JUNE 10 2017
WILL A MELTING ARCTIC CAUSE A PANDEMIC?
Margaret MacMillan, in her book THE WAR THAT ENDED PEACE, suggests that the Influenza in 1918-19, which killed some 40 million people, was caused by churning up the micro-laden soil in Northern France and Belgium. That churning up was the result of the exploding of tens of millions of shells fired by thousands of heavy guns in the four years of trench-warfare in 1914-18.
War always has consequences beyond the immediate battlefield. The World-wide Influenza was either directly or indirectly one of them. The terrible pandemic especially affected young adults. I have known several orphans in Tweed, whose parents died while they were in their infancy and were adopted by relatives.
World War I reminds me of bringing Meals on Wheels to Albert McTaggart, who in 1990 was 90 years old. He told me how he had volunteered at the age of 16 to fight in World War I, lying about his age. In 1917 he was wounded, and, using his rifle as a crutch, wandered away from the frontline in search of a First Aid station but stumbled and fell into a water-filled crater, unable to go on. An English officer spotted him, and brought him safely to a field hospital.
In the hospital train to England, up 4 high, he heard from a fellow across from him that his entire platoon had been killed just after his departure. He told me that, before he crawled away from his post, he prayed aloud for his comrades in arms, none of whom survived.
All this pales compared to today’s battle grounds, this time not confined to Northern France and Southern Belgium, but truly UNIVERSAL.
Today’s war is waged every hour, every minute, and every second all over the world. The battle fields are not limited to the traffic arteries in the major cities of the world, Beijing, Tokyo, New Delhi, L.A. New York, Toronto, where untold millions of automobiles – mostly with one person steering 2,500 lbs of steel and plastic – do their polluting work.
No, the most dangerous battlegrounds are far, far away from human habitations, in inhospitable places circling the North Pole, stretching far inland, where no longer the reindeer and the buffalo roam, but where the frozen tundra, covering millions of square miles, is in the process of melting.
The unnatural warming there – a full SIX PLUS CELSIUS above normal – is causing the same conditions as on the battle fields now 100 years ago in Europe when the millions of shells churned up the soil so thoroughly that dangerous microbes were released.
There is the real danger now that the Arctic soil, finding itself completely transformed after many millennia of a frozen state will now release the megatons of methane and trillions times trillion of microbes that normally are solidly encased. I fear that these immense areas in Siberia and Canada, in Alaska and Greenland, will cause the world to be exposed to the two-fold dangers of unbelievable rises in temperature and hordes of unknown bacteria for which the human race has no antidotes.
The world has seen disasters before.
The book RATS, LICE, AND HISTORY by Hans Zinsser, leaves no doubt that pandemics are part of the human make-up. Zinsser writes: “The sixth century was a period of calamity rarely equaled in history…..A succession of earthquakes, volcanic eruptions – Vesuvius in 513 was one – and famines preceded and accompanied the series of pestilences which wrought terror and destruction throughout all of Europe, the Near East, and Asia for over sixty years. Of the natural convulsions, the most destructive was an earthquake, followed by conflagration, which destroyed Antioch in 526, killed between 200,000 and 300,000 inhabitants, and frightened away most of the remainder…… A succession of floods and famines added to the general misery. ….All this was accompanied by the great plague of Justinian. After the plague had ceased, there was so much depravity and general licentiousness that it seemed as though the disease had left only the most wicked.”
Some 700 year later, Otto Friedrich, in THE END OF THE WORLD, devotes a long chapter to THE BLACK DEATH 1347-50. In a European population of less than 100 million, 30 million, at least 1 in 3, died. These were confusing times, both religiously and nature-wise. Again there were droughts, famines, swarms of locusts, deluges of frogs, lizards and scorpions, forcing rats and other rodents in search of food. Heavy rains in 1314 severely limited the grain harvests, so that the general physical well-being was greatly impaired, not unlike today. The rain persisted into the next year as well, causing the price of food to skyrocket.
Barbara W. Tuchman in her A DISTANT MIRROR, subtitled “The Calamitous 14th Century”, makes special mention of THE BLACK DEATH. She also points out that the epidemic occurred after the world population had experienced a series of poor harvests, enfeebling the humans there to such an extent that the disease found ready victims.
Today is not different, yes we live longer, but no, we are not very healthy.
Global Health
According to the influential medical magazine The Lancet, 90 percent of the world population already suffers from some sort of disease, telling us that the general overall health is poor. Also there is not a person in the world free of chemical contaminants, due to the universal presence of airborne particles originating from automobile exhausts, electricity generating stations, pesticides and fertilizers. This comes from the tens of thousands of compounds from our oil-based industrialization which is changing the very essence of humanity. Obesity too has become a world-wide curse, another symptom of poor health and the wrong food sources.
We now are again some 700 years. Our civilization totally dependent on fossil fuels, has done more harm than simply filling the air with CO2 and threatening our very physical existence. It also has given us a false sense of spiritual security, as if we no longer need God. It reminds me of Psalm 2, depicting the very situation we have today:
Why this tumult among nations, Among peoples this useless murmurings?
