"Nobody Ever Saw Anything Like This Before"
In our ongoing attempt to bring you articles with the words EVER and NEVER in them, we found another one today. This one is about the global warming that will soon kill us all. We must admit that if we didn't read our Bibles and didn't know how the story of life on earth would end, we would probably be carrying a sign at the capitol that says, "Stop Carbon Emissions NOW!"
The world is certainly groaning with earthquakes, floods, record heat, record cold, volcanoes...all signs of the coming Tribulation. But those who worship Mother Earth goddess are convinced that humans caused all these weather events and humans need to fix it.
Controlling methane provides our best, and perhaps only, lever for shaving peak global temperatures over the next few decades. This is because it’s cleansed from the air naturally only a decade or so after release. Therefore if we could eliminate all methane emissions from human activities, methane’s concentration would quickly return to pre-industrial levels. Essentially, humans have released in excess of 3bn tonnes of methane into the atmosphere in the past 20 years. Quashing those emissions within a decade or two would save us 0.5C of warming. No other greenhouse gas gives us this much power to slow the climate crisis.
If the Earth keeps warming, though, reducing emissions from human activities may not be enough. We may also need to counter higher methane emissions in nature, including from warming tropical wetlands and thawing Arctic permafrost. The highest natural methane emissions come from wetlands and seasonally flooded forests in the tropics – such as the Brazilian Amazon forest I recently visited at the Mamirauá sustainable development reserve – and they are expected to rise with warming. Tropical wetlands yield so much methane because they are warm, wet (by definition) and low-oxygen environments perfect for growing methane-emitting microbes.
On my most recent trip there a year ago in July, El Niño [warming of sea surface temperatures] was strengthening and the tropical Atlantic was baking. Ocean temperatures off the coast of Florida approached hot-tub levels of 40C (104F) – close to temperatures suggested for cooking salmon and the highest surface ocean temperatures measured.
Warm ocean waters in the tropical Atlantic often bring drought to the Amazon. I sat in a boat in the Mamirauá reserve with my Brazilian host, hydrologist Ayan Fleischmann, who directs climate research there. “Drought may be coming,” he said and added: “Water levels several hundred kilometres upriver at a monitoring station in Tabatinga, Brazil, are already as low as they’ve ever been.” It was hard to envision drought as we floated past trees during the seasonal floods.
“The worst Amazon droughts happen in El Niño years with warm Atlantic waters,” Fleischmann said. The key ocean region is roughly the belt from the equator to Cuba and southern Florida. The extreme drought triggered by the 2015–16 El Niño featured record high temperatures, killed billions of trees and turned the Amazon from a global carbon sponge to a vast carbon source. Amazon fires raged in 2015 and 2016.
Fleischmann’s warning was prescient. In late September, just two months after I left, the region baked in unprecedented drought. Water levels in the Amazon system were lower than at any time since record-keeping began more than a century ago. Brazil’s minister for the environment, Marina Silva, said: “We are seeing a collision of two phenomena; one natural, which is El Niño, and the other a phenomenon produced by humans, which is the change in the Earth’s temperature.”
Air temperatures around Mamirauá topped 40C for days and the absence of rain and clouds cooked Amazon waters in the sun. In Lake Tefé, a tributary of, and gateway to, the western Amazon, where I first met Fleischmann, he measured water temperatures above 40C between 3ft and 6ft underwater.
When we spoke over Zoom a few days later, Fleischmann was distraught. “Nobody ever saw anything like this before. I saw 70 river dolphin carcasses along the lake and one animal still agonising. It was about 4pm and very hot. I watched a dolphin swimming in circles, struggling to survive. It was horrible. We didn’t know what to do or how to help it.” Not only was it hot and dry, but more than 7,000 fires raged across Amazonas state.
We certainly ARE NOT ridiculing the poor animals and dolphins that are dying because of hot water and draught. This world is always a miserable place for most living things. Rabbits killed by foxes in our backyard scream as they are carried off to be eaten alive. When wolves find a buffalo stuck in the mud they commence to eat him alive starting from his soft rear end. You can watch the awful thing on video as the proud beast stands there unable to move as the wolves drag out his intestines and eat his back legs off. What kind of a cursed world do we find ourselves living in???? Death is all around us!! Everything now currently alive on earth will soon die!!!
However, we laugh at the folly of men who believe that they can control the weather by stopping the Amazon forest from dying or by slowing the melting of the millions of square miles of permafrost.
As long as earth endures there will be warm, cold, spring, winter. Some will be bad, some will be good. Having temperatures in the Amazon for 100 years hardly qualifies as long term records.
What's really happening is that the earth is getting close to going through the Great Tribulation. I feel bad for every living thing that will have to go into it. It will be hell on earth and most life will perish. But God has ordained that it happen so it WILL HAPPEN. Remember the flood of Noah?? Thankfully He also gave us a promise through Jesus that followers of Jesus will not have to endure the wrath that is coming upon the whole earth.
Keep looking up! Our redemption is near!
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