Making Sense of a World
in Disarray
Does anyone still
remember what were the main concerns in the world at the beginning of the last
decade?
It was a turbulent
time too, but compared with what we are facing today it was an almost blissful
world.
The media headlines in
those days were about the destruction of the environment, the pollution of air,
land and water, the United Nations impotence in solving the world’s conflicts,
the recurrence of famines in
How long we have come
from those days. Although many of those
problems are still with us, they pale in comparison with what we are facing
today: global terrorism, Global Warming, Global Deeming, oil crisis, and excesses
of nature the likes of which humanity had never seen before. The planet is simply telling us that it can
no longer cope with the burden human beings have placed upon it, and is
fighting back vigorously.
One of the bright
lights at the beginning of the last decade was the hope that with the end of
the Cold War the world had entered a new age of peace, progress and
prosperity. That dream is in shambles
too. One only has to look at
This however is only
one of many worldwide intractable problems.
Gone are the days of carefree travel, of ‘glorious multiculturalism’, of
the hope of a world without borders and without trade barriers. The age of peace, progress and prosperity
that politicians so enthusiastically promised us at the beginning of the last
decade is as far now as it has ever been.
Instead, we have a world that has been turned up side down, in which no
one is sure of his future anymore.
About two decades ago,
I used to work as a broadcaster for a radio station that catered for the ethnic
communities of NSW (a part time job in addition to my full time work as
teacher/librarian), when news came that the Government had just passed
legislation that enshrined
multiculturalism in law. Every one in
that large studio applauded and jumped with joy, except myself. I withdrew to my desk in silence, head in
arms, wondering what would become of this wonderful country of ours. I could not believe that politicians could be
so myopic at what they had done.
Prior to that, no one
was prevented from congregating where people of the same language were more
common. Nobody objected to people having
their own ethnic clubs, as long as they were opened to other people as
well. There were German, Greek, Russian,
and other ethnic clubs, and nobody objected to their presence because they did
not form the kernel of ethnic ghettos.
Now there are suburbs in
Prior to that
legislation, we all had something in common that united us – the language and a
nascent colorful Australian identity that borrowed from every culture and made
us all proud Australians. Children of
second and third generation lost their ethnic traits and blended in the wider
Australian culture without anyone raising an eyebrow. Now, we have people who have been born and
educated in this country who confess their allegiance to other cultures and
religions, who openly advocate the destruction of the Australian society and
the imposition of some kind of intolerant caliphate.
Is multiculturalism at
fault for that? Not so much
multiculturalism, as multireligionism.
What politicians have not understood is that multiculturalism encourages
multireligionism, and that is what makes this policy unworkable and
dangerous.
The problem comes when
people identify themselves with culture/religion first and with
Cultures do not have
emissaries that seek to impose their tenets upon other people in the manner
that religions do. Politicians brought
up in the liberal tradition of the West, never imagined that their policy would
encourage migrants that come from intolerant societies to emulate and preserve
that kind intolerant ghetto in the heart of Australian society.
Multiculturalism encourages
opportunists to make a virtue out of preserving the old ‘culture’, and
discourages those with more progressive minds from blending into the new
culture and appearing to be less patriotic to the old one.
God loves variety and
cultural differences. That is why He
created nations and cultures that are different and colorful, but He put them
far away from each other and created geographical barriers that separated
them.
Whenever cultures
intermingled in the past, they never lived in peace for very long. The missionaries of the “new world order”,
however, ignored the lessons of the past, and now the whole world pays for
their ill-conceived experiments.
When God empowered the
nations of
Make no mistake about
it: multiculturalism is a brand, or branch, of communism. Under the guise of multiculturalism and human
rights, every evil thing has become legitimate.
This is why the law Courts have lost their compass and forgotten the
meaning of justice too. The justice
system does not even make a pretence of delivering justice anymore. Instead, it is geared towards upholding the
rights of the defendant by any means, while the rights of the victims are
seldom if ever mentioned.
Last year we witnessed
an unbelievable spectacle that nearly embroiled
In the weeks and days
leading to his execution, an unbelievable array of lawyers, barristers and
government officials made their way to the Singapore Government seeking to
upturn that verdict. When they did not
succeed, they threatened to take the case to the United Nations, to the International
Court of Justice, and other forums, but their efforts were cut short by that
man’s execution.
Our media noxiated us
for weeks on end with ‘news’ of his plight.
Huge vigils were held in his honor prior to his execution as if he were
a great celebrity, and an unseemly array of church memorials were held for him
after he was executed. Few seemed to
care that of the 26,000 shots that would have resulted from that haul of
heroin, at least 100 deaths would have occurred in the streets of
But
However, for that to
happen, the world needs a complete overhaul of its systems, politics and
religions. Unfortunately, it also needs
an overhaul of its population. For
unlike heaven, which is unlimited, this planet has reached its capacity. In a little over three decades, the word’s
population is supposed to double again.
But many of the world’s resources are already scarce (water, food and
oil among them), and one third of the world’s population goes to bed
hungry. Leaving aside the question of
whether the world can survive the current crises and reach that point, what
would life be like if twice as many people need to be fed? God loves His creation too much to let it
reach that unbearable point.
Unfortunately, that requires painful measures now. This is what the current world upheavals and
realignments are all about.
The problem with our
leaders is that they do not know the ways of God. They like to do things their own way, and
that is where the danger comes from.
National leaders will be forced to take measures to ensure the survival
of their people, but rather than turn to God and go about it the right way,
they will use the only method they are familiar with – war. This time, however, it will be a war to end
all wars, and all humanity. Here are the
immortal words of Jesus Christ.
"Take heed that
no one deceives you . . . "For many will come in My name, saying, 'I am
the Christ,' and will deceive many.” And you will hear of wars and rumors of
wars. See that you are not troubled; for all these things must come to pass,
but the end is not yet. "For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom
against kingdom. And there will be famines, pestilences, and earthquakes in
various places.
"Then there will
be great tribulation, such as has not been since the beginning of the world
until this time, no, nor ever shall be. And unless those days were shortened, no flesh would be saved; but for the elect's sake those days will be
shortened . . . "Assuredly, I say to you, this generation will by no
means pass away till all these things take place.” "Heaven and earth will pass away, but My
words will by no means pass away” (Mat 24:4-7, 21-22, 34-35).
This is what the
current world turmoil is all about: a warning from our Creator God that the
much talked about Great Tribulation is upon us.
But it need not be that way. It
is certainly not going to be that way for the people of God. We have God’s promise that His elect will be
spared those trials, and that for their sake the life of this planet will be
spared too.
God has not left the
world in ignorance about those things. The Christian Herald has taken His
messages to every corner of the world, particularly to national and religious
leaders. This, however, is not a
restricted work. Anyone can be part of
it. Anyone can become an elect of
God. Indeed, God is calling people
everywhere to turn around from their destructive ways to His wholesome and
dignified way of life. As the Apostles
of Jesus Christ have said:
Oil – The Blessing and the Curse of This World
Oil brought unsurpassed prosperity to
the world. Internal combustion engines
revolutionized transport and brought people together from all corners of the
world. Agricultural fertilizers, a
product of the petrochemical industry, produced the green revolution that cut
hunger in much of the developing world and transformed many impoverished
nations into exporters of agricultural products. Now all these achievements are under a cloud,
as much because oil also brought the greenhouse effect and the Global Warming,
as because the known deposits of oil are fast running out.
“As
petrol prices remain sky-high, Keith Sutter reports on a prophet of doom’s
early warning”
”Is today’s high price
of oil proof of a warning given half a century ago that the world would start
to run out of oil by this time? The
warning, by American scientist Dr Marion King Hubbert, was largely ignored at
the time, but now, 16 years after his death it’s attracting much interest. Historians looking back over the past 150
years will call this the Age of Oil. Oil
meets 40 per cent of the world’s energy needs and nearly 90 per cent of
transport needs. Oil is also important
for fertilizer, DVD’s, rubber, plastics and metals.
The
Debate over how
quickly oil is being exhausted is focused on the “
There is continuing
debate about when the earth does reach the
Oil is being used much
faster than new reserves are being found.
Seventy per cent of the oil used today was found at least 25 years
ago. On the other hand, the technology
of exploration has improved considerably.
Engineers are drilling in areas that would have been unthinkable a few
decades ago (such as the depths of the
The country plays a
key role in moderating the international price because it can flood the market
with a new supply and so prevent others from pushing up the price. But how stable is the regime? It knits together traditional tribal clans
and conservative Wahhabi Islamic clerics.
Ordinary Saudi subjects have an unusual life. They have a lifetime pension but are
restricted by the Wahhabi police in how they spend their money. The society is wealthy and open to technology
and new ideas, but there is a great control over citizens’ lives and so they
can’t reap many of the benefits of globalization.
There is no democracy
as such. Citizens don’t pay tax and so the ruling elite feels no obligation to
be accountable. The elite consists of
about 50,000 people; the precise number isn’t known because some men don’t know
how many children they have. Osama bin
Laden is one of about 50 children. The
elite governs 22 million people (of whom 16 million are Saudi). The other six million have been recruited to
do menial tasks (for example women aren’t allowed to drive and so about a
million chauffeurs are brought from abroad to drive them).
Osama bin Laden, the
black sheep of his billionaire family, wants to destroy the regime because he
thinks it’s not conservative enough.
Most of the September 11 hijackers were Saudi Arabians – rich,
well-educated young men who, apparently, had much to look forward to and yet
were bored. Bin Laden gave them a cause
to die for. The Saudi problem is just
the tip of the oil iceberg.
The current oil crisis
is different from the one the world faced in the early 1980’s, when the sudden
increase in the price of oil was subsequently offset by a massive increase in
the supply of oil. No such offset will
occur this time, because the oil is not there anymore. Many countries have seen their meager
reserves dwindle in recent years. Even
President Bush went to
war in the
Fundamentalism and
democracy are incompatible. Changing
those regimes to democracy is a social and demographic earth shift the likes of
which only God can achieve. It so
happens that He is about to do just that.
Zec 14:16 “And it shall come to pass that everyone who
is left of all the nations which came against Jerusalem shall go up from year
to year to worship the King, the LORD of hosts, and to keep the Feast of
Tabernacles.
Zec 14:17 And it shall be that whichever of the
families of the earth do not come up to Jerusalem to worship the King, the LORD
of hosts, on them there will be no rain.”
Zec
Zec
Now why would
When will these things
happen? Well, dark clouds are already
gathering on the skies of
The angel of the
‘bottomless pit” is none other than the angel of oil. This passage says that
the age of oil, which began about the middle of the nineteenth century, will
last for five months. Using the biblical principle of a day for a year, five
prophetic months add up to one hundred and fifty years. That brings the end of
the age of oil to about our time. What then?
The end of the age of
oil comes about one hundred and fifteen years after it begins, when its angel
is locked up again into the bottomless pit.
Oil cannot be allowed to run out altogether at this time, because at the
end of the
This passage tells us
that the angel of the bottomless pit is none other than the Devil. Any wonder that oil began as a great
blessing, and ended up as a curse that is destroying the world. Only the Devil’s gifts have a sharp edge to
them.
This brings us to the
question of the origin of oil.
Scientists say that oil comes from fossils that have been buried deep in
the ground over millions of years.
However, animals do not transform themselves into oil when they
die. If they are left exposed to the
elements of nature, they putrefy and dry out, leaving behind nothing but
bones.
If the amount of oil
that has come out of the ground in the last century and a half was formed from
fossils, mountains of animals would need to have been buried alive
suddenly. But how could that happen when
the same scientists say that no upheavals of the likes of Noah’s Flood, which
turned the world up side down, ever occurred, that geological times have always
run smoothly like they do these days?
No, oil has not come out of buried fossils under pressure and heat, but
put into the ground by the Creator at the time of the creation. He knew exactly
how much oil was needed for the two ages of oil that humanity would experience
in the course of time.
It is interesting to
note that at the end of the Millennium, during the second and short lived age
of oil, the people of Gog and Magog are gathered again against Jerusalem, not
from the far north where they are found before the Millennium, but from the
four corners of the earth. Now how did
they get spread out like that? Obviously
during the Great Tribulation. We warned
President Putin that unless he stopped trampling under foot his weaker
neighbors, his nation faces catastrophe, but he did not listen. When we pointed out that although he has a
nation that extends over nine time zones he still took land from the weakest
and smallest member of the Commonwealth of Independent States, he issued a
statement saying that he took land from the
During the First World
War, when
We will have more to
say about that shortly, but first this is what God has to say about that kind
of behavior.
Exo 22:7 "If a man delivers to his neighbor money
or articles to keep, and it is stolen out of the man's house, if the thief is
found,
Exo 22:8 he shall pay double. "If the thief is not found, then the
master of the house shall be brought to the judges to see whether
Exo 22:9 he has put his hand into his neighbor's
goods. "For any kind of trespass,
whether it concerns an ox, a donkey, a sheep, or clothing, or for any kind of
lost thing which another claims to be his, the cause of both parties shall come
before the judges; and whomever the judges condemn shall pay double to his neighbor.”
If Mr. Putin refuses
to return that treasure to Romania, with whom he does not have the best of
relations these days, he could return it to the Republic of Moldova, currently
his ally, but then part of Romania, and therefore just as entitled to that
treasure, or at least to part of it.
Otherwise it will surely burn his fingers and his pockets, and
unfortunately those of his people. It is a universal principle that cannot be broken
– upheld by none other than God Himself.
Those who try to break it, will themselves be broken.
“It is a fearful thing
to fall into the hands of the living God”
(Heb
Poor
Last year the European
Union granted the Romanian Government 1.3 billion euros to prepare the country
for accession to the EU. The Government
could spend only one sixth of that amount.