They arise, the kings of the earth (Trump?)
Princes plot against the Lord and his anointed.
He who sits in the heavens laughs;
The Lord is laughing them to scorn.
Then he will speak in his anger,
His rage will strike them with terror.
We would expect that, in times of immense distress people would turn to organized religion for solace and encouragement, but Barbara Tuchman in her “A DISTANT MIRROR” disputes that. She writes, “The plague accelerated discontent with the Church at the very moment when people felt a greater need of spiritual reassurance. There had to be some meaning in the terrorizing experience God had inflicted. If the purpose had been to shake man from his sinful ways, it had failed. Human conduct was found to be “wickeder than before,” more avaricious and grasping, more litigious, more bellicose, and this was nowhere more apparent than in the Church itself…..When those who have the title of shepherd play the part of wolves,” said Lothar of Saxony, “heresy grows in the garden of the Church.” While the majority of people doubtlessly plodded on as before, dissatisfaction with the Church gave impetus to heresy and dissent, to all those seeking God through the mystical sects, to all the movements for reform which were ultimately to break apart the empire of Catholic unity.”
So far A DISTANT MIRROR.
J.H. Bavinck confirms this. In his commentary on REVELATION he writes about the last days, the current era, and I translate:
“The culmination of the natural disasters and the pinnacle of pain are caused by an earthquake (Revelation 16: 18) “No earthquake like it has ever occurred since man has been on earth.” The seismographs in the capitals shake wildly and record numbers beyond any ever registered. And the houses tumble, the palaces are ruined. No human technological expertise is any help. Nothing can withstand this force of nature: no nuclear bomb has this devastating power. Now an endless series of ever more frightening events roll over the world.
The catastrophes mentioned here extend to the entire cosmos. They affect people everywhere. Earlier we have seen how in the disastrous happenings preceding the last things, two types of distress can be detected. There are calamities that originate from above, that find their source in nature and there are those that are the result of human action. Here only the first type is mentioned. It is as if the tamed earth, given by God as a gift to humanity as his own domain, is now rebelling, is now rising up against her tormentor. It is as if nature that, for so long, for so many centuries, has faithfully furnished humanity with all its needs, has now become recalcitrant, and full of revenge has thrown itself upon humanity. And this humanity, this so superior human race, with her atomic energy, her mighty medical system, her military prowess, and her entertainment establishment all of which made her feel so immense mighty and strong, these same men and women are now in a total humiliating fashion confronted with the fact that in the final analysis they amount to nothing, that they are a mere rag that is thrown out as useless.”
He continues, “But not now. There’s not a trace of confusion to be noticed. Of course people are unsure. Of course there also is a good amount of despair. But conversion? No, they cursed God the God of the heavens! Strange, these modern men and women, who had become convinced that the concept ‘god’ did not exist anymore, all these people started to curse. They always had told themselves that they no longer believed in God, that this fairytale was something they had ridiculed all their lives. They had left the church in droves already long ago and had assured their neighbors that God was dead and that they, in line with the spirit of the age, had nothing to do with him anymore. On the census they had written “no church affiliation”, so how was it now possible that suddenly God was back, risen from the dead? How come that these educated people, so up-to-date with everything, with the latest gadgets, who never did need God, now suddenly seem to remember that he exists after all? Was there in the deepest crevices of their mind a secret notion that the meaning of life is that we always are in a conversation with him who made our lives and even guides us? Have they understood this more profoundly than they would admit to themselves and to others? In any case, at this so critical juncture, now that the flames of defeat leap up high and start to scorch their fragile body frames, now irrepressibly the certainty arises that God is there after all. And these nervous, these out of balance persons clench their small fists threatening the Lord of the heavens. They wished they could aim a guided missile and so shoot God from his throne. They would crucify him again if they could, would cast him into the deepest black hole, dead, forever defeated. But all they can do is belch out their powerless rage against him who now so mightily intervenes in this minor league game of human creation and construction.
So far a small section of Bavinck’s Dutch book on REVELATION.
WILL A MELTING ARCTIC CAUSE A PANDEMIC?
Few people in the West have ever heard of the Yamal Peninsula in western Siberia, and fewer still have heard of an anthrax outbreak there, now about a year ago, among its nomadic reindeer herders. But the Russian government launched a major effort to evacuate the whole group while shipping in medical experts plus its Chemical, Radioactive and Biological Protection Corps to sterilize the region. As of Aug. 2 2016, over 2,500 reindeer had died and 20 herders had confirmed anthrax.
We don’t know the future. We do know that, as a generation, we sucked out and dug up carbon fuels buried for millions of years. They have given us luxurious conveniences even Solomon in all his glory could not have imagined.
We now are like the Prodigal Son who wasted his inheritance, and, totally destitute, returned to his Father. (We find the entire story in Luke 15: 11-32.)
He wasted his future. We wasted our future.
Our Father too will welcome us back when we repent.