AUGUST 16 2015
THE EARTH IS ANGRY
Almost every night, for a few minutes, I watch an American channel because it reports the ongoing weather disasters in the USA. And there are plenty of them this year. Last week I saw a dust storm in Arizona, floods in Colorado and New England, fires everywhere. All these happenings are now a daily occurrence.
True these unusual weather events happen in Canada too, but not to that extent. I think it has to do with Climate Change. James Lovelock in his book The Revenge of Gaia which has an equally telling subtitle: Earth’s Climate in Crisis and the Fate of Humanity, has in its Preface this sentence: “We have driven the Earth to a crisis state from which it may never, on a human scale, return to the lush and comfortable world we love and in which we grew up”.
Fond memories
I am old enough to remember those days when there were a mere 2 billion people in the world – compared to 7 billion plus – and the atmosphere was relatively at ease. Not so now. Worse, much worse is yet to come, but, strangely enough, we will not pay attention. Why Not?
Here is what Daniel Gilbert, professor of psychology at Harvard, says: “Our brain is essentially a get-out-of-the-way machine. That’s why we can duck a baseball in milliseconds, but threats that unfold over generations fail to trigger our reactionary instincts…… Many environmentalists say climate change is happening too fast,” Gilbert says. “No, it’s happening too slowly. It’s not happening nearly quickly enough to get our attention.”
So don’t expect the world to change when all the governments on the earth will send delegates to Paris in November to discuss “The State of the Climate”. We will read frightening press releases, hear nations make great promises, and the war against the earth will continue, and the earth will become more angry than ever.
Last week Friday in the New York Times I saw an editorial “How California is winning the drought”. Pure hogwash. The earth is especially angry in California, a state built on sand. The Bible warns us not to build on a shifty foundation because when the storms come or drought or too many people clamoring for gold in the so-called “Golden State” then something has to give.
Here is what’s really happening: “California’s rivers and lakes are running dry, but its deep aquifers are also rapidly disappearing. The majority of the 40 million Californians are already drawing on this last reserve of water, and they are doing so with such intensity and without restriction that sometimes the ground sinks beneath their feet. The underground reservoir collapses. This in turn destabilizes bridges and damages irrigation canals and roads.
This groundwater is thousands of years old, and it is not replenishing itself. Those who hope to win the race for the last water reserves are forced to drill deeper and deeper into the ground.”
And not only California. I have a well, and fortunately it contains enough water to provide a life-long water supply for more than 10 families. But it is on an electric pump, so, in case electricity fails- and today anything is possible because the earth everywhere is angry – I have a hand pump, a frost free one, because in the winter with an ice storm, who what happens.
Consider this: “The Earth may be a blue planet when seen from space, but only 2.5% of its water is fresh. That water is wasted, polluted and poisoned and its distribution is appallingly unfair. The world’s population has almost tripled since 1950, but water consumption has increased six-fold. To make matters worse, mankind is changing the Earth’s climate with greenhouse gas emissions, which only exacerbates the injustices. When we talk about water becoming scarce, we are first and foremost referring to people who are suffering from thirst. Close to a billion people are forced to drink contaminated water, while another 2.3 billion suffer from a shortage of water. How will we manage to feed more and more people with less and less water? But people in developing countries are no longer the only ones affected by the problem. Droughts facilitate the massive wildfires in California, and they adversely affect farms in Spain.”
We can go without food for a few weeks: we need water every day, that’s why I have a hand pump, just in case.
Yes, the earth is angry. It reminds me of Isaiah 24. It says it better than I can put it:
The earth is defiled by its people
The have disobeyed the laws
Violated the statutes and
Broken the everlasting covenant.
Therefore a curse consumes the earth;
Its people must bear their guilt.
Therefore earth’s inhabitants are burned up,
And very few people are left.
No wonder that the New Testament repeats it in Romans 8: 22, where it says that: “We know that whole creation has been groaning as in pain of childbirth right up to the present time.”
These words were written thousands of years ago, confirming that soil degradation and the onset of deserts, due to overgrazing and deforestation has been going on for many, many centuries.
Thomas Homer-Dixon, in his The Upside of Down. Catastrophe, creativity and the renewal of civilization, writes that the Fall of Rome now some 1550 years ago was due to “greater complexity, the empire needed more and more energy, and eventually it couldn’t find enough.”
History is repeating itself. The earth is angry, because its very essence is being consumed.
A friend sent me an article by Andre Nikiforuk, which appeared in The Tyee. The article’s title is The Earth’s Battery is running Low. The subtitle is “We’ve drained our planet’s stored energy, scientists say, with no rechargeable plug in sight.”
The article starts with the following words:
“In the quiet of summer, a couple of U.S. scientists argued in the pages of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that modern civilization has drained the Earth — an ancient battery of stored chemical energy — to a dangerous low.
