Apocalypse Now:

The Planet Ravaged by Disasters and Deception

For years, we have provided ample proof that the upheavals the world is experiencing these days are connected with the prophecies about the end of this age. All the signs that Jesus Christ spoke about in connection with those prophecies have come to pass exactly as He said they would.

One such prophecy is found in the book of Revelation. What is remarkable about this prophecy is that God relates it to human activity, more specifically to human sins. Here it is in its context. Bear in mind that Revelation prophecies are highly symbolic. Even so, it is easy to relate it to our time, in particular verses 8 – 11. (For detailed analysis of Revelation prophecies, see The Christian Heralds Nos 14 & 15).

Rev 16:1 Then I heard a loud voice from the temple saying to the seven angels, "Go and pour out the bowls of the wrath of God on the earth."

Rev 16:2 So the first went and poured out his bowl upon the earth, and a foul and loathsome sore came upon the men who had the mark of the beast and those who worshiped his image.

Rev 16:3 Then the second angel poured out his bowl on the sea, and it became blood as of a dead man; and every living creature in the sea died.

Rev 16:4 Then the third angel poured out his bowl on the rivers and springs of water, and they became blood.

Rev 16:5 And I heard the angel of the waters saying: "You are righteous, O Lord, The One who is and who was and who is to be, Because You have judged these things.

Rev 16:6 For they have shed the blood of saints and prophets, And You have given them blood to drink. For it is their just due."

Rev 16:7 And I heard another from the altar saying, "Even so, Lord God Almighty, true and righteous are Your judgments."

Rev 16:8 Then the fourth angel poured out his bowl on the sun, and power was given to him to scorch men with fire.

Rev 16:9 And men were scorched with great heat, and they blasphemed the name of God who has power over these plagues; and they did not repent and give Him glory.

Rev 16:10 Then the fifth angel poured out his bowl on the throne of the beast, and his kingdom became full of darkness; and they gnawed their tongues because of the pain.

Rev 16:11 They blasphemed the God of heaven because of their pains and their sores, and did not repent of their deeds.

Rev 16:12 Then the sixth angel poured out his bowl on the great river Euphrates, and its water was dried up, so that the way of the kings from the east might be prepared.

Rev 16:13 And I saw three unclean spirits like frogs coming out of the mouth of the dragon, out of the mouth of the beast, and out of the mouth of the false prophet.

Rev 16:14 For they are spirits of demons, performing signs, which go out to the kings of the earth and of the whole world, to gather them to the battle of that great day of God Almighty.

Rev 16:15 "Behold, I am coming as a thief. Blessed is he who watches, and keeps his garments, lest he walk naked and they see his shame."

Rev 16:16 And they gathered them together to the place called in Hebrew, Armageddon.

Rev 16:17 Then the seventh angel poured out his bowl into the air, and a loud voice came out of the temple of heaven, from the throne, saying, "It is done!"

Rev 16:18 And there were noises and thunderings and lightnings; and there was a great earthquake, such a mighty and great earthquake as had not occurred since men were on the earth.

Rev 16:19 Now the great city was divided into three parts, and the cities of the nations fell. And great Babylon was remembered before God, to give her the cup of the wine of the fierceness of His wrath.

Rev 16:20 Then every island fled away, and the mountains were not found.

Rev 16:21 And great hail from heaven fell upon men, each hailstone about the weight of a talent. Men blasphemed God because of the plague of the hail, since that plague was exceedingly great.

Men were scorched with great heat, suffered pains and sores, yet what did they do? They did not repent of their deeds but blasphemed God even more. These things are already happening before our very eyes, however, because humans do not repent of their deeds, God is about to unleash His wrath upon this world with even more devastating plagues: islands will disappear, mountains will be flattened, and men will fall under great hail from heaven.