Such gross incompetence would have drawn the resignation or the sacking
of the Prime Minister anywhere else, except in
There are few
countries that are as endowed with natural resources and beauty as
“The European
Commission, said that inadequate financial control, inappropriate accounting,
and the lack of qualified personnel, which it described as “critical”, will
affect important projects after
“The
chief of the European Commission Delegation, Jonathan Scheele, also spoke
critically of a lack of vision in the administration of the Capital. “
Infernal traffic,
grossly deficient planning, dilapidated buildings, and yet the Government
wasted one billion euros. One dreads to
think what Jonathan Scheele might have found if he ventured beyond
We waited ten months
for the new government to take roots before we contacted it about the murder of
my mother, which occurred in 1991under the regime of Ion Iliescu, and which has
never been investigated. Not knowing
whom we should address, we sent e-mails to all ministers, hoping that at lest
one would take up her case and raise this question with the relevant
authorities. Instead, we received a reply from the Minister of Communications
who told us that what we have done is spam, and punishable under Romanian
law. Seeking justice for the murder of
your mother is spam in
When my mother’s
assailants heard that I was planning to revisit the country, they sent word
that if I returned I would have the same fate.
Apparently, “unforeseen accidents” still occur in
We reported in
previous editions how during communism, the Securitate had infiltrated and
decimated Romanian exile communities.
Now, apparently in a show of strength, to prove to us who is still in
charge, they have destroyed the one and only organization that maintained its
independence and fought for the community spirit during those dark days – the
Romanian Australian Cultural Society.
How did they do it? By tricking
its members into believing that those who were once Securitate agents have
changed their color and are now democrats.
Those impostors have taken hold of its leadership and have virtually
dismantled it. Along the way, they have
thrown with mud in the decent members that have kept the organization alive for
decades through countless sacrifices.
And guess which organization is flourishing again? The same that was once considered a hotbed of
Securitate agents and informers, which they called church. There is nothing sacred with those people
anymore. As they say, old habits are
hard to break. Or as the Scriptures say:
This is what this work
has been all about. We have cried aloud
the sins of the world, and shall continue to do so to the very end, in the hope
that people may turn around from their wicked ways, repent, turn to God, and be
saved.
Now we must return
briefly to
“In the later years”, when oil is on the wane,
Gog and Magog will come “from the far north” with a company of nations, that
includes
Is it a mere
coincidence that this alliance has the largest reserves of oil, the fuel of the
Devil, and that they are largely responsible for unleashing the angel of death,
the angel of terrorism, upon the world at this time?
And how did Gog and
Magog end up in the four corners of the earth from their place in the far
north? Clearly, an upheaval of
unprecedented proportions will occur during the Great Tribulation. How far are we from that event? The current oil crisis is another indicator
that we are on the brink of it. Here are
transcripts of programs that expose the truth behind the current oil
crisis.
‘Real Oil Crisis’
“What
would happen if the world were to start running out of oil? Conventional wisdom
says we’ve got 30 years, but there’s a growing fear amongst petroleum experts
it’s happening much sooner than we thought – that we are hitting the beginning
of the end of oil now. So how soon will the oil run out, and can we stop our
economy collapsing when it does? How prepared are we for the real oil
crisis?”
Narration: What would happen if the world started
running out of oil?
Jeremy Leggett: It’s going to be very difficult to get
gasoline for transport. Food is not going to be getting through in enough
quantities to the shops.
Narration: Conventional wisdom says that’s at least 30
years away. So why does a growing group of petroleum
experts believe it’s coming within three?
Eric Streitberg: Ah. I think it’s happening now frankly.
Peter Newman: It gives me nightmares when I think about
what we’re headed for. Narration: Are they just
scaremongerers or have the rest of us been asleep at the wheel. Are we about to
hit the real oil crisis?
Jeremy Leggett: Really when the crisis dawns I think people are
going to be looking back in anger. How have we allowed ourselves to get into
this mess?
Narration: In just a century, we’ve allowed our lives
to become entirely dependent on cheap oil.
Jonica Newby, Reporter: And it’s not just
that 90% of our transportation is fuelled by oil. This shopping centre is
literally full of petroleum products.
Look: the fabric in these clothes – petroleum based. These plastics,
petroleum based. It takes on average 6 barrels of oil just to bring one cow to
market.
Narration: Yet who of us stops to think oil is a finite
resource - the lifeblood of our modern world is steadily pouring away.
Jeremy Leggett: We just take it so much for granted that
cars drive around, the pumps are always full. I talk to people in financial
institutions who are investing on the assumption that oil supplies are going to
grow and grow into the 2030’s. I hardly ever meet anyone who knows about this
problem outside a relatively elite group of whistleblowers inside and around
the oil industry.
Narration: Dr Jeremy Leggett is part of an
international splinter group of petroleum geologists convinced a tipping point
on oil is imminent. This former oil
industry insider, now alternative energy advocate, has written a new book
outlining the case. It makes startling reading. The most oil ever discovered was way
back in 1965.
Narration: This graph traces world oil discoveries. Since
1965, the amount of oil discovered each year has inexorably plunged - despite
all our advances in technology.
Jeremy Leggett: The last time we discovered a whole new
province was the
Jonica Newby, Reporter: So what exactly is
peak oil, and why is it so serious? That’s what I’m heading to the west
Australian oil fields to find out.
Narration:
My guide is a geologist from deep within the oil industry. Eric Streitberg is
managing director of Australian oil company,
Streitberg:
The reason I feel strongly about this is that people don’t understand the
underlying causes of why petrol prices are going up and what the effect that
could have on our lives. Narration: Eric is about to show me what happens when
oil field reaches peak oil.
Eric
Streitberg: This oil field was discovered in 2001 and is now on full production
doing about 6000 barrels of oil a day which is about 10% of
Eric
Streitberg: We’re holding on to peal oil
production at the moment but we’ll be going into the inexorable decline of oil
fields very shortly.
Jonica
Newby, Reporter: Really, and there is
nothing you can do?
Narration: To ram home the point, Eric takes me to an
oil field which passed peal oil in 1992.
Eric
Streitberg: Jonica this is what we are
getting out of this oil well. It’s 99%
water and 1% oil. Narration: All oil
fields follow the pattern of rise, peak then fall – even if they encompass an
entire nation. The
Jeremy
Leggett: These governments have not let
anyone in to verify how much oil they have for getting on for a quarter of a
century and in the 1980s there were some suspicious treatment of oil reserves
data. Most of the Gulf countries
increased their national proved reserves supposedly by in some cases up to
double, and then ever since the quoted figures have not gone down very much at
all. I don’t believe that for a
minute. Narration: The dissident
geologists went back to original surveys to estimate total
Jeremy Leggett: 2008
maybe 2009, certainly no later than 2010.
That’s the point at which we will no longer be living in a world with
growing supplies of generally cheap oil but instead living in a world of
rapidly shrinking supplies of ever vastly more expensive oil and that point of
realization is going to come as a real shock. The we will word record oil
prices. Who knows how high they can go.
Narration: So what
does the mainstream think? The world’s
largest oil company is Exxon Mobil – Esso.
It employs 20, 000 scientists to generate their own exhaustive data
sets. In their
Dr Schwebel: OK this
is a three dimensional image of the geology offshore
Narration: Doug
acknowledges oil will run down eventually, he just vigorously disputes
when.
Doug Schwebel: Well, people have been predicting for over a
hundred years that we’re going to run out of oil. It hasn’t happened. We don’t think nit is
going to happen in the near term.
Narration: Exxon calculates twice as much oil left in the world as the
so called ‘early peakers’ - placing peak oil decades away.
Doug Schwebel: I mean
we are talking at least out to 2030 with what we know today. And then potentially another 20 – 30 years
beyond that with technologies that we can envisage might exist. You know if we can improve technology by only
10% then we can recover an additional 600 – 800 barrels of oil.
Narration: if this
majority view is correct, we have plenty of time for a smooth market driven
transition to alternatives via hybrid cars. Cruising in the balm of this
reassuring future, is tempting to dismiss the ‘early peak’ camp entirely, as a
small bunch of vested interests doomsayers.
But it’s not that easy. Petroleum
giant Chevron is now running these startling advertisements. And here in
Eric Streitberg: I
asked them to put up their hands if they thought that we had reached peak
oil. Fifty per cent of the people in the
audience put up their hand saying they believe we’re at peak oil and these are
practicing petroleum industry professionals.
Narration: So what if
they’re right? This is what the early peak camp are terrified of – an
apocalyptic gap between dwindling supply and rising demand from the voracious
east.
Jeremy Leggett: It’s panic that causes collapses in
markets. People start selling their
shares. That’s what happened in 1929.
Eric Sreitberg:
Rationing – people having to queue for three days to get a tank full of petrol,
not being able to heat their houses.
Peter Newman: Getting
Narration: But
couldn’t we just switch to alternatives – like solar cars or hydrogen? Professor Peter Newman should know. He’s been
trying to prepare his home town of
Peter Newman: This is
a transport that can’t be done overnight. Hydrogen technology is being developed
but it’s a 20 year program.
Jesica Newby,
Reporter: Twenty years? Peter Newman:
Yeah, the next 20 years are an absolute critical point where we don’t know that
we can make it. I just feel we haven’t
started soon enough.
Narration: The trouble
is, if peak oil is imminent, other mooted oil substitutes, like biofuels, tar
sands, shale oil, could only yield a fraction of the world’s needs. And no one
can think of an alternative fuel for aeroplanes.
Jeremy Leggett: So
I’ve looked at it all and I don’t see a way of closing the gap quickly
enough. That’s the honest and depressing
answer. It’s all about renaissance. How quickly we can repair the problems and
get an alternative infrastructure after the crisis breaks.
Narration: Whether we reach the end of cheap oil in 3
years or 30, it will be a defining moment for human society. Even if there is only a one in ten chance the
early peakers are right, with the lifeblood of our economy at stake, shouldn’t
we listen just in case.
Eric Streitberg: If
people like myself are taking the view that they need to speak out, I think
it’s time to start taking it seriously.
Peter Newman: We have
lots of preparedness for terrorist attacks; but where’s the plan for peak
oil? We don’t have one.
Jeremy Leggett: I
think the interesting thing about the problem is that we’ll find out. We’ll find out who’s right really soon,
within a few years it will happen and play out on our watch.” (Jonica Newwby, ABC, Catalyst, “Real Oil Crisis”,
IEA says
world’s energy policy is not sustainable
PARIS/LONDON (Reuters) - The world must change its
energy habits or struggle with choking fumes, runaway oil demand and a growing
dependence on the volatile Middle East for fuel, the International Energy
Agency said on Monday.
Energy demand and greenhouse gas emissions will soar
by more than 50 percent by 2030 if consumers keep burning oil unchecked, the
IEA said in its World Energy Outlook. That would blow a hole in the
Under the IEA's reference scenario, a likely but
undesirable outcome the agency said,
"If investments do not come in a timely and
sufficient manner, there will be higher oil prices, and global economic growth
will suffer," said IEA Chief Economist Fatih Birol. The IEA also outlined a deferred investment
scenario, where producers delay spending -- inadvertently or deliberately --
and a world alternative policy scenario, where importing nations take action to
cut demand and change the pattern of fuel use.
"Consuming countries have realized there has to be a policy
response to these prices and that process has begun," IEA Deputy Executive
Director William Ramsay said. We would
be quite happy to see our reference scenario made irrelevant by good policy
decisions." The combined emissions
of countries that have signed up to
"The
"We have to work out the trick of how to get the
Even if world governments got tough on tackling the
environment and energy security, demand in 2030 would still soar by 37 percent
and the
"This will add to the vulnerability to a
disruption and to the risk that those countries will seek to use their dominant
market position to force up prices at some point in the future," said the
IEA. In the reference scenario, global
dependence on
Global Warming
For a decade and a
half, we have warned humanity that it would come to this, but no one
listened. Now everybody is talking about
it. All of a sudden, Global Warming is
on everybody’s lips. People, who hardly
react to warnings about catastrophe, until they experience it on their skins,
are outraged that it has come to this without warning.
Hardly a week passes
by without another report about the seriousness of the Global Warming. Yet, the general population is still largely
oblivious to the magnitude of this problem.
Our leaders plead with people to be more energy conscious, to buy cars
that are more energy efficient, to put accent on recycling, etc., yet factories
are still churning out vehicles that can carry tons when they seldom need to
carry more than one person, and travel at speeds that far exceed the sped
limit.
Leaders of the nations
that have signed the
As we have said from
the beginning, and will say it again,
The world has turned
its back on our messages, and now it pays the consequences. Speaking about the Bible and the Word of God
is sure to make one an outcast these days.
What human beings like are prophets and preachers who speak of good news
even when the world is crumbling around them.
Any wonder that Jesus
Christ said the world will be taken by surprise by the most destructive event
in its history. We spoke with
confidence about those things long before they occurred because we trusted the
Word of God, but our nemesis lulled the world into believing that ignorance is
virtue, and knowledge is ‘fundamentalism’.
For hundreds of years
the people of God paid with their lives for speaking the truth of God, a truth
which the world did not want to hear.
This time however, ignorance is no longer a refuge. It will hear and obey that truth, or it will
die.
This prophecy has been
in the Scripture for two millennia, yet few people have ever thought that it
might occur in their lifetime. They
always think of it as a prophecy for an indeterminate future. That future, however, has caught up with us.
We tried to breech
this subject with two evangelists who were once conducting a seminar on the
prophecies of our time. We asked them to
comment on the above Scripture, but they quickly retorted, “When we will come to
that we will worry about it then.” It
seems that it is all right to talk about prophecies of our time as long as you
do not believe them, or not taking them too seriously.
The Catholic Church is
even punishing its priests if they dare look into, or comment upon, the
prophecies of Revelation. Yet that book
is now more important than ever. Without
it, we would never understand the times in which we live, and the meaning of
the events that are taking place around the world.
