FEBRUARY 11 2017
THE ARCTIC’S ACUTE AGONY
The late Dr. Barry Commoner coined the four laws of ECOLOGY.
They are:
1. Everything is connected to everything else.
2. Nothing disappears: there is no such thing as waste.
3. Nature knows best.
4. Nothing comes free: the bill always comes sooner or later.
When we see that the Arctic experiences a 30 Degree Celsius spike in temperature, then this has universal implications because “EVERYTHING IS CONNECTED TO EVERYTHING ELSE”.
Way up there in the far North, we are distorting the nature of nature because for many millennia the Arctic has been a place where the seal and the polar bear had their play grounds which included a lot of ice. God created it that way.
Scientists now discover that the ice there and on Greenland is melting at a rate 600 percent faster than earlier estimates. The ice on Greenland rests on solid land, which means that its melting directly influences the world’s sea levels, endangering such low lands as The Netherlands and Florida, while in the Arctic the ice is free floating. There the danger is different. There, in the shallow waters, only 50 – 100 meters deep, are Giga (Giga is billion x billion) Tons of methane buried under the ice cover. This suggests that millions, perhaps billions of years ago, the region had a tremendous amount of vegetation – how else to explain the presence of this lethal gas? – but God, in his wisdom had decreed that the North- and the South Poles should leave that dangerous gas forever buried, because NATURE KNOWS BEST, which actually means that we must follow God’s plan for creation.
What then is God’s plan for creation?
God’s plan for creation is called ”The Kingdom of Heaven.”
This kingdom has a cosmic character, which means that it comprises the entire world as we have come to know it. Not only are we humans part of that Kingdom, but it also includes the worlds of animals and plants. Yes, even the angels are part of this wider context: they too have a place in the harmonious totality of God’s Kingdom.
“In the beginning” in that Kingdom – which we might call NATURE – all parts of the world were attuned to each other: EVERYTHING WAS PERFECTLY CONNECTED TO EVERYTHING ELSE. Nowhere was there a false note, a dissonant that disturbed the unity, as everything fitted harmoniously into the greater scheme of the totality.
We have undone that sacred plan. We went our own way, and now reap what we have sown. Just recently the Arctic, when there was not a single ray of sunshine, saw temperatures 30 Degrees Celsius above normal. Since EVERYTHING IS STILL CONNECTED TO EVERYTHING ELSE, this has dire consequences for all of us. We have upset the normal. We have transgressed the very laws of nature and must face the after effects. The unexpected rise in temperature there will harm the entire globe, will influence everything and everybody everywhere. How and to what extent the very near future will tell.
That sudden spike signals that something vital has died. Not only the polar bears and the seals; not only the myriads of other living matter that only thrive in very cold temperatures, it also introduces elements in these waters that always were foreign there, did not fit, were alien elements.
What are the consequences?
Death. The Bible says that ‘the wages of sin are death.’ Our distorting of God’s Holy Creation, is SIN, a sin that affects us as humans, but equally exerts a toll on the environment, influences everything that surrounds us as we breathe in the air, eat stuff grown on the soil, drink its water.
Our own body temperature normally is 37 degrees Celsius. We have a fever when it goes up to the 38-39 range and we die when it exceeds 45. Does an increase of 30 degrees above normal somewhere on earth also spell doom?
The law “NOTHING DISAPPEARS: THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS WASTE” sounds at odds with a world overflowing with refuse: everywhere municipalities have to cope with mountains of garbage, while discarded electronics are becoming a hazard, and what about the trillions of plastic particles saturating the oceans? Since our world is a closed system, from which nothing can escape, our throw-away-society is distorting ‘nature’ and signals again another symptom of our mounting sins against creation, another sign of ignoring the laws of ecology which also includes that “THERE IS NO FREE LUNCH.”
Sooner or later the bill appears at our doorsteps, and, by all indications, the due date is NOW.
The greatest storage of waste is found in the air and in the oceans. Plastic there is a problem, but a much greater hazard is the warming of the world’s waters, increasingly evident in the ARCTIC.
IS THE END NIGH?
ARCTIC NEWS thinks so. It poses the question:
WILL HUMANS BE EXTINCT BY 2026?
A mere nine years?
Here is what it says:
“In the Arctic, vast amounts of carbon are stored in soils that are now still largely frozen. As temperatures continue to rise and soils thaw, much of this carbon will be converted by microbes into carbon dioxide or methane, adding further greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. In addition, vast amounts of methane are stored in sediments under the Arctic Ocean seafloor, in the form of methane hydrates and free gas. As temperatures rise, these sediments can get destabilized, resulting in eruptions of huge amounts of methane from the seafloor. Due to the abrupt character of such releases and the fact that many seas in the Arctic Ocean are shallow, much of the methane will then enter the atmosphere without getting broken down in the water.
“What makes the situation so dangerous is that huge eruptions from the seafloor of the Arctic Ocean can happen at any time. We can just count ourselves lucky that it hasn’t happened as yet. As temperatures continue to rise, the risk that this will happen keeps growing.”