Two decades ago, when we perceived that biblical prophecies were being ignored, we began publishing The Christian Herald in an attempt to bring knowledge of these prophecies to the attention of world leaders – religious and secular – and their people. Yet instead of taking note of the danger that this world is blindly heading into, we encountered a never ending chain of problems and obstacles from the same people. Even now, when it has become clear that humanity is on the edge of the precipice, religious leaders are still engaged in pathetic attempts to obscure and belittle our work. Have a look at this.

“Jury out on climate change?” ”THE drought this year has been particularly cruel in the country. Not simply because this is the seventh year and most farmers are broke, but because there were good early rains. Hopes were high, but nothing followed. The climate has changed, but Australia has long known terrible droughts. I suspect it was not only distance that precluded a large population before European settlement, when only a few hundred thousand Aborigines had the skill to survive our harsh environment. But is human industrial activity making the weather worse?

Are we on the brink of a man-made catastrophe? Could we do anything to change global weather patterns, even in the unlikely eventuality that the Great Powers agreed and society could afford it? These are big and different questions.

I am a believer in the Catholic understanding of faith and morals. I reserve my leaps of faith for religion: e.g.the Incarnation and Redemption.

I am certainly sceptical about extravagant claims of impending man-made climatic catastrophes, because the evidence is insufficient. Climate change has always occurred. Scientific debate is not decided by any changing consensus, even if it is endorsed by public opinion. Science is a process of experimentation, debate and respect for all the evidence. Often it's dealing with uncertainties rather than certainties, so its forecasts and predictions can be spectacularly wrong. In the 1970s, some scientists were predicting a new ice age because of global cooling. Today, other scientists are predicting an apocalypse because of global warming. It's no disrespect to science, or scientists, to take these latest claims with a grain of salt.

Uncertainties on climate change abound. Temperatures in Greenland were higher in the 1940s than they are today, and the Kangerlussuaq glacier is growing in size, not shrinking.

[Wrong! The glaciers in Greenland did not melt in the 1940’s at the speed they do now].

The journal American Scientist recently published a study on the melting glacier on Mt Kilimanjaro.
The study confirms that air temperature around the glacier continues to be below freezing, so it's not melting because of global warming. Instead, the melt pattern of the glacier is consistent with the effect of direct radiant heat from the sun. Human activity can't be blamed for that. The day before Al Gore and the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, England's High Court ruled that DVDs of Gore's documentary An Inconvenient Truth could not be shown in schools without teachers providing additional materials to correct nine "significant errors'' in the film.

Among them were claims that Pacific atolls were being evacuated because of rising sea levels, and that polar bears were drowning because they had to swim as far as 100km to find ice. The court found there was "no evidence'' to support either claim. [Wrong again! Some islands have shrunk in size,and many people have lost their homes. Tuvalu is one of them].

Some allege preachers raise their voices when they have a weak point. It has never worked for me, and it doesn't work in science or politics. (Cardinal Pell, The Sunday Telegraph, Oct 28, 2007).

This is none other than the head of the Catholic Church in Australia. He reckons that human beings have had nothing to do with the current climate change. More than that: he denies that there is even a global warming. The current worldwide increase in tempereature, he says, is nothinmg more than a natural cycle the likes of which this world has experienced many times in its long history. If Cardinal Pell had wanted to be properly informed and kept up to date with the latest scientific discoveries, he would have read none other than the very newspaper that publishes his concoctions.

“Turning up the heat” “LOS ANGELES: Climate models predicting the Earth's temperature could rise up to 5.6C by the end of the century may have underestimated the increase by as much as 2.3C. Research at the University of California Berkeley suggested that, as carbon dioxide emissions heat the globe, hotter oceans and soils would release stored carbon dioxide, kicking up the thermostat. "We've probably underestimated the problem," University of California Berkeley ecologist John Harte said yesterday.