I was walking past the
Anglican Cathedral of Sydney at lunchtime one day when I noticed crowds of
people going inside. It was a weekday,
and I was curious what was going on, so I walked in too. The Anglican Archbishop of
The Archbishop touched
on a number of subjects, but mostly of the main one about salvation: God is good, man was good once too, but fell
and needs redemption, which he could obtain by turning to Jesus Christ. Nothing wrong with that, except that given
the recent upheavals in the world I was hoping he might touch on the prophecies
of our time and whether Global Warming and the horrible excesses of nature
might be part of it. But not a
word.
At the end of his
Bible study, people were queuing up to talk with him. As I had time on my hands, I joined that
queue too. When my turn came, I asked
him whether the condition of the world might indicate that we are close to the
return of Jesus Christ. He gave me a
loud, quick and sharp answer: “No, no
one knows the day or the hour of Jesus’ return.
He could return tonight, or He could return a thousand years from now.
No one knows when.” And with that he
shoved me aside and turned to the next person.
Silly me to think that I could have gotten a different answer. Everybody knows that Jesus said that no one
knows the hour or the day of His return, but no one remembers that He also said
this:
Mat 24:32 "Now learn this parable from the fig
tree: When its branch has already become tender and puts forth leaves,
Mat 24:33 you know that summer is near. "So you also, when you see all these
things, know that it is near; at the doors!”
When you have a
comfortable job right in the heart of
The question is, if we
cannot not convince church leaders that the world is in the midst of the end
time prophecies, who could we convince?
There is a story in the Bible about two people who witness the Gospel of
Jesus Christ to the world in the end time, who are so hated for their message
that they are killed for it. Do you
think that this could happen in our time?
If we are living in those times, it will. It must, for “the Scriptures cannot be
broken”.
Global Warming is
supposed to be caused by the greenhouse effect, which is caused by air
pollution and the warming of the oceans.
However, as the above passage from
Humanity is already on
a slippery slope, and the only power that could save it now, is its Creator.
In December 2005, the
United Nations held a conference on the environment in
‘Survey finds glaciers are retreating more
rapidly as the local climate becomes warmer’
“Nine out of 10 marine glaciers around the
coast of the
"Fifty years ago,
62 per cent of the glaciers that flowed down from the mountains to the sea we
looked at were slowly growing in length, but since then this pattern has
reversed," she said. In the past five years, the majority were shrinking
rapidly. The worst affected is the Widdowson Glacier, which has retreated by
more than a kilometre a year. The
retreat began at the northern, warmer tip of the
Although global
warming looks increasingly likely to be the cause, the evidence is not
straightforward because there were similar local warmings between 2,000 and
10,000 years ago, and the recent warning trend cannot be reproduced with
computer models. "What we still
need to determine is whether or not the warming in this area has its roots in
human-influenced global warming," he said.
(Roger Highfield, Science Editor, The
Daily Telegraph,
“Ice collapse, global warming link” “The collapse of a
huge ice shelf in
"The modern
collapse of the LIS-B (Larsen B ice shelf) is a unique event within the
Holocene," they write. "The
LIS-B eventually thinned to the point where it succumbed to the prolonged
period of regional warming now affecting the entire
The Holocene is the
period of relatively balmy weather that followed the last Ice Age. The research is the latest in a series of
studies to sound the alarm about the effects of climate change in
Of the 244 glaciers
that drain inland ice and feed these shelves, 87 per cent have fallen back
since the mid-1950s, according to a British study published in April. Global Warming, also called the greenhouse
effect, is caused by carbon gases mostly discharged by burning oil, gas and
coal, that trap the Sun's heat. But
Earth's climate also goes through natural oscillations of warming and cooling,
resulting in Ice Ages and the milder interglacial periods in between. The new study does not say that global
warming caused by human activity was responsible for the Larsen B's
demise. However, it refers to a steep
rise in the temperatures over the past several decades, a phenomenon that
climatologists concur was unleashed by fossil fuels. (The Daily Telegraph,
To give you an idea
how quickly Global Warming has entered the world’s consciousness, compare those
reports with the one we published in 1994, in The Christian Herald No 4.
At that time, we merely had the first mutterings about Global
Warming. Few people took them seriously
then, and fewer still imagined that within a decade the whole world would be
gripped by it.
“The First Proof: Our
Weather’s Gone Mad”
“Australian climate researchers
believe they have found the first sure sign that the warming of the planet is
having an effect on extreme weather events, but it is a surprising one - the
world is having fewer severe frosts. Scientists now have no doubt that the
world has been getting slowly warmer recently and many forecast that if this
continues as expected due to the greenhouse effects, events such as floods,
droughts and cyclones will increase or become severe...
The new findings by the Bureau of Meteorology Research Centre, in
Although a full global analysis will not be available until the end of
the year, the centre's studies so far show that this trend is also affecting
non-urban areas in many countries...
The environmental group Greenpeace found evidence that since 1990 ‘the
number of extreme weather events is increasing dramatically’. The Group cites 500 reports of such events
and related incidents around the world - including the January bushfires in eastern Australia, ocean warming in the
Pacific and the coral reef bleaching in Tahiti - as ‘real evidence that climate change has began and
the effects are already being felt.’” (SMH, June 2, 1994).
Notice carefully, “The environmental group Greenpeace found evidence that since 1990 ‘the
number of extreme weather events is increasing dramatically’”. Why was that year so important? That is when we began this work and told the
world that the troubled times of the end time are upon us. We saw what the Bible said about our times,
and since no one was doing anything about it, we began publishing The Christian Herald for this
purpose. We knew that the world was in
deep trouble, but no one believed us then.
Would they believe us now if we told them that even bigger troubles are
ahead, that no one will escape them unless they turn to God? Here is further of what Global Warming means
for the world.
“Global warming linked to increase of hurricanes” As the world warms
the tempests rage harder.
Global warming could be behind as dramatic rise in the number of
ferocious hurricanes and tropical cyclones, a new research suggests. As the
oceans have warmed, the incidence of Category
“What we found was rather astonishing,” said Peter Webster, of the
Georgian Institute of Technology in
In the 1970s there were, on average, 10 intense storms with winds above
200 kilometres an hour each year. Since
1990 this figure has risen to 18.
Professor Webster said the findings established a link between surface temperature,
which has risen by about half a degree since 1970, and increasing storm
intensity. Their results were published
yesterday in the journal Science.” (SMH,
And here is a transcript of a program that shows how quickly the climate
is deteriorating around the world.
DR VICKY POPE: Good evening.
TONY JONES: Now, the
DR VICKY POPE: Well, there's
evidence that, as you say, the storms have increased. I think it's not really
that well understood why that is. Certainly in the
TONY JONES: Yes. What's the
balance of evidence then between natural causes and man-made climate change,
because this is, in the end, the nub of a huge scientific debate?
DR VICKY POPE: Well, I think
there's still more work that needs to be done before we can really assess that
and there's still a lot of discussion going on in the scientific community.
What we're also doing is using models to look forward to what might happen in
the future and our models suggest that the number of storms may not change very
much but that the intensity of the stronger storms may increase. So that would
be consistent with what we've seen over the last 30 years.
TONY JONES: And why is that
happening? What do your models actually indicate? Because if the intensity of
the storms change and, yet, oddly enough, there are fewer of them worldwide,
something strange is going on?
DR VICKY POPE: Well, the way that
the tropical storms develop doesn't just depend on the surface temperature,
which of course will increase in the future due to global warming and has,
indeed, increased over the last 50 years. It also depends on the conditions in
the atmosphere, so, for example, if you have windshear, which means you have
stronger winds high up in the atmosphere and weaker winds lower down, that will
tend to disperse the storm before it gets really strong. And that's what is
changing in the future - that those winds will change as well, and it just
depends in which direction that happens. Certainly the temperatures increased,
but the circulation patterns change, too.
TONY JONES: All right, let's go
back, if we can, to what's happening in the
DR VICKY POPE: Well, there have
been, over quite a long period, warmer temperatures in recent years. But,
obviously, this year is unusual in the sense that temperatures were warm and,
in fact, they were predicting a strong hurricane season because of this.
TONY JONES: Can you explain what
happens when the hurricane passes over a large body of warm water like this?
DR VICKY POPE: Well, essentially,
you get more evaporation, so more water coming out of the surface of the ocean.
And you get more convention, which is the process that raises the water up into
the atmosphere. And then you get very strong circulation patterns associated
with that, which gives you this very strong spinning motion and the very strong
winds.
TONY JONES: And that appears to
have turned Hurricane Rita in a very short space from 4 to a very serious
Category 5 storm?
DR VICKY POPE: That's right. The
conditions are just right in that case for it to become a very, very strong storm.
TONY JONES: Now, do we know for
sure, and is there concrete evidence across the world, of rising surface
temperatures?
DR VICKY POPE: Yes, we have -
there's a lot of careful work being done to look at the records of temperature,
particularly at the surface where we have better records going back certainly
150 years and in some cases much longer than that. Of course, the records we
have as we go back in time are less complete, so we have to take account of
these gaps in our knowledge and also in the way that measurements have been
made in the past. And so we have to take account. For example, ships make
measurements and they might have different heights of masts on the ships and
that might make a difference to the temperature and we have to correct for those.
But these very careful assessments have been done of observations to make sure
we have a clean record and we can show that over the last 150 years the global
mean surface temperature has increased by 0.7 degrees centigrade.
TONY JONES: And what would you
have to know to work out whether man-made global warming was actually
responsible for a higher rate of increase that's happening at the moment?
DR VICKY POPE: Well, in terms of
the temperatures, we use our models to look at whether we can reproduce that
increase in temperature by including just the natural forcing of the climate
system - so things like variations in the solar cycle, volcanic eruptions and
various other factors. But what we have to find is we have to include the
carbon dioxide changes that have been caused by man's activities and the other
pollution that man causes in order to produce the observed signal.
TONY JONES: And how significant
are those man-made changes when they're fed into the models?
DR VICKY POPE: Well, we're
talking about changes in carbon dioxide. The carbon dioxide has increased by a
third since before the Industrial Revolution, so that's quite a major change
and, as I say, the temperature has gone up by 0.7 degrees. But if we're looking
into the future, then we would obviously see much bigger temperature rises with
bigger carbon dioxide changes. The other thing to bear in mind is the
temperature globally has gone up by 0.7 degrees and in the future might go up
by 2 per cent or more. But if you look locally, the changes will be greater in
some regions than in others. For example, in high latitudes . . . if the ice
melts then you get more sunshine reaching the surface and more warming. So you
get a lager warming of perhaps
TONY JONES: Since computer
modelling appears to be the only predictive analysis that we have available to
us, what is it telling us about the rate that carbon dioxide is being fed into
the atmosphere and what effect that may have on extreme weather events? You
talk about a possible increase of temperature of up to 2 degrees I think you
just said.
DR VICKY POPE: That's right. What
we tend to do in our climate models is to feed in the emissions that are
predicted from the future from economic scenarios of how the global economy
will grow and populations will grow and we then see how the climate responds to
that. More recently we've started doing experiments where we actually allow the
carbon cycle to respond. And by the carbon cycle I mean the way the plants
grow, the way that the ocean takes up carbon through the ecosystems in the
ocean. And what we find there, at the moment
the ecosystems of
plants and things are absorbing half of the carbon dioxide that's being emitted
by man. In the future that may change and, in fact, soil, for example, may
start to release carbon into the atmosphere. That would speed up global
warming.
TONY JONES: So do your
models . . . predict that there will be, as a result, more extreme weather
events like these hurricanes?
DR VICKY POPE: Well,
they certainly predict even more extreme temperatures. We're looking now in
much more detail at how much the storms and other extreme events will change in
those sorts of conditions. So far we haven't really looked at how much tropical
storms will increase in strength. We need very high resolution models to look
at storms because, of course, they have very strong structure on smaller
scales. And as yet, we haven't done that with the models that include this carbon
feedback.
TONY JONES: Now some
scientists are already convinced that these changes we're talking about are, in
fact, locked in, that they've become permanent. You can't actually go backwards
now, so we're going to have to live with more extreme weather events. Your
models seem to be indicating that. What do you think?
DR VICKY POPE:
Essentially, there is a certain amount of climate change that is inevitable. Even if we stopped all emissions now, the
carbon dioxide that we've already put in the atmosphere takes quite a long time
to recover - up to 100 years. So we're already committed to some change
which obviously we will have to adapt to. So further change over what we've had
already. But it will make a difference if we reduce our emissions. The rate of
rise will start to decrease. And clearly, the more that we can do and the
sooner that we can do it, the greater the impact will be. But there may be
points in the future where certain changes become irreversible. For example,
when the temperature gets above a certain level, the
TONY JONES: Not only
that, it appears, but it would also change the great patterns of the
circulation of currents in the oceans as far as we understand it. That is, in
fact, the scenario set out in the movie The
Day After Tomorrow. That's an extreme version of what might happen.
What do you think will happen if we keep going and if the ice caps keep
melting?
DR VICKY POPE: The
suggestion that you're talking about is the
TONY JONES: Let's look
at changes that appear to be happening now. Can you explain to us exactly what
the
DR VICKY POPE: All
right. Well the
TONY JONES: Very
briefly, that is what the scientists who don't believe in global warming point
to as the cause of these extreme weather conditions in the Gulf right now,
isn't it?
DR VICKY POPE: Well I
think in terms of the extreme conditions that have been happening this year,
the jury's out, I think, as to whether you can link them to global warming or
whether they're natural changes. It's something we would need to look at. But
you can never link any one individual event to global warming. It's really a
balance of probabilities that certain types of event might become more frequent
with global warming than they would have been otherwise.
TONY JONES: All right,
Dr Vicky Pope we'll have to leave you there. We thank you very much for coming
in to talk to us tonight.
DR VICKY POPE: Thank
you. (Australian Broadcasting
Corporation, Lateline,
Global
Dimming
Unlike Global Warming, the nature of
which some people still argue about, Global Deeming is totally man made and
totally beyond the human resolve. Global
Deeming is even more serious than Global Warming. Here is what television programs from both
sides of the world had to say about Global Deeming.
