WHEN?

JANUARY 20 2018

WHEN?

“If you do not think about the future, you cannot have one,” the British author John Galsworthy wrote at the beginning of the 20th Century.

Little could Galsworthy expect that in that near future close to 10 percent of people then living on earth would die a violent death: wars alone would kill 123 million and a pandemic would prematurely cut short the lives of more than 50 million.

I know I am a doomsayer. Sorry about that. Just imagine: in my life time, 1928-2018, this short span of 90 years, the earth’s population increased from a mere 2 billion to close to 7.5 billion of ever more greedy creatures. The first billion took forever, not reached until about 1820. Then thanks to coal, greater hygiene and better nutrition doubling took only a bit more than 100 years. Then, like a rocket, it shot up to where it is today. The problem with rockets is not that they go up: it’s their down trajectory that is dangerous.

I clearly remember both my grandparents. I have a picture how my paternal grandfather, sitting on a two-wheeled-horse-drawn large box, in which he transported his groceries, made the rounds of his rural customers, often bartering groceries for eggs. I vividly can picture my OMA – my maternal grandmother – walking up to his carriage, and handing over dozens of fresh eggs – truly free-ranch – and receiving her sugar and tea and coffee, probably they only items she needed for the week. The rest of the diet was all homegrown: heaps of potatoes and – by our standards today – the meals saturated with animal fats. The other part of the noon meal always was butter-milk porridge, which I was allowed to sweeten with syrup. All cooked or heated on a woodstove in a separate building, the so-called stoke-hut, which also had an added eating room.

Altogether a life so different from ours – no electricity – that there really is no comparison. In my way of thinking this way of life was sustainable for ages to come. Today this is no longer the case. The way in which we now grow in numbers and add pollutants to the planet is the direct cause of the warming of the earth with fatal climatic changes.

The Paris Climate Accord to stop this destructive way of life is piously preached but, to satisfy the growing need for corporate profits, senior care and health maintenance, belies this aim because for all nations Economic Growth is the real goal. That this lead to the destruction of the biosphere and to increasing polluting of air, water and soil, is buried in statistic that nobody reads anyway.

The WHO – the World’s Health Organization – has revealed how 36 percent of all deaths by lung cancer, and 34 percent of all strokes can be directly traced to air pollution, but since these mostly occur in China and India, little attention is paid to these numbers. The Indian minister of the environment took note of these ugly numbers and his reaction was, “air pollution is a nuisance but nobody dies of it.” The terrible truth is that more than a million pass away prematurely every year there from the dirtiest air in the world.

When fires threaten wealthy enclaves in California, people are evacuated making it possible to extinguish the blazes and eliminate the cause. Fires in the Arctic regions, however, are not news items, yet these fires threaten to melt the methane there.

Every one tree that burns, is not only one less to absorb our Green House Gases, it also by burning, adds to CO2 in the air. Believe me, today the entire world is playing with FIRE. No wonder 2 Peter 3: 10 tells us that “the elements will be destroyed by fire.”

IS THE U.N. A USELESS BODY?

The U.N. wants to follow the rule that prevention is better than a cure, seeing how the globe is heating up through climatic changes, so they organized the first world-wide climate conference in 1995, held every year since then.

Since then thousands of people from all over the world have attended these meetings, causing more air pollution and the waste of millions of papers, but no concrete results: on the contrary, the situation now basically is beyond repair.

Take the 2016 Paris accord. Almost all world leaders were present to celebrate the conclusion of a climate accord in which the emission of the GHG – Green House Gases – CO2 – Carbon Dioxide – would be tackled in a unified approach, limiting Climate Change to no more than 1.5 Degrees Celsius.

One of the pitfalls of the Paris Accord was that the statistics concerning the CO2 emissions cited by the different countries were way out of whack, while the immense amount of GHG generated by airplanes and sea transportation, were not included.

Even worse, such gases as methane, untold many times more dangerous, were also not counted. So really, the so celebrated Paris Accord on Climate Change was nothing but an expensive farce, also because none of it was binding.

THE THREE LARGEST POLLUTERS: Russia, China and the USA.

When, after much haggling the Paris Climate Accord was finalized and the signing nations had to ratify the agreement, Climate experts from the U.N. already warned that, in order to attain the goal of an temperature increase of 1.5 Degrees Celsius, the agreed CO2 reductions would have to be increased by 2-3 times as much.
Of course this will never happen: instead CO2 emissions are rising, the heating of the globe accelerates and with it climate changes that speed up Methane emissions, that gas 100 times more lethal than plain car exhausts.

The true nature of the intentions of the world’s nations became even clearer when, in order to keep up the pressure, about a month ago, on December 12, an extension of the Paris Accord was held.

Now that the nations were forced to affirm their goals, America, with Trump in power, went AWOL, absent in body, mind and spirit, while Russia failed to show up. Putin did notify the UN body that Russia’s ratification of the Paris Climate Accord, would take years.
Of course we know from experience that often delay is simply an excuse of total inaction.

