New Scientific Insight Into "Acts of God"
- DrDeanCrosbyposted 13 years ago
0The newspaper article you will read below deserves an award as one of the top ten articles published during 2010.It not only helps to silence the skeptics who keep throwing doubt on the Bible's prophecies of disasters that will occur prior to Jesus' "Second Coming", but it then goes beyond in what has to be considered a stroke of journalistic genius, and presents scientific testimony to show that it is man who is primarily responsible for these judgments of nature against us.We can only hope that at some point in the immediate future the majority of the Christian community will cease and desist from their on-going onslaught of outrageous blasphemy that occurs when they blame God for Satan, and now increasingly man, created natural disasters or as they are so often profanely called,"acts of God".
As you read this absolutely fascinating article keep in mind what hopefully will soon become the motto of the American military in Afghanistan:"WE HAVE NOW ENCOUNTERED THE ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE AND WE HAVE LEARNED THAT THE ENEMY IS US".
2010'S WORLD GONE WILD
By Seth Borenstein and Julie Reed Bell
Associated Press
This was the year the Earth struck back.
Earthquakes, heat waves, floods, volcanoes, super typhoons, blizzards, landslides and droughts killed at least a quarter million people in 2010 - the deadliest year in more than a generation. More people were killed worldwide by natural disasters this year than have been killed in terrorism attacks in the past 40 years combined.
"It just seemed like it was back-to-back and it came in waves," said Craig Fugate, who heads the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency which handled a record number of disasters in 2010."The term '100-year event' really lost its meaning this year."
No one had to tell a mask-wearing Vera Savinova how bad it could get. She is a 52-year-old administrator in a dental clinic who in August took refuge from Moscow's record heat, smog and wildfires."I THINK IT IS THE END OF THE WORLD" she said. "OUR PLANET WARNS US AGAINST WHAT WOULD HAPPEN IF WE DON'T CARE ABOUT NATURE".
The EXCESSIVE AMOUNT OF EXTREME WEATHER THAT DOMINATED 2010 IS A CLASSIC SIGN OF MAN-MADE GLOBAL WARMING that climate scientists have long warned about. They calculate that the killer Russian heat wave - setting a national record of 111 degrees - WOULD HAPPEN ONCE EVERY 100,000 YEARS WITHOUT GLOBAL WARMING. warming.Preliminary data show that 18 countries broke their records for the hottest day ever.
"These weather events would NOT have happened without global warming," said Kevin Trenberth, chief of climate analysis for the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo.That's why the people who study disasters for a living say it would be wrong to chalk 2010 up to just another bad year.
"THE EARTH STRIKES BACK IN CAHOOTS WITH BAD HUMAN DECISION-MAKING" said a weary Debarati Guha Sapir, director for the World Health Organization's Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters. "It's almost as if the policies, the government policies and development policies, are helping the Earth strike back instead of protecting from it. We've created conditions where the slightest thing the Earth does is really going to have a disproportionate impact."
Here's a quick tour of an anything but normal 2010:
HOW DEADLY:
While the Haitian earthquake, Russian heat wave, and Pakistani flooding were the biggest killers, deadly quakes also struck Chile, Turkey, China and Indonesia in one of the most active seismic years in decades.
Through mid-December there have been 20 earthquakes of magnitude 7.0 or higher.
Flooding alone this year killed more than 6,300 people in 59 nations through September, according to the World Health Organization. Inundated countries include China, Italy, India, Colombia and Chad.
Super Typhoon Megi with winds of more than 200 mph devastated the Philippines and parts of China.
Through Nov. 30, nearly 260,000 PEOPLE DIED IN NATURAL DISASTERS IN 2010 COMPARED TO ONLY 15,000 IN 2009 !
The World Health Organization, which hasn't updated its figures past Sept. 30, is just shy of 250,000. By comparison, deaths from terrorism from 1968 to 2009 were less than 115,000, according to reports by the U.S. State Department and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
HOW EXTREME:
After strong early year blizzards - nicknamed Snowmageddon - paralyzed the U.S. mid-Atlantic and record snowfalls hit Russia and China, the temperature turned to broil.The year may go down as the hottest on record worldwide according to the World Meteorological Organization.
Los Angeles had its hottest day in recorded history on Sept. 27: 113 degrees. In May, 129 set a record for Pakistan and may have been the hottest temperature recorded in an inhabited location.
In the U.S. Southeast, the year began with freezes in Florida that had cold-blooded iguanas becoming comatose and falling off trees. Then it became the hottest summer on record for the region. As the year ended, unusually cold weather was back in force.
Northern Australia had the wettest May-October on record, while the southwestern part of that country had its driest spell on record.