“Noticed less sunshine lately?” “Scientists have
discovered that the amount of sunlight reaching the Earth’s surface has been
falling over recent decades. If the
climatologists are right, their discovery holds the potential for powerful
disruption to life on our planet. Already it may have contributed to many
thousands of deaths through drought and famine. Essentially, the phenomenon called
"global dimming" may mean that even the direst predictions about the
rate of global warming have been seriously underestimated. Until recently many scientists had never
heard of global dimming. Among those who had, a lot remained skeptical. Now,
thanks in part to the work of Australian researchers, the debate is set to edge
into public consciousness. This special
report from the BBC’s Horizon program reveals how global dimming was gradually
unmasked by isolated groups of scientists across the world ... in Israel,
Germany, the US and Australia.
Global dimming is a
product of the fossil fuels that cause global warming. It is the result of tiny
airborne pieces of soot, ash and sulphur compounds reflecting back the heat of
the sun. By allowing less sunlight to
reach the Earth, global dimming is cushioning us from the full impact of global
warming, climatologists say. They fear that as we burn coal and oil more
cleanly, and dimming is reduced, the full effects of global warming will be
unleashed. The worst-case scenario has
temperatures rising by up to 10 degrees by the end of the century – twice more
than previously thought. Scientists have also linked global dimming to the
failure of rains in sub-Saharan
Tragic Consequences of Global Deeming
NARRATOR (JACK
FORTUNE): “This is a film that demands action. It reveals that we may have
grossly underestimated the speed at which our climate is changing. At its heart
is a deadly new phenomenon. One that until very recently scientists refused to
believe even existed. But it may already have led to the starvation of
millions. Tonight Horizon examines for the first time the power of what
scientists are calling Global Dimming.
NARRATOR:
DR DAVID TRAVIS (
NARRATOR: For 15 years
Travis had been researching an apparently obscure topic, whether the vapour
trails left by aircraft were having a significant effect on the climate. In the
aftermath of 9/11 the entire
DR DAVID TRAVIS: It
was certainly, you know, one of the tiny positives that may have come out of
this, an opportunity to do research that hopefully will never happen again.
NARRATOR: Travis
suspected the grounding might make a small but detectable change to the
climate. But what he observed was both immediate and dramatic.
DR DAVID TRAVIS: We
found that the change in temperature range during those three days was just
over one degrees C. And you have to realise that from a layman's perspective
that doesn't sound like much, but from a climate respective that is huge.
NARRATOR: One degree
in just three days no one had ever seen such a big climatic change happen so
fast. This was a new kind of climate change. Scientists call it Global Dimming.
Two years ago most of them had never even heard of it, yet now they believe it
may mean all their predictions about the future of our climate could be wrong.
The trail that would lead to the discovery of Global Dimming began 40 years
ago, in
DR GERALD STANHILL
(Agricultural Research Organisation,
NARATOR: For a year
Gerry collected data from a network of light meters; the results were much as
expected, and were used to help design the national irrigation system. But
twenty years later, in the 1980s, Gerry decided to repeat his measurements to
check that they were still valid. What he found, stunned him.
DR GERALD STANHILL:
Well I was amazed to find that there was a very serious reduction in sunlight,
the amount of sunlight in
NARRATOR: A 22% drop
in solar energy was simply massive. If it was true surely Israelis should be
freezing. There had to be something wrong. So when Gerry published his results
they were ignored.
DR GERALD STANHILL: I
must say the publications had almost no effect whatsoever on the scientific
community.
NARRATOR: But in fact
Gerry was not the only scientist who had noticed a fall in sunlight. In
DR BEATE LIEPERT
(Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory): I was the same, I was as skeptical as any
other climatologist. But then, um, I, I saw the same results err in
NARRATOR:
DR GERALD STANHILL:
The scientific community was obviously not ready to deal with the fact that
there was a Global Dimming phenomena.
NARRATOR: Of course,
there was a good reason for the skepticism. Less energy from the Sun should be
making the world cooler. Yet scientists knew the Earth was getting hotter. As
the carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases we emit trap ever more heat in
the Earth's atmosphere and cause Global Warming.
DR BEATE LIEPERT: My
friends' reaction actually to Gerry's and to my work at the same time too was,
oh my God this is really extreme, you are um contradicting global warming. Er
do you know how many billions of dollars was spent on global warming research
and you and this old guy er are contradicting er us.
NARRATOR: So Liepert
and Stanhill's work was widely dismissed. But Global Dimming was not the only
phenomenon that didn't seem to fit with Global Warming. In
PROF GRAHAM FARQUHAR (
NARRATOR: In some
places agricultural scientists have been performing this rather dull daily task
for more than a hundred years.
PROF GRAHAM FARQUHAR:
The long-term measurements of pan evaporation are what gives it its real value.
DR MICHAEL RODERICK (
PROF GRAHAM FARQUHAR:
Yeah, they deserve a medal. Each of them.
DR MICHAEL RODERICK:
Yeah.
NARRATOR: For decades,
nobody took much notice of the pan evaporation measurements. But in the 1990s
scientists spotted something very strange, the rate of evaporation was falling.
PROF GRAHAM FARQUHAR:
There is a paradox here about the fact that the pan evaporation rate's going
down, an apparent paradox, but the global temperature's going up.
NARRATOR: This was a
puzzle. Most scientists reasoned that like a pan on the stove, turning up the
global temperature should increase the rate at which water evaporated. But
Roderick and Farquhar did some calculations and worked out that temperature was
not the most important factor in pan evaporation.
DR MICHAEL RODERICK:
Well it turns out in fact that the key things for pan evaporation are the
sunlight, the humidity and the wind. But really the sunlight is a really
dominant term there.
NARRATOR: They found
that it was the energy of the photons hitting the surface, the actual sunlight,
that kicks the water molecules out of the pan and into the atmosphere. And so they
too reached an extraordinary conclusion.
DR MICHAEL RODERICK:
You know, if the pan is going down then maybe that's the sunlight going down.
NARRATOR: Was the fall
in pan evaporation in fact evidence of Global Dimming? Somewhere in the
journals, they felt, must be the hard numbers that could tie the two things
together.
DR MICHAEL RODERICK:
And then one day, just by accident, I had to go to the library to get an
article out Nature. As you do, I couldn't find it. And I just glanced at a,
through the thing, and there was an article called Evaporation Losing Its
Strength. Which reported a decline in pan evaporation over
NARRATOR: Mike knew
how much sunlight was needed to evaporate a millimetres of water. So he put the
two sets of figures together - the drop in evaporation with the drop in
sunlight.
DR MICHAEL RODERICK:
And so you just do the sum in your head. A hundred millimetres of water, less a
pan evaporation, two and a half mega joules, so two and a half times a hundred
is two hundred and fifty mega joules. And that is in fact what the Russians
have measured with the decline in sunlight in the last thirty years. It was
quite amazing.
NARRATOR: It was the
same with
DR BEATE LIEPERT: All
of a sudden you see, oh my God the world is dimming, and then you, all of a
sudden you see oh my God this really has a tremendous impact.
PROF GRAHAM FARQUHAR:
There had to be dimming in
NARRATOR: But what was
causing it? Scientists knew that there was nothing wrong with the sun itself.
The culprit had to be here on Earth. And
as they searched for clues, they would
make another startling discovery. Global dimming is a killer. It may have been
behind the worst climatic disaster of recent times, responsible for famine and
death on a biblical scale. And Global Dimming is poised to strike again.
NARRATOR: The
Maldives: a nation of a thousand tiny islands in the middle of the Indian
Ocean, so recently battered by the Asian tsunami. It was here that Veerabhadran
Ramanathan, one of the world's leading climate scientists first began to
unravel the mystery of what's causing Global Dimming. He had first noticed
declining sunlight over large areas of the
PROF VEERABHADRAN
RAMANATHAN (
NARRATOR: Ramanathan
was certain of one thing, the big drop in sunlight reaching the ground had to
be something to do with changes in the Earth's atmosphere. There was one
obvious suspect.
PROF VEERABHADRAN
RAMANATHAN: Almost everything we do to create energy causes pollution.
NARRATOR: Burning fuel
doesn't just produce the invisible greenhouse gases which cause global warming.
It also produces visible pollution, tiny airborne particles of soot and other
pollutants. These produce the haze which shrouds our cities. So Ramanathan
wondered: Could this pollution be causing Global Dimming? The
PROF VEERABHADRAN
RAMANATHAN: The stunning part of the experiment was this pollutant layer which
was three kilometre thick, cut down the sunlight reaching the ocean by more
than 10%.
NARRATOR: A 10% fall
in sunlight meant that particle pollution was having a far bigger effect than
anyone had thought possible.
PROF VEERABHADRAN
RAMANATHAN: Our models led us to believe the human impact on the dimming was
close to half to one per cent. So what we discovered was tenfold.
NARRATOR: INDOEX
showed that the pollution particles were blocking some sunlight themselves; but
far more significant was what they were doing to the clouds. They were turning
them into giant mirrors. Clouds are made of droplets of water. These only form
when water vapour in the atmosphere starts to condense on the surface of
naturally occurring airborne particles, typically pollen or sea salt. As they
grow, the water droplets eventually become so heavy they fall as rain. But
Ramanathan found that polluted air contained far more particles than the
unpolluted air, particles of ash, soot and sulphur dioxide.
PROF VEERABHADRAN
RAMANATHAN: We saw ten times more particles in the polluted air mass north of
the
NARRATOR: In the
polluted air billions of man-made particles provided ten times as many sites
around which water droplets could form. So polluted clouds contained many more
water droplets, each one far smaller than it would be naturally. Many small
droplets reflect more light than fewer big ones. So the polluted clouds were
reflecting more light back into space, preventing the heat of the sun getting
through. This was the cause of Global Dimming.
PROF VEERABHADRAN
RAMANATHAN: Basically the Global Dimming we saw in the
NARRATOR: And when he
looked at satellite images, Ramanathan found the same thing was happening all
over the world. Over
NEWS REPORT - MICHAEL
BUERK VOICE OVER: Dawn, and as the sun breaks through the piercing chill of
night on the plain outside Korum it lights up a biblical famine, now in the
20th Century. This place say workers here is the closest thing to hell on
earth.
NARRATOR: The 1984
Ethiopian famine shocked the world. It was partly caused by a decade's long
drought right across sub-Saharan
DR LEON ROTSTAYN
(CSIRO Atmospheric Research): What we found in our model was that when we
allowed the pollution from Europe and North America to affect the properties of
the clouds in the northern hemisphere the clouds reflected more sunlight back
to space and this cooled the oceans of the northern hemisphere. And to our
surprise the result of this was that the tropical rain bands moved southwards
tracking away from the more polluted northern hemisphere towards the southern
hemisphere.
NARRATOR: Polluted
clouds stopped the heat of the sun getting through. That heat was needed to
draw the tropical rains northwards. So the life giving rain belt never made it
to the
DR LEON ROTSTAYN: So
what our model is suggesting is that these droughts in the Sahel in the 1970s
and the 1980s may have been caused by pollution from Europe and North America
affecting the properties of the clouds and cooling the oceans of the northern
hemisphere.
NARRATOR: Rotstayn has
found a direct link between Global Dimming and the
PROF VEERABHADRAN
RAMANATHAN: The Sahel is just one example of the monsoon system. Let me take
you to anther part of the world.
NARRATOR: For
Ramanathan the implications are clear.
PROF VEERABHADRAN
RAMANATHAN: There is no choice here we have to cut down air pollution, if not
eliminate it altogether.
NARRATOR: Fortunately,
tackling air pollution needn't be too difficult. It wouldn't mean giving up on
oil and coal altogether. We'd just have to burn them more cleanly. And in
NARRATOR: It was David
Travis who first caught a glimpse of what the world could be like without
Global Dimming. It happened in those chaotic days following the tragedy of
9/11. For fifteen years, Travis had been studying the vapour trails, or
contrails, left behind by high-flying aircraft. Though each individual contrail
seems small, when they all spread out, they can blanket the sky.
DR DAVID TRAVIS: Here
are some examples of what we call outbreaks of contrails. These are large
clusters of contrails. And here's a particularly er good one from
NARRATOR: But the
problem Travis faced was to establish exactly how big an effect the contrails
were actually having. The only way to do that was to find a period of time
when, although conditions were right for contrails to form, there were no flights.
And, of course, that never happened. Until September 2001. Then, for three days
after the 11th virtually all commercial aircraft in the
DR DAVID TRAVIS:
Initially data from over 5,000 weather stations across the 48
NARRATOR: Travis was
not looking just at temperature - that varies a lot from day to day anyway.
Instead he focused on something that normally only changes quite slowly: the
temperature range. The difference between the highest temperature during the
day and the lowest at night. Had this changed at all during the three days of the
grounding?
DR DAVID TRAVIS: As we
began to look at the climate data and the evidence began to grow I got more and
more excited. The actual results were much larger than I expected. So here we
see for the 3 days preceding September 11th a slightly negative value of
temperature range with lots of contrails as normal. Then we have this sudden
spike right here of the 3 day period. This reflects lack of clouds, lack of
contrails, warmer days cooler nights, exactly what we expected but even larger
than what we expected. So what this indicates is that during this 3 day period
we had a sudden drop in Global Dimming contributed from airplanes.
NARRATOR: During the
grounding the temperature range jumped by over a degree Celsius. Travis had
never seen anything like it before.
DR DAVID TRAVIS: This
was the largest temperature swing of this magnitude in the last thirty years.
NARRATOR: If so much could happen in such a short
time, removing just one form of pollution, then it suggests that the overall
effect of Global Dimming on world temperatures could be huge.
DR DAVID TRAVIS: The
NARRATOR: This is the real sting in the tail. Solve
the problem of Global Dimming and the world could get considerably hotter.