Current models predict a doubling of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which at current emissions rates should happen within the next 50 years. That would raise global temperatures between 1.5C and 4.5C. The Berkeley lab predicted a doubling of carbon dioxide production would mean more of the gas would be released naturally, pushing the global thermostat up by between 1.6C and 6.2C. By the end of the century, the rise could be as much as 7.8C. "It's a vicious cycle where more warming causes more greenhouse gas emissions, and more greenhouse gas emissions cause more warming," biogeochemist Margaret Torn said. "That could have serious consequences both for human populations and biodiversity." Global temperatures fluctuate naturally with the intensity of sunlight hitting the Earth.

The scientists studied past warm periods in a 360,000-year climate record contained in Antarctic ice cores.

Using air bubbles trapped in the ice, they estimated past global temperatures using the ratios of oxygen isotopes and deuterium, which vary with the temperature. They then checked the effect of hotter temperatures on the level of carbon dioxide and methane in the bubbles. They found that, as temperatures rose, the production of two greenhouse gases increased more than would be expected from just the increased sunlight that initiated the warming. "The extra greenhouse gas emissions that occurred would lead to a significant amount of extra warming in the future," Ms Torn said. (Betsy Mason, The Daily Telegraph, May 24, 2006).

Cardinal Pell preferred the opinion of a judge to that of scientists. And to make sure his message is understood in the right places, he sunk his boot into what he called “allege preachers”. What he does not know, or does not want to admit, is that virtually all of God’s prophets were “allege preachers” for their contemporaries, including Jesus Christ. (See the article, “Why the prophets of God have never been welcomed by this world” elsewhere in this edition). If it were not for these “alege preachers”, we would have no Bible today, and the world would not know where it stands in relation to its Creator.

Let us now look more closely at the scientific evidence and see whether the jury is indeed still out on climate change.

The same day Cardinal Pell published his article, Chanel Nine television network, presented two documentaries on global warming in its “60 Minutes” program. One from the Greenland, and the other from California. Here are parts of their transcripts. First the one from Greenland.

The Greenland’s dissapesring ice cap “The Greenland’s ice cap is melting at an astonishing speed … even as we watch, it is changing. Huge ice blocks are collapsing into the sea. “The disappearing ice is a weather vein, proof that global warming is right here, right now.” “In the past 30 years, temperatures have increased by 1.5 degrees, more than double the world average … High up into the mountain … a glacier has retreated in the last ten years by almost 100 metres. You are really experiencing global warming. You see it happening … “When you fly north and over Greenland’s vast ice cap, the downside of global warming becomes frighteningly clear. Eighty per cent is still under ice. If it were all to melt, sea levels around the world would rise by a disastrous seven metres. That thow is already under way, and glaciers here are retreating at a rate that is shocking glaciologists like Gene Katania. “It has been increasing over the last 15 years or so. Every year we see more and more of it.”

“Do you have any doubt that man has anything to do with this?”

“No!”

“Gene has been tracking the movement of the ice using satelite positioning. The glacier in this area is the fastest in the world, moving 15 kilometres a year down fiord.”

“It definitely has been speeding up. We never thought that ice could move that fast …

“Disappearing icebergs, rising sea levels, unpredictable weather, this is the downside of a climate change, but for Greenlanders global warming gives them the best shot at a good life.”

Now a transcript of the documentary from California.

“California ablaze”. Reporter: It’s a frighgtening warning for us. Enough to make you wonder what we are in for this summer. Let’s just hope it’s nothing like this, an absolute catastrophe. A daily fire storm that’s raced through America’s west coast, forcing more than half a million people to evacuate their homes. And the terrible thing is it’s all part of a global pattern: fires that get worse and worse every year, at least ten times bigger than we’ve ever seen before. There is no doubt that we are living in the age of the mega fire.”

Tom Boatner, US Fire Chief: “The fire of this size and this intensity in this country would have been extremely rare 15, 20 years ago. They are common place these days.

Reporter: “Ten years ago, a big fire was what?”

T.B.: “Ten years ago, if you had a 100,000 acres fire you were talking of a huge fire. And if we had one or two a year that was probably normal. Now we are talking of 200,000 acres fires like it is just another day at the office. It’s been a huge change.”