The article then shows a graph which somehow I am unable to reproduce in my blog, but which I can transpose into prose. This illustration shows a number of feedbacks: extreme weather such as heatwaves causes fires, which generates CO2 emissions, which melts the Arctic ice, which makes ice and snow to disappear which allows the dark waters to absorb more heat which accelerates the heating process, which warms the shallow Arctic seas to the point where the Giga tons of methane are released, a gas up to 100 times as lethal as CO2, causing the Global temperature to rise by TEN DEGREES Celsius by 2026, less than 10 years from now.
Here’s how the ARCTIC NEWS describes this:
“This dangerous situation has developed because emissions by people have made the temperature of the water in the Arctic Ocean rise, and these waters keep warming much more rapidly than the rest of the world due to a number of feedbacks.
“One such feedback is the retreat of the sea ice, which in turn makes the Arctic Ocean heat up even more, as much sunlight that was previously reflected back into space by the sea ice, instead gets absorbed by the water when the sea ice is gone.
“Without sea ice, storms can also develop more easily. Storms can mix warm surface waters all the way down to the bottom of shallow seas, reaching cracks in sediments filled with ice. This ice has until now acted as a glue, holding the sediment together. As the ice melts, sediments can become destabilized by even small differences in temperature and pressure that can be triggered by earthquakes, undersea landslides or changes in ocean currents. This past week there were hurricane storms raging in the Arctic!!.
“As a result, huge amounts of methane can erupt from the seafloor of the Arctic Ocean and once this occurs, it will further raise temperatures, especially over the Arctic, thus acting as another self-reinforcing feedback loop that again makes the situation even worse in the Arctic, with higher temperatures causing even further methane releases, in a vicious cycle leading to runaway global warming.”
What next?
Such a temperature rise in the Arctic will not stay within the borders of the Arctic. It will trigger huge firestorms in forests and peatlands in North America and Russia, adding further emissions including soot that can settle on mountains, speeding up the melting of glaciers and threatening to stop the flow of rivers that people depend on for their livelihood.
These developments can take place at such a speed that adaptation will be futile. More extreme weather events can hit the same area with a succession of droughts, cold snaps, floods, heat waves and wildfires that follow each other up rapidly. Within just one decade, the combined impact of extreme weather, falls in soil quality and air quality, habitat loss and shortages of food, water, shelter and just about all the basic things needed to sustain life can threaten most, if not all life on Earth with extinction.
How much have temperatures risen and how much additional warming could take place over the next decade?
I repeat:
The article signals that, because of the different feedbacks and reinforcing elements the potential global temperature rise by 2026 from pre-industrial levels could be as high as 10 degrees Celsius.
So far scientists intimately involved with the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has been extremely cautious and this has given the world a false sense of security. The ice melting on Greenland is one example, where it now appears that this process has seen a 600 percent increase. None of the reports even mention methane as a danger, because the rapid acceleration there is seen as too alarming, and TRUMP, no doubt, will label such a news item as FAKE.
There is nothing FAKE about the Bible which repeatedly states that the DAY OF THE LORD will come as a thief in the night. Just look up 1 Thessalonians 5: 2 or 2 Peter 3: 10 or Matthew 24: 43.
Revelation 18 too hints at that, where the merchants, AMAZON, WALMART, COSTCO, all with their warehouses full with merchandize, are “terrified that this is happening” (verse 15-17). Suddenly they all are stuck with billions of dollars of unsold stuff. The owners and operators of these retailers are completely caught off guard: there were no news reports that this would happen. Everything seemed totally normal.
A TEN DEGREE Celsius increase makes true the words of 2 Peter 3: 10-13, where Peter saw this happening, without really knowing what he was talking about. He wrote (verse 12) “That day will bring about the destruction of the heavens by fire and the elements will melt in the heat.”
That’s what a TEN DEGREE jump in the world-wide temperature will do to everything. The Arctic’s Agony is our agony. When one part of the body that is our earth suffers, the entire body suffers. The agony is so acute that it will spell the end.
That’s why the earth needs total purification. We have so thoroughly distorted God’s GOOD creation, HIS KINGDOM that only an intense world-wide holocaust will cleanse the earth, and all it contains, from the damage we have caused and increasingly inflict.
Still the laws of ECOLOGY hold true. In spite of total conflagration NOTHING WILL DISAPPEAR except sin. The essence of whatever is or was will remain. From the ashes will arise – see Revelation 21 – “A NEW HEAVEN” to replace the one that was saturated with undue amounts of CO2 and Methane, and “A NEW EARTH” replacing the one that was filled with garbage, Monsanto seeds and all the human detritus that has made living a God-honoring existence nearly impossible.
Peter, this same apostle who had denied Jesus three times when the chips were down, was nevertheless chosen by Jesus to play an important part in the coming of the Kingdom: he had learned his lesson, as is evident from his concluding remarks: (verse 14) “make every effort to be found spotless, blameless and at peace with him.”
That ‘peace’ includes shedding tears for the Arctic’s Acute Agony.