And this is not just theory, it may already be happening. In
DR BEATE LIEPERT: We thought we live in a global warming
world, um but this is actually er not right. We lived in a global warming plus
a Global Dimming world, and now we are taking out Global Dimming. So we end up
with the global warming world, which will be much worse than we thought it will
be, much hotter.
NARRATOR: This is the
crux of the problem. While the greenhouse effect has been warming the planet,
it now seems Global Dimming has been cooling it down. So the warming caused by
carbon dioxide has been hidden from us by the cooling from air pollution. But
that situation is now starting to change.
DR PETER COX (Hadley
Centre, Met Office): We're gonna be in a situation unless we act where the cooling
pollutant is dropping off while the warming pollutant is going up, CO2 will be
going up and particles will be dropping off and that means we'll get an
accelerated warming. We'll get a double whammy, we'll get, we'll get reducing
cooling and increased heating at the same time and that's, that's a problem for
us. NARRATOR: And that's not all.
Climatologists like Peter Cox have begun to worry that Global Dimming has led
them to underestimate the true power of global warming. They fear that the
Earth could be far more vulnerable to greenhouse gases than they had previously
thought.
DR PETER COX: We've
got two competing effects really, that we've got the greenhouse effect, which
has tended to warm up the climate. But then we've got this other effect that's
much stronger than we thought, which is a cooling effect that comes from
particles in the atmosphere. And they're competing with one another. And we
know the climate's moved to a warmer state by about point six of a degree over
the last hundred years. So the whole thing's moved this way. If it turns out
that the cooling is stronger than we thought then the warming also is a lot
stronger than we thought, and that means the climate's more sensitive to carbon
dioxide than we originally thought, and it means our models may be under
sensitive to carbon dioxide.
NARRATOR: The models that everyone has been using to
forecast climate change predict a maximum warming of 5 degrees by the end of
the century. But Cox and his colleagues now fear those models may be wrong.
Temperatures could rise twice as fast as they previously thought with
irreversible damage just twenty-five years away.
DR PETER COX: If we
don't do anything by about twenty thirty we could have a global warming of
exceeding two degrees, and at that point it's believed the Greenland ice sheet
would start to melt in a way that you wouldn't be able to stop it once it
started it, it would melt. Take a long time to melt but ultimately it would
lead to a sea level rise of seven or eight metres.
NARRATOR: Once the
DR PETER COX: 2040 it
could be four degrees warmer, the climate change could have led to big drying
particularly in the Amazon Basin, that would make the forest unsustainable,
we'd expect the forest to catch fire probably, turn into savannah and maybe
ultimately even desert if it gets really really dry as our model suggests.
NARRATOR: And as the
rainforest burnt away, it would release vast amounts of carbon dioxide into the
atmosphere, driving global warming still further. Cox calculates that in just a
century, the world could be 10 degrees hotter, a warming more rapid than any in
Earth history. If this were to happen, the landscape of
DR PETER COX: We're
talking about a change from er a lush, moist climate, environment like this, to
a North African climate in just a few decades or a hundred years. NARRATOR: Most British plant species could
not survive a North African climate. With vegetation dying everywhere, soil
erosion would become a severe problem. From a green and pleasant land,
DR PETER COX: You can
imagine ten degree warming in the
NARRATOR: And just
when one might think things could get no worse in the far North a ten degree
warming might be enough to release a vast natural store of greenhouse gas
bigger than all the oil and coal reserves of the planet.
DR PETER COX: We will
be in danger of destabilising these things called methane hydrates which store a
lot of methane at the bottom of the ocean in a kind of frozen form, ten
thousand billions tons of this stuff, and they're known to be destabilised by
warming.
NARRATOR: At this
point, whatever we did to curb our emissions, it would be too late. Ten thousand
billion tons of methane, a greenhouse gas eight times stronger than carbon
dioxide, would be released into the atmosphere. The Earth's climate would be
spinning out of control, heading towards temperatures unseen in four billion
years. But this is not a prediction - it is a warning. It is what will happen
if we clean up pollution while doing nothing about greenhouse gases. However,
the easy solution - just keep on polluting and hope that Global Dimming will
protect us - would be suicidal.
DR PETER COX: If we
carried on pumping out the particles it would have terrible impact on human
health, I mean particles are involved in all sorts of respiratory diseases,
that's why they're being brought under control, and of course they effect
climate anyway. If you, if you fiddle with the, the balance of the planet, the
radiative balance of the planet, you affect all sorts of circulation patterns
like monsoons, which would have horrible effects on people. So it would be
extremely difficult, in fact impossible, to cancel out the greenhouse effect
just by carrying on pumping out particles, even if it wasn't for the fact that
particles are damaging for human health.
NARRATOR: Instead we
have to take urgent action to tackle the root cause of both global warming and
Global Dimming - the burning of coal, oil and gas. We may have to make very
difficult choices, about how we live and how we generate our electricity. We
have been talking about such things for 20 years. But so far very little has
been done in practical terms. The discovery of Global Dimming makes it clear
that we are rapidly running out of time.
DR PETER COX: One of
the real driving forces is that you leave an environment that is comfortable
for your children. And we carry on going the way we're going, we're not going
to do that, we're going to leave an environment that's much worse than the
environment we lived in; and it will be down to what we did when we were using
that environment, and that would be, um, tragic really, if that happened.” (BBC,
It is a long
transcript, but an extremely important one.
It is the kind of knowledge that all world leaders need to be made aware
of. But without placing these scientific
reports in their proper spiritual context, one could never get a true picture
of what is happening in the world. This
is where The Christian Herald has
brought its contribution. We know of no
other publication that has fulfilled a similar job. Here is another “must read” report about
Global Deeming.
PROF BILL MCGUIRE: I
can only describe it as catastrophic. It’s clearly going to influence us every
day of our lives.
Dr RICHARD WOOD: You
could expect to see sea ice off the coast of
BOB GASGOSIAN: The
implications are huge. The economic implications, the political implications,
and the national security implications, for all countries.
NARRATOR: If these scientists have it right forget
the
NARRATOR: In the
Atlantic waters north of
DR BILL TURRELL
(Marine Laboratory,
NARRATOR: Turrell
believes that he has found evidence that a
climate catastrophe could be heading right towards us.
DR BILL TURRELL:
These changes are fundamental, they’re substantial. They are going to impact
our climate and the climate our children have to live in.
NARRATOR: If he is
right then Britain could be heading for a massive drop in temperatures. It
seems we could be heading for something like an ice age. The ice ages were one
of the greatest forces nature has unleashed on our planet.
PROF BILL MCGUIRE
(University College London): They simply were the most dynamic, destructive
phenomenon that’s ever hit the planet. They involve glaciers hurtling down from
mountainous regions, pouring out from the polar regions and devastating
everything in their paths, grinding rock to nothing, lowering mountains,
filling valleys.
NARRATOR: More than
twenty times in the earth’s history ice sheets have come down from the North
Pole, the last one struck a hundred thousand years ago. Britain was buried in a
tomb of ice.
Prof B. MCGUIRE:
Effectively they wiped the slate clean in the northern hemisphere, over twenty
times in the last two million years.
NARRATOR: These
events were so terrible that for years scientists wondered what had caused it,
and could they ever threaten us again.
In the search for answers they turned to the sun, our ultimate source of
heat. They discovered that the pattern of ice ages matched strange wobbles in
the earth’s orbit around the sun. These altered how the sun’s heat shone upon
the earth. They allowed the ice to grow and retreat. Prof RICHARD ALLEY (Penn State University):
And these wiggles in earth’s orbit are very regular, they’re very predictable,
they make sense and so there’s this long slow bumpy slide in to an ice age and
then a climb out of an ice age.
NARRATOR: They found
that the ice ages didn’t happen at random. They followed a slow and predictable
pattern. It took ninety thousand years to grow an ice sheet and about ten
thousand years to melt it. That predictability allowed scientists to calculate
when the next one was due. It was reassuring news, not for thousands of years.
Prof RICHARD ALLEY: For
a big ice age, a big climate change, we don’t expect anything to happen on
human time scales of a few dozen generations.
NARRATOR: The message from the sun seemed to be clear. We had no reason
to fear a massive drop in temperatures, at least that’s what conventional
theory said.
NARRATOR: Then
fifteen years ago Richard Alley came to Greenland to study how our climate had
changed since the last ice age.
Prof RICHARD ALLEY:
When we started working in Greenland we knew we were on to something big. We
really expected that we were going to find things that might surprise us.
NARRATOR: Greenland
is like an ancient thermometer, a unique record of what has happened to the
weather. Every single year for the last a hundred thousand years. It’s all
because the ice is preserved in layers, the further down you drill the older
the snow.
Prof RICHARD ALLEY:
If you took all these pieces of core that have been collected and put them end
to end they’re about two miles long and this is a sort of two mile time
machine.
NARRATOR: Each layer
records what was happening in the earth’s atmosphere at the time the ice was
formed. Whether it’s the traces of a huge natural disaster or pollution from
human activity, it’s all frozen and perfectly preserved.
Prof ALLEY: We can
see this, this ice core is beautifully layered and we can ask of it what
happened, what was coming through the atmosphere at that time. Is there ash and
acids from a big volcano, is there lead from Roman lead refining or what have
you? So there’s this history of what was blowing through the air and piling up
on top of the Greenland ice sheet, sitting here on these beautiful layers.
NARRATOR: But the
most important measurement preserved in the layers is the temperature. The ice
that Ally brought back to the lab was in effect the annual weather reports
since the beginning of the last ice age. What he was looking for was changes in
the amount of so called heavy water held in the ice. The basic rule, the more
heavy water the warmer the climate. If the conventional wisdom about climate
change was true then when he plotted the results he would expect to see slow
changes in heavy water as the world warmed and cooled during the last ice age.
But that’s not what he found.
Prof RICHARD ALLEY:
This flabbergasted us, I think this flabbergasted a lot of people.
NARRATOR: The
changes were anything but slow. He saw that temperatures could drop suddenly
and catastrophically. And it happened far more often than was predicted by the
passage of ice ages.
Prof RICHARD ALLEY:
The world sometimes did change in the slow grand sleeps and sometimes it
changed like a light switch.
NARRATOR: The
earth’s past was full of devastating climate jilts, none as bad as a full ice
age but enough to turn Britain in to Alaska. The search was on to find out what
could trigger these climatic disasters. They searched through the ice record
for clues. Had huge volcanoes blotted out the sun? There was no evidence for
that. A succession of asteroid impacts? Again, no evidence. More wobbles in the
sun’s orbit? That didn’t fit. In fact no one could account for what Ally had
discovered. Except for one man who thought he could. Wally Broecker is the guru
of climate science. He was convinced that it was all to do with the oceans.
Prof. W.
BROECKER (Columbia Univ.): I’m convinced that the ocean is at the core
of the whole thing. The trigger lies in the ocean.
NARRATOR: Not
everyone saw it his way.
Prof WALLY BROECKER:
And of course you started out was three allies in a hundred people, who think
it’s nuts.
NARRATOR: Broecker’s
attention was drawn to one ocean current in particular, the gulf stream.
Britain bathes in its heat. It begins south of the equator and as it flows
along the gulf of Mexico it absorbs heat from the tropics. It continues on past
the coast of Britain.
Prof WALLY BROECKER:
It’s roughly equal to all the rain in the world. Fifteen million cubic meters
per second.
NARRATOR: The
current carries the heat of a million power stations. It means we can swim in
the sea at the same latitudes that Canada has polar bears. But the most
important thing about it happens further north. It sinks.
Prof WALLY BROECKER:
When it gets up in to the northern regions of the Atlantic, cooled and make
denser and it sinks in to the deep sea and goes back the other way.
NARRATOR: This
sinking is caused by salt in the water. When the salty water cools near
Greenland it becomes so dense that it plummets to the bottom of the ocean. The
water then heads back south to where the gulf stream began, and the whole
process begins again. It’s a continuously circulating belt of water and heat,
that’s why it’s called the conveyor. The sinking off Greenland is vital, this
is what keeps Britain forever warm. So Wally began to speculate what would
happen if the conveyor ceased to flow. Could that explain those dramatic falls
in temperature? Trouble was most scientists were convinced that the oceans
never changed at all.
Prof WALLY BROECKER:
People tended to think about it as something that went on and on and on and on.
We assume that the properties of the ocean are at a steady state, but if it’s
changing then you can't assume that anymore and it makes real chaos.
NARRATOR: Then came
something that shocked everyone out of their complacency. Something so small it
might have been completely overlooked. Lloyd Keigwin spends his time examining
mud samples from the bottom of the ocean. Mud cores just like the ice in
Greenland can tell the history of activity in the ocean and what was going on
in the conveyor. In particular Keigwin was looking for tiny sea shells called
forams. These lurk on the ocean floor feeding on nutrients that sink to the sea
bed.
Dr LLOYD KEIGWIN
(Woods Hole Oceanographic Inst.): The forams build their shells out of calcium
carbonate like any sea shell you’d find on the beach. And when they take carbon
and oxygen and other elements out of the water to make their shell the
chemistry of their shell reflects the chemistry and the physical properties of
the water. NARRATOR: When the conveyor
flows most of the nutrients get swept past the forams, and so their shells are
usually poor in nutrients.
Dr LLOYD KEIGWIN:
When the conveyor is on the deep water of the north Atlantic is continually
being flushed out and there aren’t a lot of nutrients that have accumulated.
But if the conveyor went in to an off mode or a reduced mode um more nutrients
would accumulate.
NARRATOR: Keigwin
developed a way of measuring how much nutrients the forams must have absorbed.
Dr LLOYD KEIGWIN: We
add a little more liquid nitrogen here, and this trap will capture the carbon
dioxide produced as this sample falls in the hot acid. And soon we’ll know was
the conveyor circulation on or off at this particular time. NARRATOR: To his surprise he found massive
variations in the composition of the shells. In other words at times in the
past the conveyor must have switched off. When this work was published Wally
Broecker knew exactly what it meant. It was the clue he had been looking for.