The Russians are not stupid. Much of the country is in the Northern regions which actually may benefit from the warming of the earth. It may open up navigation in the Polar Regions and also make exploitation for rich mineral treasures possible there.

Other countries, such as Poland and Australia, have large coal deposits and aren’t too eager to curtail CO2 emissions.

And then there is China.

China, the second largest economy in the world, after the USA, may soon pass its closest rival. China is doing the impossible: it is relocating its hundreds of millions of rural dwellers and moving them into gigantic cities. That means that its CO2 output is bound to increase, and its water- and air pollution will go up in spite of its pledge to decrease it. True, it is the world leader in solar energy but so far not one vehicle runs on pure renewable energy and is manufactured that way. With a growing middleclass and rising expectations, with the people aiming for more energy rich products, the good intentions to reduce GHG will be just that.

Because of growing urbanization China will need hundreds of new coal-fired generation stations, while its expertise in these matters will be exported to scores of other countries especially to Africa.

TREES, TREES, TREES.

The only piece of creation that can save us, the TREE is also under tremendous stress. Trees, as we all know, inhale CO2 and exhale oxygen, the stuff we need every second of our lives, part of the rule of three for life: three minutes without air – oxygen – three hours exposure to the elements, three days without water, three weeks without food. Thus it is in our own interest that we preserve forests everywhere. But, as always, greed is difficult to suppress.

Brazil has granted permits to cut down large tracks of the rainforests to make place for the growing of soy beans, which then are fed to cows whose urine and shit – now an acceptable word since Trump calls countries ‘shit holes’ – are the second highest source of methane in the world. Also the red meat itself is the major source of dietary diseases.

So if all this is tallied up: the cutting down of trees – reducing carbon sinks – promoting mechanized agriculture – adding to GHG – increasing the number of cattle – significantly upping methane output – and creating an end product that promotes cancer and heart attacks, it truly makes me wonder whether there is any sanity left in the world.

Goodbye birds, goodbye flowers, goodbye people.

All this adds up to the inevitable: the warming of the planet cannot be stopped: it will only accelerate. These International Climate Change agreements are a farce – they only make matters worse. Governments subsidize coal, natural gas and oil exploration to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars, more than double what they allow for solar and wind energy. Nuclear energy is being abandoned as too costly, also because it offers possible terror targets.

But the climate conferences continue, of course: appearance of action needs to be preserved.

Then there is the Arctic.

Sam Canara writes THE ARCTIC NEWS. There the news is beyond frightening. While I am writing this, my outside temperature is Minus 15 Celsius. Guess what it is now in Alaska: temperatures there were as high as 18.5°C or 65.3°F on Jan. 14 and 15, 2018 in Metlakatla, Alaska. This is crazy, outrageous, unnatural and very, very dangerous for us.

There’s an island between the top of Norway and the Arctic called SVALBARD. The sea surface near Svalbard was as warm as 15.9°C or 60.8°F on January 12, 2018, while waves as high as 13.04 m or 42.8 feet battered the North Atlantic along Norway’s coast all the way to Svalbard on January 15, 2018.

Strong storms batter the ice and pulverize it, exposing the seas to more heat. On January 16, 2018 100% relative humidity was recorded over the Arctic Ocean. The Jet Stream reached speeds as high as 426 km/h or 264 mph on January 15, 2018.

In conclusion, as the Arctic is warming up faster than the rest of the world, Jet Streams are getting more wavy, resulting in more extreme weather events. Wind speed accelerates over warmer oceans, pushing more heat into the Arctic Ocean, threatening to cause eruptions of huge amounts of methane from the Arctic Ocean seafloor.
Once that process is in full swing – and it will come soon near a location like yours or mine – the population of the world which saw a rocketing increase in my life-time from a mere 2 billion in 1928 to close to 7.5 billion today, will see a reduction of many, many billions, not over a time-span of 90 years, but within 9 years: it’s the rocket’s down trajectory that is dangerous.

It’s not a question of “If”. It’s a question of “When.”

Sam Canara expects an increase in the world’s temperature of 10 degrees Celsius once the Arctic Methane starts exploding, which could happen within 5 years.

We are trapped into a vicious circle of positive feedback: the warmer it gets, the warmer it gets, the stormier it gets, the stormier it gets. What happens in the Arctic, what happens in Australia –heat- what happens in Africa drought will very soon happen everywhere.
We are dangerously ignorant of our own ignorance: human population increase, degradation of land, depletion of resources, accumulation of wastes, pollution of all kinds, abuse of technology, destruction of biodiversity, all this constitutes a threat unknown to previous generations.

The 20th century was the bloodiest one ever. The 21st one will top it by many more multiples.

“If you do not think about the future, you cannot have one.”

The only viable future lies in the Coming Kingdom of God: Creation Regained!!

Unless you prepare for this NOW, there won’t be a future for you.

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