Global Warming and Bible Prophecy
On 18 July 1997, Dr John Heap, the Director of the UK based Scott Polar Research Institute, gave an interview with the Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC) radio news program. He said, in speaking with the announcer about the history of Antarctic research after the recent ANARE Jubilee Science Conference, that the threat of global warming was like the Sword of Damocles hanging over the head of everyone living below 60 metres (200 feet) above sea level. What did he mean by that statement? How will the waters get that high? When will they get that high? When will it start? These are very important questions and the politicians are saying nothing.
The president of the Maldives said that global warming threatens his nation. He was reported in the following news extract from the St Paul Pioneer Express on 25 June 1997:
In an urgent plea for help, island nations at the Earth Summit are telling an alarming tale of the here and now: The seas already may be encroaching on their fragile lands. The president of the Maldives said global warming threatens his nation’s very existence while industrial giants engage in "sterile debates" about cost factors. Already low-lying atolls have been abandoned in Micronesia. A UN report on rising temperatures suggests sea levels may climb a disastrous 2 feet worldwide within 100 years.
Now this does not make all that much sense does it? The UN report says it may rise some 60 centimetres (2 feet) in 100 years and the islands in Micronesia are being abandoned already. Dr Heap says 60 metres (200 feet). Who is kidding who and why?
Since this paper was written in 1997, we have had a major El Nino and a serious rise in temperatures in the Pacific.
The rise in world sea levels is already visible. It is visible on the coast of Australia right now.
Recently, New Zealand scientists announced they were concerned that the Antarctic ice cap was breaking up and drifting away in 10 hectare (25 acre) blocks.
A recent TV documentary in Australia examined the depletion of the krill and penguin populations in Antarctica. The krill population is down 50% and the penguin population is down 25%. Why is this?
Krill breed under the southern ice cap. They live under and from the ice system and breed there. Krill are small crustaceans like shrimp. They form the basis of the food chain in the southern oceans. They are the staple food of the whales. The fish are dependent upon them and the penguins are hence also at risk. If the levels continue to decrease, we will not have to worry about whale quotas; none will survive.
Since this time there has been an increase in incidents of the meltdown in the Antarctic cap.
After El Nino the increase in temperatures in the Antarctic resulted in viral infections amongst the sea lion population. Something like 11,000 sea lions died from viral infections from the warming sea. What would that be? Scientists are now saying that there are viruses we have never encountered before, locked in the ice sheafs that are now being released. So we are going to encounter viruses thousands of years old and we will not be able to deal with them.
Interview with Jim Titus of the US EPA
In a recent Internet interview with Jim Titus of the US Environmental Protection Agency, I posed some simple questions to him about the possibility of the caps melting and the effects of each cap on the world sea levels. The following is a summary of the questions and answers.
(Cox) If the Greenland cap melted:
(a) What is the projected total rise in world sea level?
(b) What is the speed or time-frame under present estimated conditions?
(Jim Titus) If the entire ice sheet melted, [the seas would] probably [rise] about six metres. This is likely to take at least one thousand years. (The EPA report is at
http://www.gcrio.org/EPA/sealevel/text.html). The estimates are in Chapter 7. The Greenland section is in Chapter 4. You are looking at, most likely, only a few centimetres in the next century but perhaps as much as 30 cm.
[1,000 years ago, Danes settled Greenland, which had much less ice than at present.]
(Cox) If the Antarctic cap melted:
(a) What is the effect of the West basin on sea levels?
(b) What is the effect of the entire cap on sea levels?
(Jim Titus) [It would be] 6 metres for the West and about 60 metres for the entire ice sheet. This would take tens [of thousands of years].
(Cox) What is the combined effect on sea levels?
(Jim Titus) Forget East Antarctica. The only plausible scenario for a large rise is West Antarctica combined with a large Greenland warming causing a 4-metre rise in 200 years and about 8 metres in 500 years. That is unlikely but the estimates are contained in Chapter 7 of the EPA report.
(Cox) What is the lack of reflection effect going to do with the temperature system rather than just the greenhouse gas effect?
(Jim Titus) This feedback is included in the models. The main reduction in Albedo is the retreat of sea ice, not the glacier, since much more sunlight hits the sea ice. Note also that melting of the Arctic cap will come sooner, maybe a few centuries, which would cause a radiative asymmetry between northern and southern hemispheres.
(Cox) What is the effect of thermo-nuclear devices being used to melt the caps? It appears that this will make all theories irrelevant. How many nuclear or other weapons will it take to melt:
the Greenland cap?
(b) the Antarctic cap?
(Jim Titus) We don’t know.
(Cox) What is the effect of the glaciers on the total levels?
(Jim Titus) I have already covered this above (see also Chapter 7 of the report).
(Cox) What is the total thermal effect on sea levels of a 10-degree rise in world temperatures?
(Jim Titus) A rough rule of thumb is 30 cm per degree after a few centuries.
(Cox) Have you any other comments that might be useful in dealing with this matter in a simple and responsible fashion yet showing the very real dangers involved.
(Jim Titus) Yes. People need to start figuring out how to plan their shoreline management.