Prof. BROECKER: The
greatest joy to a scientist is discovery. It’s almost as if nature is trying to
prevent us from uncovering her secrets.
NARRATOR: So he put it all together. The huge drops in temperature seen
in the Greenland ice, the shells that said the conveyor had been cut off, they
had to be connected.
Prof WALLY BROECKER:
Well it was, it was this merging two parts of my science, the understanding of
the ocean and the understanding of the climate. It popped in to my head that
one way you could do that would be by turning on and off the what’s now called
the conveyor belt, the deep water formation in the north Atlantic. And so I got
the idea well hell if you turned that on and off or up and down, that could
make at least in Europe very large climate changes.
NARRATOR: Broecker
believed this explained the massive jolts in temperature seen in Greenland, the
conveyor had switched off. And if it had happened before it could happen again.
And if it did Britain would be plunged in to a bitterly cold climate. But then
someone pointed out one obvious flaw in the theory. This isn’t the age of
global cooling but of global warming. Eight of the ten warmest years on record
fell in the last decade. Climate experts are predicting temp. to rise faster than at any time since the
last ice age.
Dr. WOOD (Met.
Office): The models that are used to make the predictions of global warming
suggest that by the end of the century the warming we would see will be between
about one and a half degrees and around six degrees. And really to go to see
that in historical context you’d have to go back hundreds of thousands, maybe
even millions of years to see a climate in the past that was that warm.
NARRATOR: The
effects of global warming are being felt across the planet. The talk is not of
ice but about how to prepare for hotter weather and the extremes that would
bring.
PROF BILL MCGUIRE:
Global warming should make the UK a more hazardous place to live. Particularly
during the winter when we have not only more rain but we have more heavy
precipitation, bursts of extreme rainfall. This is going to mean that for
example river flooding is much more common, much more frequent and its
implications will be much more serious.
Dr RICHARD WOOD:
They’ll be changes in er frequency of things like tropical cyclones. And
possible storms in the er outside the tropics and there are some latitudes to
the UK and Europe.
NARRATOR: These are
the changes our government is urgently planning for in the coming century. But
recent discoveries suggest we might have to gear up for ice, not heat and rain.
But our understanding of global warming maybe too simplistic. One of the most
important of these discoveries was made by a team of NASA scientists based
inside the arctic circle. Bill Krabill and his team have spent the last decade
monitoring the effect of global warming upon the vast Greenland ice sheet.
BILL KRABILL (NASA,
Wallops Island): This particular area, you can think of it as a huge ice cube
that nicely offers global climate, an ice cube that’s a thousand miles long,
four hundred miles wide and two miles thick in the centre.
NARRATOR: For years
accurate measurements of the effects of global warming across the ice sheet
were impossible. It was just too huge and inhospitable to measure from the
ground. So they took to the air. Greenland is one of the biggest blocks of
frozen water in the world. And if it started to melt the effects would be felt
worldwide.
BOB THOMAS (NASA):
It comprises enough water to raise sea level by about six or seven metres if it
all were to melt.
NARRATOR: They
mapped the ice with a combination of global positioning satellites and lasers.
The satellite measures the height of the plane and the laser measures the
distance from the plane to the ice.
BILL KRABILL: There
are five thousand individual beams per second that are being projected in to
that scan there and then down in a pattern on the surface, measures the surface
at ten centimetre accuracy.
NARRATOR: At five
year intervals they have flown the same route across the island, each time they
have measured the height of the ice. By comparing the two measurements they can
see if the ice is growing or shrinking.
BILL KRABILL :
There’s definitely changes taking place here, all over the margin of the
Greenland ice sheet it is thinning. It’s equivalent to fifty cubic kilometres
of ice and snow that are disappearing off the Greenland ice sheet each year.
NARRATOR: This fifty
gigotonnes of water melting from Greenland was the first evidence that global
warming might be effecting the ice sheet here. But one change really shocked
them. They started to measure one of the island’s biggest glaciers.
BOB THOMAS: Less than ten years ago, five years ago, it
was moving at about six, seven kilometres per year. And that was more or less
in balance with the snowfall. Now in the five years since then the speed is
almost doubled.
NARRATOR: It’s now
advancing at twelve kilometres a year. The increase seems to be linked to
global warming. It’s the fastest moving glacier on the planet. It dumps enough
fresh water in to the sea each day to supply London for several months. Global
warming seems to be reshaping the whole landscape of one of the biggest ice
sheets on earth.
BOB THOMAS: Well I
myself am convinced that global warming has affected the dynamics of the
Greenland ice sheet and um that is possibly because increased melt water is
creeping to the bed through crevasses and boullans and lubricating the bed and
making it far more easy for the er, for the ice to flow.
NARRATOR: NASA have
recently doubled their estimates of how much fresh water is coming off
Greenland. To a hundred cubic kilometres per year. And much of that fresh water
is flowing towards the sinking zone of the conveyor. Scientists began to wonder
just what could be the effect of all that fresh water on the conveyor. They
began to realise that because the conveyor was driven by the salty water
sinking then too much fresh water would dilute the salt and so if the salt was
diluted too much the conveyor wouldn’t sink.
Dr TERRY JOYCE
(Woods Hole Oceanographic Inst.): What’s amazing about this is that how well
fine tuned the system is. Where only a one percent chance in the salinities
maybe significant, may tip us over in to this regime where the water is too
fresh at higher altitudes to sink and the conveyor will stop.
NARRATOR: Cut off
the conveyor and a climate catastrophe would happen. The only question was just
how much fresh water would it take. The truth is that no one quite knows. What
they do know is that Greenland isn’t the half of it. There is another even
bigger source of fresh water heading straight for the sinking zone. Predictions
are that global warming will lead to a much wetter world, because warm air can
hold more moisture. And when it heads north and cools it should lead to more
rain. In 2000 a team of American scientists travelled to Siberia. They studied
the effects of global warming on some of the biggest rivers in the world.
Dr BRUCE PETERSON
(MBL, Woods Hole): If you took the Ob, the Enesai and the Elena rivers and put
them side by side you’d have a volume of discharge equivalent to three
Mississippi rivers.
NARRATOR: The rivers
collect rain that has fallen over a vast area of land. They already carry
nearly twenty times the amount of fresh water towards the sinking zone, then
drains from the ice in Greenland. Peterson wanted to find out if global warming
had led to more water in these rivers. The warming in the last hundred years is
only about half a degree. He measured how the flow of water had changed.
Dr BRUCE PETERSON:
An increase in annual discharge of a hundred and twenty eight cubic kilometres
per year. You probably can not imagine what a hundred and twenty eight cubic
kilometres per year’s like. It’s a large volume of water.
NARRATOR: And in the
coming century we’re expecting up to ten times more global warming. So Peterson
decided to calculate how much more fresh water that could bring.
Dr BRUCE PETERSON:
At the end of the next hundred years we expect approximately fifty percent
increase in the discharge that these rivers would occur.
NARRATOR: It’s a
horrifying prospect. A fifty percent increase in some of the world’s biggest
rivers. If Peterson’s projections are true a vast wall of fresh water will soon
come flooding through northern Siberia. An extra thousand cubic kilometres a
year more could flow in to the salty waters of the conveyor. The impact could
be immense. And that was the warning that Bill Turrell had seen in the deep.
He’s been monitoring the saltiness of the conveyor as it flows past the Faro
Isles north of Scotland.
DR BILL TURRELL: This
is the device we use to measure the salinity in the ocean. These bottles here
collect the water samples that we bring back to the ship to analyse, to
collaborate the electronics which are down here. This package measures
temperature, salinity, about twenty five times a second as we lower it down
from the surface down to the seabed.
NARRATOR: If the
saltiness of the water is dropping it’s a sign that the driving force of the
conveyor is weakening.
DR BILL TURRELL:
This graph shows the salinity or saltiness of the bottom water. It’s the
saltiness from 1900 to the present day.
NARRATOR: Until the
1970s the salinity had been almost constant. But then it began to drop.
DR BILL TURRELL:
After the late seventies we began to see a freshening of the bottom water. So
much so that we, we began to doubt our own results. We took further samples, we
checked with other countries who are sampling the same water, until eventually
we became convinced that this change was actually happening.
NARRATOR: Turrell
had measured the largest and most dramatic change recorded in the era of modern
instruments. And there was worse. He took measurements from the very bottom of
the ocean, from the return leg of the conveyor. Its flow had fallen by a
massive twenty percent.
DR BILL TURRELL: It’s the first changes that we’d expect to
see if we thought that global warming was beginning to effect the conveyor
belt. Er a few years ago I probably wouldn’t have said that because global
warming was far more iffy, it wasn’t so significant, it wasn’t so certain. Now
we really do know that fresh water input to the Arctic is increasing. The
Siberian rivers are pumping out more fresh water. The Arctic ice sheets are
melting and there is more release of fresh water. It, it’s the most fundamental
change I’ve observed in my career. NARRATOR:
The process that could cut off the conveyor has begun. We don’t know where the
cut off point is, we just know we’re getting closer to it.
Prof RICHARD ALLEY:
I don’t think that an abrupt sudden trip and fall down the stairs is the most
likely outcome. But I think that the probability of that is high enough that we
should really think about it.
Dr TERRY JOYCE : The
likelihood of having an abrupt change is increasing because of global warming
is moving us closer and closer to the brink. We don’t know where that is but we
know one thing, we’re moving towards the edge. And so I would say within the
next hundred years it’s very likely. In other words a fifty percent probability
that this might happen. NARRATOR: So there
could be a fifty percent probability that the conveyor will stop flowing past
the shores of Britain. Perhaps a one in two chance that one of the most
important sources of heat in the world will just disappear. What would happen
to us if the heat of a million power stations were to cut off? The answer
depends crucially on how soon it happens. The Met Office has run a series of
possible scenarios. In the first they examined what would happen if the
conveyor cut off in fifty years. They have balanced the effects of fifty years
of global warming against the regional cooling caused by the conveyor cutting
off. In this scenario the area around Britain does indeed get colder.
Dr RICHARD WOOD: Cooling due to the ocean circulation
collapsed is even stronger than the global warming. We’re still looking at a
climate which is a lot colder than today’s.
NARRATOR: But how
much colder? This was the coldest winter in the past century. A freak event not
easily forgotten.
PROF BILL MCGUIRE:
The winter of 1962 to 1963 is something that people of my age particular
remember because from Boxing day ‘til March there was very deep snow on the
ground across much of England.
NARRATOR: Blizzards lashed the country for day after day. In places snow
lay eight meters deep. And temperatures fell to minus twenty two degrees.
Dr RICHARD WOOD:
That would have had a huge impact on, on people’s lives. There’s a lot of
disruption to all sorts of infrastructure, people were snowed in for long
periods, over quite a wide part of the country.
NARRATOR: The
electricity supply failed across the whole south east. Crops had to be drilled
out of the ground. We asked the Met. Office to examine their scenario and
calculate how often we could expect a winter like this. Their answer, once
every seven years. But there is a second scenario the scientists have been
examining.
PROF BILL MCGUIRE:
Well I can only describe it as catastrophic.
BOB GASGOSIAN: The
implications are huge.
PROF BILL MCGUIRE: It’s
clearly going to influence every single one of us every day of our lives.
BOB GASGOSIAN: The
economic implications, the political implications, er and the national security
implications, for all countries.
NARRATOR: This scenario is that the gulf stream
conveyor cuts off, not within fifty years but twenty. It’s described as a low
probability, high impact event. The whole of north west Europe gets a lot
colder.
Dr RICHARD WOOD:
This is really a huge change in climate, a massive cooling. If this was to happen
we would certainly have a future which was very cold, very different from what
we have today.
NARRATOR: The
coastline of Britain would become unrecognisable.
Dr RICHARD WOOD: You
could expect to see sea ice off the coast of south east England probably
several miles off shore.
NARRATOR: We would
struggle to keep our coastline open and our ports working. But the effects of a
shutdown could be even greater on land. Winter blizzards would bring us
entirely new hazards.
PROF BILL MCGUIRE:
We’d expect to see ice storms. Now these are severe winds but they bring with
them either frozen rain or snow which clogs up and builds up on cables, power
cables, telephone cables, brings them down very effectively. These conditions
can persist for days and can really bring a country to its knees.
NARRATOR: Our
infrastructure would be in danger of collapse.
PROF BILL MCGUIRE:
The power lines would ice up, they’d snap, they’d collapse and this could
happen virtually country wide during the worst of these storms.
NARRATOR: With enough warning we could make plans and
adapt to our new landscape. The trouble is there wouldn’t be any warning.
Dr TERRY JOYCE:
It’ll be quick and suddenly one decade we’re warm, the next decade we’re in the
coldest winter that we’ve experienced in the last hundred years, but we’re in
it for a hundred years.
NARRATOR: Winters
like this would be commonplace.
PROF BILL MCGUIRE: I
think we’d be extraordinarily poorly equipped to deal with a gulf stream
shutdown. If we’re dealing with a situation where snow is on the ground for
perhaps thirty days a year or maybe up to a hundred days a year, with
temperatures regularly down in the minus twenties, I think we’ll find it very,
very difficult to cope with that.
NARRATOR: It could
mark the end of the British way of life as we’ve known it. But there is
something even more disturbing about the conveyor cutting off. Something that
suggests it could cause a catastrophe of truly global proportions if it were to
happen. The Met Office have run another computer simulation. It shows a clear
link between a conveyor cut off and patterns of rainfall across the world.
Dr. R. WOOD: One thing that’s really surprised us
was the fact that, that the impact is not just confined to our part of the
world.
NARRATOR: The dark
red areas of his map suffer massive drops in rainfall.
