Alps, Italy, Germany and Denmark and on through south western Poland.
BROILING OCEANS
Ocean surface temperatures over a zone stretching from the Equator to Alaska now range between 1 and 6 C above late 20th Century values. A gigantic blob of hot water in the Pacific is feeding the growth of a powerful atmospheric wave. This will lead to new record hot temperatures to explode all over the US West coast and Canada. Of course, extreme events do happen from time to time. Such storms are supposed to happen once every 500 years or so, not in fast succession.
Don’t for a minute think that Climate Change will ever stop.
METHANE IS THE PLANET’S NUCLEAR THREAT.
We may complain about the heat in North America. It is well-known that overall we are experiencing the hottest year so far ever! Yet, this is nothing compared to the increase in overall temperature in and near the Arctic. Widespread Arctic melting means that potentially dangerous amounts of methane are pouring into an already toasty atmosphere. Permafrost stores about double the carbon that the atmosphere does. The better the bacteria there do, the more carbon joins the sky, the warmer earth becomes. We call that for some reason ‘positive feedback’: the process feeds on itself.
A heatwave that hit Siberia this summer has unleashed a horde of long-frozen bacteria that now threatens the entire world. An outbreak of anthrax in western Siberia has so far claimed the lives of 1,500 reindeer and made scores of people sick. There frozen carcasses defrosted and released the long-dormant bacteria. Siberia and Northern Canada, the entire region around the Arctic is a powder keg.
Where is the methane coming from?
Take China, with its massive methane belching coal mines and coal burning facilities. Or try Mongolia and Russia, with their leaky gas fields. Then there is the Middle East and Europe which burns high-methane brown coal. Indonesia also, where tropical forests are burning down, as well as the Amazon and the US where fracking has greatly increased methane emissions, and especially the Arctic where the permafrost spreading over many millions of square km is thawing.
But the real threat comes from the Arctic. In total, more than 1.300 billion tons of carbon is locked away in the permafrost soils. Much of this carbon is in the form of the frozen ice-methane called hydrate. That is now coming on stream. It’s like nuclear bombs exploding everywhere.
There was a warning, outlined in Deuteronomy 30: 15-17:
“Now I set before you today life and prosperity, death and destruction. For I command you today to love the Lord, to walk in his ways… then you will live and the Lord will bless you.” In other words, treat the earth as an equal.
“But if your heart turns away and you are not obedient, and if you are drawn to other gods-money, economic exploitation and growth- you will certainly be destroyed.”