Otherwise we will end up armouring the shores, especially estuaries, and having no beaches or wetlands. This is long term land use planning, but far cheaper than cutting fossil fuel use. So if we are even thinking of the latter, we should do the former too. The sea will rise. It is too late to stop the whole rise. Yet we develop the coasts as if this was not an eventuality. We need to change land ownership in some coastal areas so that the areas will revert to nature as the sea rises.
Jim Titus has produced details in his wetland policy paper and in his paper on how to protect wetlands and beaches without hurting property owners.
I then posed another serious question to him about whether he had considered the effect that the mass might have in a polar shift from the effect of mass on the earth’s core.
He frankly admitted that other people have, but his studies did not. He said that this is not as big of an issue in the USA. He said that, "studies suggest maybe a 10% variation in the USA." He said existing sea level rise is already a problem due to land subsidence, etc.
The results of these are contained in Chapter 7 of the report. Jim has written on the impacts. Most of the papers are at
http://www.erols.com/jtitus.The real answer to the long term planning problem is to find out how much of the world by countries will be flooded by rises of 30 cm (1 foot), 50 cm (1.6 feet), 1 metre (3.3 feet), 2 metres (6.6 feet), 5-6 metres (16-19 feet), and so on. The studies have already been done for the USA. The details are in Jim Titus’ paper Holding Back the Sea.
He said that there is no excuse for not developing these estimates for Australia and, indeed, every country.
This was a straightforward and hopefully helpful interview to get an idea of the problem if the estimates are correct based on current rates. No provision has been made for the effects of nuclear war and/or terrorist activity or space station laser guided or based weapons systems. Similarly, the likelihood of the East Antarctic melt is considered slight. This may be an error. (Now we are finding that it is a serious error). There is a serious military option in this structure for short term advantage that is not being considered and which is examined in the paper The Last Thirty Years: the Final Struggle (No. 219).
The total effect of the cap melt is at least a 66 metres (well over 200 feet) rise in sea levels without superheating.
The melt of the East Antarctic cap will reduce reflection and this has not been fully appreciated. War has not been fed into the statistics. Some nations are particularly more vulnerable than others to large-scale sea rise. North-West Europe is a classic example.
More particularly there is another matter of destabilisation of the crust and an increase in earthquakes. The increase in earthquake activity has been relatively significant in the last two years. There are more earthquakes in populated areas than previously recorded. That is important.
Australian Research
In another interview with Bill De La Mare of the Australian Antarctic Research Division based in Hobart, it became clear that the changes have been in stages. De La Mare has done a detailed study from whale kills extracted from the records of world whaling over the extensive period of the records from last century up until the 1970s. From the records of each whale taken, Bill was able to plot the movement of the Antarctic shelf over that period. The whales feed on krill and are found near the shelf. The records of their positions in whaling provided a record of the changes in the shelf itself over the period of the whaling. He told in the ABC radio interview of 4 September 1997 that the shelf had regressed quite significantly over the period from the mid-1950s until the 1970s. It moved southwards towards the pole by some 300 kilometres (186 miles) and the ice shelf lost was about an area of approximately two-thirds the size of Australia. This reduction stabilised in the 1970s and he says satellite technology has shown no significant changes since the 1970s. The major activity of the period was above ground nuclear testing. This may be coincidental or highly significant.
So, we see that, over the last few decades, there has been a significant change in the Antarctic ice, which seems to have stabilised for the period from the 1970s until the present, but recent British reports indicate it is on the march again. The temperature has risen 2.5 degrees since the 1940s. In a British Antarctic Survey (BAS) report of 27 February 1995, Dr Mike Thomson said, after flying over the Larsen Ice Shelf, that he had never seen anything like the dramatic and very recent changes to the Larsen Ice Shelf in 25 years of Antarctic field work. The observations came hard on the heels of the disintegration of the Wordie Ice Shelf on the west coast of the Antarctic Peninsula. Glaciologist David Vaughan said:
There is no doubt that the climate on the Antarctic peninsula has warmed significantly over the last few decades. What we are seeing now are changes only just working through to glaciers and ice sheets. It’s an exciting time for glaciologists (BAS, ibid.).
Since these observations were made, the Larsen Ice Shelf was reported as being disintegrated along with the Wordie.
This is the cause of the depletion in the krill and the penguin populations. For the first time in recorded history, in the summer of 1995, James Ross Island was circumnavigable. The ice shelf in the Prince Gustav Channel disintegrated. A huge iceberg has been calved from the Larsen Ice Shelf measuring 78 km x 37 km (48 miles x 23 miles). This is about the size of Oxfordshire. The repeated calving of the smaller bergs is under way as the New Zealand scientists are reporting now.
The models do not take into account the localised effect of temperature in the Antarctic and clearly that is happening now at an increasing rate. The hole in the ozone layer may be exacerbating this event.
What also has occurred, is that they have now discovered their models were wrong, because they assumed an even temperature increase. What they have found now is that the temperature increase is much higher at the Poles than it is at the Equator. So with a 2 degree temperature increase at the Equator, you are looking at up to a 12 degree temperature increase at the Poles. That has not been taken into account either, but is now being put into the models.
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Topic: Global Warming and Bible Prophecy (No. 218) (Read 1577 times)