Dr RICHARD WOOD: The
main rain band in the tropics would move quite a bit south so all these
countries in the red region here would lose a very large proportion of their
rainfall and that could impact on a large number of people in those parts of
the world.
NARRATOR: Central
America would be one of the worst hit regions. It could lose up to forty
percent of its rainfall.
Dr RICHARD WOOD: The
model suggests that the present er vegetation in the rainforest wouldn’t be
sustainable in that situation, and the forest would die and be replaced by
grassland. NARRATOR: While we shivered
through long and bitter winters huge tracks of forest would die away. Well
that’s what the computer model said. And then came evidence that it had
actually happened before. The clues came from within Richard Alley’s ice cores.
They contained bubbles of ancient air, evidence of how the atmosphere has
changed. Alley’s attention focussed on one gas that was present in the bubbles,
methane. It’s produced naturally by bacteria in the tropics when they receive
plenty of rainfall, and it disappears at times of drought.
Prof RICHARD ALLEY:
And so you can ask of those bubbles how many swamps were there on earth. And
this is wonderful because it tells you something that’s happening across a
whole bunch of the land area. If the world dries up partially they’ll be much
less methane in the air and it will show up, right there. NARRATOR: He found that the methane levels
plummeted at the same time as temperatures had dropped in the past. It seemed
the conveyor cut off made the world drier.
Prof RICHARD ALLEY:
And when the north Atlantic has been cold in the past the monsoon seems to have
weakened or failed in places in Asia. Chill out the northern Europe and you dry
a lot of places around a lot of millions of people with that.
NARRATOR: The
monsoon is a lifeline to hundreds of millions of people living across the Asian
subcontinent. Agriculture depends on its heavy rains. Should this scenario ever
happen it would bring disaster on an unimaginable scale. There would be famine,
economic collapse and refugees on the move.
DR BOB GASGOSIAN: We had only three billion people on this
earth in 1962, we have over six billion now. Where are these people going to
go if there are economic hard times? If we were to get on the same scale of the
Irish famine today, that occurred then, I am very concerned at what would
happen at that time. NARRATOR: And there
is a final twist to these scenarios. Switching the conveyor off can happen at
speed. But switching it back on is altogether harder.
TERRY JOYCE: We’re
moving along and suddenly we drop down, how do we switch it back on? Well we
would have to climb this cliff. There’s an enormous amount of energy required
to climb that cliff.
Prof WALLY BROECKER:
And there’d be nothing in the meantime we could do to change it.
TERRY JOYCE: We have
to reveres this effect of global warming by hundreds of years.
NARRATOR: We are now preparing for more heat
and more rain. But our new understanding of how climate change works challenges
all that. It suggests our defences could be pointing the wrong way.” (BBC
program, broadcast on SBS, Australia, Oct. 16, 2005).
All of a sudden,
catastrophe is stalking this planet. It
is not a question of Global Warming or Global Deeming, it is both, and
incredibly, almost at the same time.
Winters have become colder, yet the hottest decade on record was the
last.
“Unless the nation works
together, our grandchildren face global disaster”,
said the NSW Premier, Morris Emma.
“This year has been the warmest on record in Australia. The nine hottest
years globally have all been since 1995. Brazil's first hurricane, the melting
of Siberia's permafrost and America's record hurricane season are testimony to
the devastation of climate change. NSW is not immune. We have witnessed longer
and more destructive bushfire and storm seasons and prolonged drought. Our
grandchildren face a grim future if we do not cut the greenhouse gas emissions
that are causing the planet to warm dramatically.” (Morris Emma, S. M. H. Nov. 29, 2005).
Now is it a mere
coincidence that these things have occurred exactly at the time foretold in
prophecy? If we had not spoken about
it for a decade and a half, and raised our voices only when these things have
become obvious, as a few of our nemesis are doing, we would be accused of
opportunism. However, we have spoken
about these things long before they occurred, and that is why the world ought
to listen to what we say about what will happen next. The world is primed for nothing less than
the much talked about Great Tribulation of Jesus Christ. Behind the scenes, the major world powers are
feverishly preparing and positioning themselves for a world conflict that will
result in nothing less than the annihilation of all flesh. Never before has this warning from Jesus
Christ been more acute than it is now.
Mat 24:7 "For nation will rise against nation,
and kingdom against kingdom. And there will be famines, pestilences,
Mat 24:8 and earthquakes in various places. "All these are the beginning of sorrows
. . .
Mat 24:11 "Then many false prophets will rise up
and deceive many.
Mat 24:12 "And because lawlessness will abound, the
love of many will grow cold.
Mat 24:13 "But he who endures to the end shall be
saved.
Mat 24:14 "And this gospel of the kingdom will be
preached in all the world as a witness to all the nations,
Mat 24:15 and then the end will come. "Therefore when you see the 'abomination
of desolation,' spoken of by Daniel the prophet, standing in the holy
place" (whoever reads, let him understand), . . .
Mat 24:20 "Pray that your flight may not be in
winter or on the Sabbath [When Jesus
Christ returns, He expects to find His followers observing the Sabbath]. "For then there will be great
tribulation, [for those who do not
observe the Sabbath],
Mat 24:21 such as has not been since the beginning of
the world until this time, no, nor ever shall be.
Mat 24:22 "And unless those days were shortened,
no flesh would be saved; but for the elect's sake those days will be shortened.
Mat 24:29 "Immediately after the tribulation of
those days the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light; the
stars will fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens will be shaken . . .
Mat 24:32 "Now learn this parable from the fig
tree: When its branch has already become tender and puts forth leaves,
Mat 24:33 you know that summer is near. "So you also, when you see all these
things, know that it is near; at the doors!
Mat 24:34 "Assuredly, I say to you, this
generation will by no means pass away till all these things take place.
Mat 24:35 "Heaven and earth will pass away, but My
words will by no means pass away.
Notice how important
for the world is the presence of God’s elect.
But where are the elect of God today? Can you see anyone around? Maybe you think you could find them in churches
at the weekend. Well, the elect of God
are supposed to be recognized by their fruits anywhere and at all times, not
just during their church attendance.
"By their fruits you will know them,” said Jesus Christ (Mat 7:20).
He also said this:
Watch, therefore, and
be informed, for on it depend your life and the life of this planet!
Global
Dying
Are Global Warming, Global Deeming,
and a peak in the age of oil, happening at the same time by chance or by
design? If they are happening by chance,
humanity is lost, but if by design, there is hope.
If the world is traveling aimlessly
through this inhospitable universe, we have two stark choices: be scorched to
death by Global Warming in the short term, or be frozen to death by Global
Deeming in a little longer term.
Forums of experts and summits of
leaders have mushroomed in the last year or so since it became obvious that our
planet is in deep trouble. Yet at no
time has our Creator been invoked in their deliberations.
To the very end, human beings will not
admit that they have failed themselves, that unless they bend their knees and
bow their head to the One and only Power that can save them, they will vanish
without a trace. But how could people
turn to God for salvation when the leading religious institution in the world
is telling them that the word of God – the Bible – is unreliable, and that they
are a product of evolved monkeys?
“The hierarchy of
the Roman Catholic Church has published a teaching document instructing the
faithful that some parts of the Bible are not actually true. The Catholic bishops of England, Wales and
Scotland are warning their five million worshippers, as well as any others
drawn to the study of scripture, that they should not expect “total accuracy”
from the Bible . . . Some Christians
want a literal interpretation of the story of creation, as told in Genesis,
taught alongside Darwin’s theory of evolution in schools, believing
“intelligent design” to be an equally plausible theory of how the world
began. But the first 11 chapters of
Genesis, in which two different and at times conflicting stories of creation
are told, are among those that this country’s Catholic bishops insist cannot be
“historical”. At most, they say, they
may contain “historical traces”.
Similarly,
they refute the apocalyptic prophecies of Revelation, the last book of the
Christian Bible, in which the writer describes the work of the risen Jesus, the
death of the Beast and the wedding feast of Christ the Lamb. The bishops say: “Such symbolic language must
be respected for what it is, and is not to be interpreted literally. We should
not expect to discover in this book details about the end of the world, about
how many will be saved and about when the end will come.” (The
Times, Oct. 2005).
“The Vatican today
warned Catholics that if they do not listen to the contentions of modern
science – regarding the origin of life and other issues – they risk falling
prey to "fundamentalism."
“When asked about the debate raging between evolution and intelligent
design in the United States, a papal representative reaffirmed John Paul II's
1996 assertion that evolution was "more than just a hypothesis."
Said Monsignor
Gianfranco Basti, director of the Vatican project STOQ, or Science, Theology and
Ontological Quest: "A hypothesis asks whether something is true or false.
(Evolution) is more than a hypothesis because there is proof."
(WorldNetDaily.com, Nov. 3, 2005).
Who decides what is
true and what is not true in the Bible?
If we have to pick and chose from that book, it is no longer the Word of
God. But what did Jesus Christ say? “Your word is truth.” To highlight this point, God put this
statement in both the Old and the New Testaments.
Jesus Christ also said
that the Scriptures cannot be broken, meaning that they are letter of the law
that must never be tampered with.
The Son of God
declared the Bible to be the unbreakable word of God, yet the “Vicar of Christ
on earth” says that people must pick and chose through it because not all of it
is true. They pick on texts that are
allegorical in nature, which they do not understand, and denigrate the whole
Bible for it. Now who do you believe:
Jesus Christ or His “Vicar on earth”?
What people must
understand is that it has not been left to them to determine what formed the
Word of God and what not. The Holy
Spirit has been guiding inspired men throughout history to write and put
together texts that became known as the Bible, or the Scriptures. The Apostles
of Jesus Christ believed in the authenticity of the whole Bible, and so should
you.
Contrary to what the
enemies of God would have you believe, the Bible is not contradictory. It is a complex book, but that is why reading
it and unraveling its mysteries is such an unforgettable and exhilarating experience. Anyone who has spent time on it knows that it
is an extraordinarily harmonious book.
Given that its authors have lived hundreds of years apart, it is clear
that only an unseen hand – the Holy Spirit – could have brought it together and
preserved it in the form that we have it today.
That is one of the guarantees that we are dealing with the genuine Word
of God.
The other one being
the accuracy of its predictions. Every prophecy, some as old as three thousand
years old, has been fulfilled exactly how the Bible said it would. The Bible however, does not yield its secrets
easily to just anyone. God says us that
He had specifically put it together in such a way that those who do not deserve
it will never understand it.
Why has God done
that? To give a rope to those who pose
themselves as experts on the Bible, who have no idea what they are talking
about, so that they may hang themselves with it.
The
priest and the prophet have erred through intoxicating drink, They are
swallowed up by wine,
For all tables are full of vomit and
filth; No place is clean.”
When Jesus Christ
said, “Your word is truth”, He meant the entire Bible is true not just parts of
it. Then He sealed it from His glorified
position in heaven with the following stern warning:
Now is it a mere
coincidence that the Vatican has disowned the books of Genesis and of
Revelation exactly when we have adduced proofs that the Genesis account of
creation is true (See TCH 1), and are
in the process of unveiling for the first time ever the book of Revelation to
the world? (See TCH 14 and this
edition).
Why is the Catholic Church afraid of the book
of Revelation? Is it because that book
reveals to the world the full horror a certain “Mother of Harlots” has wrecked
among the people of God for centuries?
If you do not know who that “Mother of Harlots” is by now, you never
will. Perhaps if you ask the Vatican, it
might tell you. Or it might not. One day, humanity will wake up to the
insidious deception that “the god of this age” and his servants have palmed
upon the world.
The world will also
wake up to the fact that evolution and creation simply do not go together. Why then does the Vatican preach
evolution? Is it because it tries to
serve two masters? But what did Jesus
Christ say about that?
Mat 6:24 "No one can serve two masters; for
either he will hate the one and love the other, or else he will be loyal to the
one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon.”
The Catholic Church
has shown its true colors when it chose to serve mammon rather than God. And what accusation did it bring against
those who trust God and take His word at its face value? Fundamentalism!
For more than a
millennium, it was deadly for anyone to be caught reading the Bible. The Catholic Church can no longer kill people
for reading the Bible, but it can besmirch it and make them feel as if they are
wasting their time studying it. And this
from the man that claims to be the “Vicar of Christ on earth”.
Will God put up much
longer with this grievous blasphemy?
Certainly not! The age of Satan
and his servants is over. The problem is
that they are determined to take humanity to Hell with them.
Monsignor Gianfranco Basti said that
evolution “is more than a hypothesis because there is proof.” And where pray tell is that proof? Every piece of bone – skull, skeleton, wing
or whatever – that has been presented as “evidence” of a transitional form,
without which there is no evolution, has been questioned by other scientists
and declared to be unreliable and unlikely to be what their proponents claimed
it to be. History of the evolutionary
theory has been fraught with forgeries and deceptions, but you will never hear
that from the Vatican. As opposed to
that, there are mountains of evidence of creation all over the world, the most
striking being evidence of a worldwide upheaval that has lifted sea beds on top
of mountains. God says that He did it at
the time of Noah’s Flood. The wise men
of this world, however, and of the Vatican in particular, would not be caught
dead believing in the Flood of Noah.
Well, very shortly, no one will believe in evolution anymore. They will all see the great power of God at
work.
Now as if its
statements about the Bible and evolution were not enough, the Vatican gave us
another gem.
“The Vatican says
practicing homosexuals, men with “deep-seated” gay tendencies and those who
love the culture should not become priests . . . In light of such teaching,
this dicastery [Vatican department] … believes it necessary to state clearly
that the Church, while profoundly
respecting the person in question, cannot admit to the seminary or to Holy
Orders those who practice homosexuality, present deep-seated homosexual
tendencies or support the so-called gay culture.” (The Newcastle Herald, Nov. 24, 2005).
Every major media in
the world took up this statement and made a case of the fact that the Vatican
no longer admits gays to the priesthood. No one, however, took note of the fact
that the same institution”profoundly respects” those people.