Reporter: “And the biggest fires are what now?”

T.B.: “We’ve had, I believe, two fires this summer that’ve been 500,000 acres, half a million acres. And one of those was 600,000 acres . . . Seven of the ten bussiest fire seasons have been since 1999.”

Naration: “It was 20 years ago that fire fighters got their first glimpse of what was to come. This is Yellow Stone 1998, when a third of the national park was burned. Since then, fires have broken records in nine States. Several mega fires like this one in Arizona have burned over half a million acres each.”

Reporter: “Is it possible we get these mega fires and we just can’t fight them, because they are too large?”

T.B.: “Well, we’re …we’re there already. We have had to fight fires this summer that we knew we can’t put them out with the resources that we have now.

Naration: “The fire season over the last 15 years has increased by 78 days due to the melting ice on top of mountains. Global warming and climate change have increased temperatures in the west by one degree and that has increased the fire season. With these super fires, some forests may never recover. In 2006, the Feds spent 2 billion dollars on fire fighting, seven times more than just ten years ago.”

Reporter: “You know, there are a lot of people who don’t believe in climate change.”

T.B.: “You won’t find them in America’s west, because we’ve had climate change beating us in the last ten or fefteen years. We know what we are seeing and we are dealing with a period of climate change in terms of temperature, humidity and drought that’s different than anything people have seen in our life time.”

So, is the jury still out on climate change? Or is it a case that there is none as blind as he that will not see. Far from the case of the jury being out on climate change, scientists are alarmed by the speed with which the globe is warming.

“2008 critical for shrinking ice cap” PARIS: The Arctic ice cap has shrunk by an area twice the size of France's land mass over the past two years, the Paris-based National Centre for Scientific Research said yesterday. "The year 2008 promises to be a critical year on every level," said Jean-Claude Gascard, the body's research director and co-ordinator of the European scientific mission monitoring the effects of climate change across the Arctic.

Measurements in September last year show ice covering 4.13 million sq km, down from 5.3million sq km in 2005.

"Melting could result in the loss of another million in one (2008) summer," Mr Gascard said.

"Summer 2007 was marked by a major retreat in the ice cap, one we were not anticipating. The decline is also two or three times faster than (observed) beforehand." International models used to predict retreating ice have some "catching-up" to do, he said. Over the past 20 years, 40 per cent of the ice cap has melted, with the average thickness halved from three to 1.5 metres. Year-round ice coverage has reduced, with summer melting also lasting longer, the centre reported.

The team highlighted the role of ocean currents, namely in the northern Pacific, behind the warming of waters.

Mr Gascard's research colleague, Gerard Ancellet, also spoke of recently-formed Arctic mist, pollution clouds that "trap" Earth's naturally emitted infrared rays, thereby raising temperatures.

In last year's summer, the Northwest Passage, historically an ice-jammed potential shortcut between Europe and Asia, was "fully navigable" for the first time since monitoring began in 1978, according to the European Space Agency. It lasted five weeks, according to Canada's environment ministry.” (AFP/ The Australian,January 25, 2008).

“Wild weather a taste of things to come” “A MONSOON dropped 35 centimetres of rain in one day across many parts of South Asia this month. Germany had its wettest May on record, and April was the driest there in a century. Temperatures reached 45 degrees in Bulgaria last month and 32 degrees in Moscow in late May, shattering long-time records. The year still has almost five months to go, but it has already experienced a range of weather extremes that the UN's World Meteorological Organisation says is well outside the historical norm and is a precursor to much greater weather variability as global warming transforms the planet.

The warming trend confirmed in February by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change - based on the finding that 11 of the past 12 years had higher average ground temperatures than any others since formal temperature recording began - appears to have continued with a vengeance into 2007. The meteorological organisation reported that January and April were the warmest worldwide ever recorded. "Climate change projections indicate it to be very likely that hot extremes, heatwaves and heavy precipitation events will continue to become more frequent," the organisation said.