“Although the battery metaphor made headlines in leading newspapers in China, India and Russia, the paper didn’t garner “much immediate attention in North America,” admits lead author John Schramski, a mechanical engineer and an ecologist.
“In the paper, Schramski and his colleagues at the University of Georgia and the University of New Mexico compared the energy state of the Earth to “the energy state of a house powered by a once-charged battery supplying all energy for lights, heating, cooling, cooking, power appliances and electronic communication.
“It took hundreds of millions of years for photosynthetic plants to trickle charge that battery. Those plants converted low quality sunlight into high-quality chemical energy stored either in living biomass (forests and plankton) or more lastingly in the dead plants and animals that became oil, gas and coal. But in just a few centuries humans and “the modern industrial-technological informational society” have spent that stored chemical energy and depleted the Earth-space battery.
“Society partly drains the battery by converting forests and grasslands into agricultural fields. It diminishes the battery further by burning fossil fuels to plow fields and build cities. Human engineering of one kind or another has left a mark on 83 per cent of the planet. In essence, humans depleted the battery to grow exponentially and spend more energy.
“As the battery discharges,” the scientists write, the cooling, heating and electronic services provided to the house “become unavailable and the house soon becomes uninhabitable.”
“The Earth is like a dying cell phone at an airport, says Schramski, but with no rechargeable plug in sight. As we burn organic chemical energy, we generate work to grow our population and economy. In the process the high-quality chemical energy is transformed into heat and lost from the planet by radiation into outer space,” explains Schramski and his colleagues.
“Oil companies, dams and solar networks can’t create energy: they can only tap in to the flow and transform it into a useful form. And in the process of transforming the fossil fuels, heat is lost into the atmosphere and eventually space. All of this energy consumption from stored biomass has left an ugly trail of carbon dioxide and methane emissions that are now creating climate chaos and acidifying oceans. According to Schramski, the stored living biomass portion of the battery represents the basis for sustaining all life on Earth and is what distinguishes us from the other planets in our solar system.
“At the time of the Roman Empire, the Earth held 1,000 billion tonnes of carbon in living biomass, which equaled about 35 zettajoules of chemical energy. Meanwhile chain welding, soil eroding and bulldozing humans have whittled the Earth’s net primary production down to 550 billion tonnes of carbon in biomass and thereby depleted the battery to 19.2 zettajoules. That’s a significant drop.
“I’m not an ardent environmentalist; my training and my scientific work are rooted in thermodynamics,” Schramski says. “These laws are absolute and incontrovertible; we have a limited amount of biomass energy available on the planet, and once it’s exhausted, there is absolutely nothing to replace it. The paper goes on: “The Earth is in serious energetic imbalance due to human energy use. This imbalance defines our most dominant conflict with nature. It really is a conflict in the sense that the current energy imbalance, a crisis unprecedented in Earth history, is a direct consequence of technological innovation.”
So far my quote from this magazine.
In other words: we humans have monopolized the earth at the expense of animals: almost all big animals are gone. Almost all fish has disappeared. Almost all water is wasted. How long can we still last?
If these calculations of the earth’s total stored energy of 1000 billion tons of stored energy, of which we have used up 450 billion tons, that means that there are only 550 billion left. We are almost half-way, almost to the tipping point. Having arrived there, red warning lights will show up, and even more disasters will further drain the earth’s battery. As more forests burn, diminishing the capacity to absorb Green House Gases, and the burning itself adding more and more, and as methane escapes from the ever warming tundra, the pace speeds up, exponentially.
Jesus once accosted the Pharisees, in Matthew 23: 24, saying, none too politely: “You blind guides, you strain out a gnat and swallow a camel.” These words were spoken just before Matthew 24, which has as its heading: Signs of the End of the Age. In that chapter Jesus says that “The Angry Earth” will be totally destroyed by you, stupid people, who strain out the smallest of the smallest animal, a gnat, or do a bit of recycling, but fly everywhere in the world for a vacation, creating tons of Green House Gases, swallowing a camel.”
We have painted ourselves in an impossible situation. We are so addicted to fossil fuel that it will kill us if we continue and also kill us when we stop using it.
Well, whatever I say or write will hardly make a difference. Prof. Gilbert discovered that our brains simply cannot fathom the fact that we are on a suicidal path. For centuries, from as far as we can remember, the human race has thrived, has grown in expertise, has become more clever than ever, so we simply look to the past and extrapolate it to the days to come. Never before have we experienced a total global collapse. Yet the Bible tells us so in unambiguous terms. Matthew 24, Jesus’ very own words, spells it out, drumbeat after drumbeat. He hammers it out again in Revelation. Actually the entire Bible confirms it. 2 Peter 3: 10 reaffirms Jesus’ words:
“But the Day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night. The heavens will disappear with a roar and the elements will be destroyed by fire, and the earth and everything in it will be laid bare”.
That’s what will happen to the angry earth: it will be totally purified and from there on it will be at peace forever.