It “profoundly
respects” gays but it does not want then in the priesthood, not because God
just as profoundly hates their abominable practice, but because it causes its
members to stray to “fundamentalist” churches, as they do in droves in Latin
America.
Now do you think that
those who engage in that abhorrent practice would abandon it when they hear
that the Vatican profoundly respects them?
This is how profoundly the Apostles of Jesus Christ respected those
people:
“Those who practice
such things are deserving of death”. If
that is what the Apostles thought, so did Jesus Christ Himself, for they had
His mind. And if that is what Jesus Christ
thought, so did God the Father, for He had the mind of God.
This then is what the
churches ought be preach, not that they are “profoundly respectful” towards
those who engage in practices that drew the wrath of God in the past. Since this sin is widely practiced in the
world these days, the whole world is in danger because of it. And they wonder that the world is undergoing
such heartrending devastations. When
people turn to God and Jesus Christ, they are no longer homosexuals, but
Christians. Unless they lapse and return to their old ways, in which case there
is no longer any hope for them.
The Catholic Church
has been shifting its errand homosexual priests from parish to parish for
decades, until it could no loner do so because of public pressure. And people still think that they could find
salvation in that church. God says that
the time has come for His people to come out of ‘BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF
HARLOTS’.
Verse 17:8 gives us an
interesting statement that stands out from the rest of this passage. The whole world will marvel at the fall of
this Babylon the Great and Mother of Harlots, except those that have been
written in the Book of life, “from the foundation of the world”. Now what does that tell you? That this world follows a haphazard course,
left to the vagaries of nature? Far from
it! Rather, that God has been working
out a well thought out plan for His people, whom He knew before the foundation
of the world.
God knew the people
that will be saved even before He created the world, just as He knew that His
Son Jesus Christ would need to come into the world to save the humanity from
sin and death.
God says that He also
knew the people who would fall victim to Satan’s deception.
Now what do these
statements tell you? That human beings
have free moral agency, as churches preach and as schools of philosophy all
over the world teach, or that everything is in the hands of God, including your
salvation? If free moral agency is
true, if people are saved because of the rightness of their decisions, then the
grace of God is of no value and not needed anymore. Salvation becomes a matter of right, not of
grace.
This is what is
destroying this world. People no longer
believe that they need God in order to be saved. Few people believe in salvation anyway, and
those that do, believe in a false gospel of salvation. This is a huge subject, and we cannot deal
with it here. We have covered this topic
in a number of editions, particularly in The
Christian Herald No 11.
Human beings believe
that they have immortality within themselves, and are assured of a place in
heaven simply for their inherent goodness.
Where does this belief come from?
From a misunderstanding of the Genesis account of creation. Let us go to that book now to show you one of
the biggest and longest standing deceptions that this world has ever seen. First, let us determine when the creation
took place. We saw earlier that Jesus
Christ believed that the entirety of God’s word – the Bible – is true. And what did He believe regarding the
beginning of the world?
Mat 19:3 “The Pharisees also came to Him, testing Him,
and saying to Him, "Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife
Mat 19:4 for just any reason?" And He answered and said to them, "Have
you not read that He who made them at
the
Mat 19:5
beginning 'made them male and female, and said, 'For this reason a
man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two
shall become one flesh'?”
For Jesus Christ the beginning
occurred when God created male and female upon the earth. If anybody tells you otherwise, do not
believe it. No true follower of Jesus
Christ would believe otherwise, for then he would not be a Christian.
During my university
days, the universe was supposed to be twenty five billion years old. Nowadays it has shrunk to just fifteen
billion years. What does that tell
you? That they know what they are
talking about? They play with billions
of years as if they play with yo-yos.
You will be surprised how quickly the age of the universe will shrink to
just a few thousand years shortly when God steps in human affairs.
What scientists do not
tell you is that there is no method by which the age of the universe could be
measured with accuracy. Much of what
they say is nothing but pure guesswork.
And you know why the age of the universe cannot be measured with
accuracy? Because we operate under
different laws now than they did before the Flood of Noah. The Patriarchs, who lived upwards of eight
hundred years before the Flood of Noah, could not live half that long these
days. Something happened to the
structure of the earth, to its gravity and the passage of time that affected
human longevity.
The earth’s magnetic
field, which is tied to gravity, has been steadily losing its strength for as
long as scientists have been able to measure it. That affects the earth’s measuring
instruments, and gives scientists skewed measurements. But you will never hear that from
evolutionary scientists who believe in uniformitarian geology – that things
have always run in the manner that we are observing today, and no upheavals of
the like of Noah’s Flood ever occurred.
Even the second law of thermodynamics, which says that the universe is
running down continually, fits better into the Biblical account of creation
than in the evolutionary science. By
its very nature, this world grows old and needs renewing, except that when that
renewing will take pace it will not be of the same matter, but of spirit that
never grows old, like God Himself.
Like a cloak You will change
them, And they will be changed.
As for those who
believe and preach otherwise, this is what God says.
Throughout history,
men have wondered what God is doing on this planet, but have not been able to
find the answer.
Mat 13:10 “And the disciples came and said to Him,
"Why do You speak to them in parables?" He answered and said to them,
Mat 13:11 "Because
it has been given to you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to
them it has not
Mat 13:12
been given. "For whoever
has, to him more will be given, and he will have abundance; but whoever does
not have, even what he has will be taken away from him. "Therefore I speak to them in parables,
Mat 13:13 because seeing they do not see, and hearing
they do not hear, nor do they understand.
Mat 13:14 "And in them the prophecy of Isaiah is
fulfilled, which says: 'Hearing you will hear and shall not understand,
Mat 13:15 And seeing you will see and not perceive; For
the hearts of this people have grown dull. Their ears are hard of hearing, And
their eyes they have closed, Lest they should see with their eyes and hear with
their ears, Lest they should understand with their
Mat 13:16 hearts and turn, So that I should heal
them.' "But blessed are your eyes
for they see, and your ears for they hear; "for
Mat 13:17 assuredly,
I say to you that many prophets and righteous men desired to see what you see,
and did not see it,
and to
hear what you hear, and did not hear it.”
Now if not even God’s
prophets and righteous men could discern what God was doing on this planet,
what chance is there for those who are not following God or deny His
existence? For a long time, God retained
that knowledge even from His prophets.
That privileged knowledge required a solid and widespread spiritual
background, and that was not possible before Jesus Christ overcame the world
and made the Holy Spirit available to all who would believe and follow
Him.
The world cannot
receive, or hear, or see the “Spirit of truth”, so it cannot know the mystery
of God’s creation. It is only in the
very end of time that God says He will reveal that mystery to the world.
Since we are in the
process of unveiling the book of Revelation to the world, what does that tell
you? The problem is that even when
things are made very clear, there are people who would follow their own way
rather than the way of God.
It is not possible for
one to be a disciple of Jesus Christ if he does not believe in creation, in the
Flood of Noah, and in the Bible as a whole, just as Jesus Christ believed. We saw how unreservedly He believed in the
Genesis account of creation. And what
does that account say? You will be
surprise at the difference between what the Bible says and what people believe
it does. Let us go to it now. First, the account of creation in its
entirety, so that you may refer to it.
Verse 1 says that God
began His creation with the heavens, not with the earth, as it is commonly
believed.
Verse 3 tells us that
He created light. Now we all know that
light comes from the sun, yet at this stage, the sun could not be seen. It was only in the fourth day that the sun
appeared. So where did the light come
from? There are two possibilities. It came from God Himself, for we know that
God is light.
Alternately, the light
came from the sun. From recent
scientific discoveries (not all science is wrong, only the evolutionary one),
we know that the universe could have started with an explosion of gas and misty
cosmic dust. Out of that dust, God
created the solar system. That dust
however, was still very dense, and prevented the sun from appearing on the
earth. It was like cloudy days in which
there is light, but the sun cannot be seen.
Verses
Verses
Verses 14 to 19 tell
us that God shifted His attention to the universe once again. He caused the cosmic dust to coalesce into
the planets, the stars and galaxies outside of our solar system. For the first time the sun could be seen from
the earth. That was the fourth day.
Verses 20 to 23 tell
us that God then created the marine animals and the flying creatures. That was the fifth day.
Verses 24 and 25 tell
us that God created the animal kingdom of the dry land. That must have been in the first part of the
sixth day, because verses 28 to 31 tell us that in the same day God created
human beings.
Verses
Now here comes the
interesting part. At the end of each
day, God looked at His creation and said that it was good. In the sixth day, after He created the land
animals, He also said that it was good.
Then He created human beings and said… What did He say? If you ask church people, they will most
likely tell you that God looked at human beings and said that they were not
merely good, but ‘very good’. Herein
lays one of the greatest deceptions this world has ever seen. Let us look at that account yet again.
Here would have been
the ideal place for God to look at His creation and declare it ‘good’ or ‘very
good’. But what do we have instead? Nothing!
Let us look again at that passage, lest there be a misunderstanding
about it.
It was only in verse
31 that God looked at . . . what did He
look at and declare ‘very good’? At
human beings? No! He looked at everything that He had created
and said that it was very good. God
deliberately separated human beings from the expression ‘very good’. Why did He do that? Because He knew that human beings were not
good, let alone very good. Why were they
not good or very good? Because they were
rotten from the very beginning, and rotten they have been ever since. Here is Jesus Christ again.
Mat 19:16 “Now behold, one came and said to Him,
"Good Teacher, what good thing shall I do that I may have eternal
life?"
Mat 19:17 So He said to him, "Why do you call Me good? No one is good but One, that is, God. But
if you want to enter into life, keep the commandments."
If Adam and Eve were
‘good’ or ‘very good’, they would have been like God. Yet Jesus Christ said that only One is good,
that is, God. To which Apostle John
added this.
How did Jesus know
that? He created man!
Jesus Christ was the
God of creation. He knew that no man is
intrinsically good. Nothing in the
universe is intrinsically good, least of all human beings, but everything was
‘good’ or ‘very good’ the purpose for which is was created.
No man has immortality
in himself. If anyone tells you that
there is something immortal in you by right of birth, do not believe him, for
he is leading you to perdition, not to salvation. The whole world has been blinded with a false
gospel. This is why the word is heading
towards catastrophe, and why so few people will be saved in the end.
Mat 20:16 "So the last will be first, and the
first last. For many are called, but few chosen."
Mat 22:14 "For many are called, but few are
chosen."
Why New Kings and
Priests Are Being
Prepared
For the Kingdom Of God
In the book of Revelation, we find a
puzzling statement about the future leaders of the Kingdom of God.
He who is ‘the ruler
over the kings of the earth’ is preparing a new set of ‘kings and priests’ for
the Kingdom of His Father. Now why would
He do that, when there have been so many kings and priests in the history of
the world? And where are the new kings
and priests that He is preparing for that Kingdom now? No doubt, those who are currently kings or priests would say, here we are, take
us for the count, except that the Bible says that the new kings and priests are
unknown to this world.
Those who will be
kings and priests in the Kingdom of
God are not known at this stage. We
highlighted the word ‘and’ because in the Kingdom of God, there will no longer
be a separation between church and state, between the religious and the
secular, but kings will be priests, and priests will also be kings. From God’s point of view, there are no such
things as Presidents, Prime Ministers, ‘Dear Leaders’, or what have you. They
are all kings. That is why when the Scriptures speak of the kings of this
world, they refer to all leaders.
At the beginning of
the state of Israel, there was no separation between the religious and the
secular. The leaders, called ‘judges’, performed both the role of priests of
God and leaders of the people. It is
only when they decided to be like their neighbors and demanded a king, that the
religious and the secular became separated.
If they were unhappy
with Samuel’s sons, they could have asked for different judges, more righteous
and more obedient to God than his sons, for Samuel was not the only judge in
Israel, but obviously they had waited for an opportune occasion to ask for a
king so that could be like “all the nations”.
The tag of ‘chosen people’ did not stand well with them anymore. Little did they know that what they had asked
for would eventually lead to the destruction of Israel.
He will take your sons
and daughters, and ten percent of your income.
Now is this what the kings and leaders of this world are taxing their
people these days? What a wonderful world
it would be if people paid only ten percent taxes. The average tax in the world at present is
at least thirty percent, on top of which preachers demand the ten percent that
God said belongs to the leaders – a shameless twisting of the Scriptures, and a
merciless regime of taxes, all in the name of God. Can you see now why Jesus Christ did not
have a particularly good impression of the kings of this world?
Mat 11:7 “As they departed, Jesus began to say to the
multitudes concerning John: "What did you go out into the wilderness to
see? A reed shaken by the wind?”
"But what did you go out to see?
Mat 11:8 A man clothed in soft garments? Indeed, those
who wear soft clothing are in kings' houses.
Mat 11:9 "But what did you go out to see? A
prophet? Yes, I say to you, and more than a prophet. "For this is he
Mat 11:10 of whom it is written: 'Behold, I send My
messenger before Your face, Who will prepare Your way before You.'
Mat 11:11
"Assuredly, I say to you, among
those born of women there has not risen one greater than John the Baptist; but
he who is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he.”
What Jesus Christ was
telling people here is that if they wanted to find the people of God, they must
look not in king’s palaces, among those who are well endowed, well fed, and
well clothed, but among modest and humble people who are doing the work of God
from a poor base. What happened to John
the Baptist in the end? He was decapitated
for speaking the Word of God boldly by the king that was indulging in the
wicked pleasures of this world. Nothing
reflects the difference between the people of God and the rulers of this world
better than the case of Herod and John the Baptist.
Pleasing those who
were with him was more important for Herod than pleasing God. Obviously, he did not think much of the
judgment of God. He should have.
As the ancient Greeks
used to say, whom the gods want to destroy, they imbue with power.
Power is not a good sign
as far as salvation is concerned. On the
contrary, it is a sign of wickedness and perdition.