The heavy rains in South Asia have resulted in more than 500 deaths and displaced 10 million people, while 13.5 million Chinese have been affected by floods, the report said. In England and Wales, the period from May to July was the wettest since record-keeping began in 1766, resulting in floods that killed nine and caused more than $US6billion ($7billion) in damage. The World Meteorological Organisation, which is co-sponsoring a series of meetings and reports on global climate change, is putting together an early-warning system for climate extremes and establishing long-term monitoring systems, and plans to help countries most vulnerable to climate change.

"The average Northern Hemisphere temperatures during the second half of the 20th century were very likely the highest during any 50-year period in the last 500 years, and likely the highest in the past 1300 years," the report said.

Global warming is expected to result in more extreme weather because of changes in atmospheric wind patterns and the ability of warmer air to hold more moisture, said Martin Manning, the head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's working group on the physical science of climate change. He said that one year of heavier than normal rains and warmer than usual temperatures said nothing definitive about climate change, but they were consistent with the panel's long-term predictions. "What we have projected is an increase in extreme events as the global temperatures rise," Dr Manning said. "Floods, droughts and heatwaves are certainly consistent with that."

The World Meteorological Organisation reported the extreme weather occurred in many parts of the world. In May, a series of large waves (estimated at up to 3.6 metres) swamped almost 70 islands in 16 atolls in the Maldive Islands off south India, causing serious flooding and extensive damage. Halfway around the globe, Uruguay was hit during the same month by the worst flooding since 1959 - floods that affected more than 110,000 people and severely damaged crops and buildings. Two months later, an unusual winter brought high winds, blizzards and rare snowfall to parts of South America. Meanwhile, two extreme heatwaves affected south-eastern Europe in June and July. Dozens of people died, and firefighters worked nonstop battling blazes that destroyed thousands of hectares. On July 23, temperatures hit the record 45 degrees in Bulgaria. (Marc Kaufman, The Washington Post/SMH, August 9, 2007).

“Antarctica shows need for action on climate change, Ban Ki-moon says”

“Ban Ki-moon, during his historic visit to Antarctica, the first by a United Nations Secretary-General, has said warming temperatures on the continent show the growing dangers of climate change and the need for action to address it.

“It is here where our work, together, comes into focus,” Mr. Ban said in a statement issued on Friday. “We see Antarctica's beauty – and the danger global warming represents, and the urgency that we do something about it.”

The Secretary-General, who has made climate change a priority issue and is working to galvanize support for an international conference to be held in Bali in December on global commitments to stop it, said he is personally determined to push forward. He said the landscapes on Antarctica are “rare and wonderful” but also deeply disturbing as the ice continues melting at a fast pace. “All this may be gone, and not in the distant future, unless we act, together, now,” he warned.

“Antarctica is on the verge of a catastrophe – for the world.”

The Secretary-General offered stark figures to illustrate his point, noting that the glaciers on King George Island have shrunk by 10 per cent, while some in Admirality Bay have retreated by 25 kilometers. He also recalled how the 87-kilometer “Larsen B ice sheet” collapsed several years ago and disappeared within weeks and warned that the entire Western Antarctic Ice Shelf is at risk. “It is all floating ice, one fifth of the entire continent. If it broke up, sea levels could rise by 6 meters or 18 feet,” he noted, pointing out that 138 tons of ice are now being lost every year. Other “deeply worrying signs” he mentioned were the shrinking penguin population of Chabrier Rock, which has dipped by 57 per cent in the last 25 years.

“What will happen to the annual march of the penguins in the future? Will there even be one?”

At the same time, grass is growing for the first time ever on King George Island, where it rains rather than snows increasingly in the summer. “These things should alarm us all. Antarctica is a natural lab that helps us understand what is happening to our world. We must save this precious earth, including all that is here. It is a natural wonder, but above all, it is our common home,” said Mr. Ban. (