Parts of the Amazon River basin struck by drought hit their lowest water levels in recorded history.
On Dec. 21,just the very first day of Winter, this headline story jumped out of international newspapers: EUROPE'S WHITE CHRISTMAS PROVING FRIGHTFUL
"The worst winter weather in decades continued to hold the Continent in its grip, freezing road and rail traffic and stranding thousands of outraged holiday travelers at Europe's major airports for a fourth day. In Britain, the government offered troops to help ease airport gridlock."
HOW COSTLY:
Disasters caused $222 billion in economic losses in 2010 - more than Hong Kong's total economy . That's because this year's disasters often struck poor areas without very much property insurance, such as Haiti.
HOW WEIRD:
A volcano in Iceland paralyzed air traffic for days in Europe, disrupting travel for more than 7 million people. Other volcanoes in the Congo, Guatemala, Ecuador, the Philippines and Indonesia sent people scurrying for safety.
New York City had a rare tornado.
A nearly 2-pound hailstone that was 8 inches in diameter fell in South Dakota in July to set a U.S. record. The storm that produced it was one of seven declared disasters for that state this year.
There was not much snow to start the Winter Olympics in a relatively balmy Vancouver, British Columbia, while the U.S. East Coast was snowbound.
In a 24-hour period in October, Indonesia was struck with a deadly magnitude 7.7 earthquake, a tsunami that killed more than 500 people and a volcano that caused more than 390,000 people to flee. That's after flooding, landslides and more quakes killed hundreds earlier in the year.
Even the extremes were extreme. This year started with a good sized El Nino weather oscillation that causes all sorts of extremes worldwide. Then later in the year, the world got the mirror image weather system with a strong La Nina, which causes a different set of extremes.
In the United States, FEMA declared a record number of major disasters, 79 as of Dec. 14. The average year has 34.A list of day-by-day disasters in 2010 compiled by the AP runs 64 printed pages long!
"The extremes are changed in an extreme fashion," said Greg Holland, director of the earth system laboratory at the National Center for Atmospheric Research.For example, even though it sounds counter intuitive, global warming likely played a bit of a role in "Snowmageddon" earlier this year, Holland said. That's because WITH A WARMER CLIMATE THERE IS MORE MORE MOISTURE IN THE AIR WHICH MAKES STORMS INCLUDING BLIZZARDS MORE INTENSE he said.
White House science adviser John Holdren said we should get used to climate disasters or do something about global warming: "The science is clear that we can expect more and more of these kinds of damaging events unless and until society's emissions of heat-trapping gases and particles are sharply reduced."
And that's just the "natural disasters." It was also a year of man-made technological catastrophes. BP's busted oil well caused 172 million gallons to gush into the Gulf of Mexico. Mining disasters - men trapped deep in the Earth - caused dozens of deaths in tragic collapses in West Virginia, China and New Zealand. The fortunate miners in Chile who survived 69 days underground provided the feel good story of the year.
In both technological and natural disasters, there's a common theme of "pushing the envelope".WE HAVE OURSELVES TO BLAME most of the time, scientists and disaster experts say.
Colorado's Bilham said the world's population is moving into riskier mega cities on fault zones and flood-prone areas. He figures that 400 million to 500 million people in the world live in large cities prone to major earthquakes.A Haitian disaster will happen again, Bilham said: "It could be Algiers. it could be Tehran. It could be any one of a dozen cities."
Even though many catastrophes have the ring of random chance, the hand of man made this a particularly deadly, costly, extreme and weird year for everything from wild weather to earthquakes.
Poor construction and development practices conspire to make earthquakes more deadly than they need be. More people live in poverty in vulnerable buildings in crowded cities. That means that when the ground shakes, the river breaches, or the tropical cyclone hits, more people die.
Andreas Schraft, vice president of catastrophic perils for the Geneva-based insurance giant Swiss Re. stated "ALL THE CHANGE THAT IS MADE IS MAN-MADE".The January earthquake that killed well more than 220,000 people in Haiti is a perfect example. Port-au-Prince has nearly three times as many people - many of them living in poverty - and more poorly built shanties than it did 25 years ago. So had the same quake hit in 1985 instead of 2010, total deaths would have probably been in the 80,000 range, said Richard Olson, director of disaster risk reduction at Florida International University.In February, an earthquake that was more than 500 times stronger than the one that struck Haiti hit an area of Chile that was less populated, better constructed, and not as poor. Chile's bigger quake caused fewer than 1,000 deaths.
In the summer, one weather system caused oppressive heat in Russia, while farther south it caused flooding in Pakistan that inundated 62,000 square miles, about the size of Wisconsin. That single heat-and-storm system killed almost 17,000 people, more people than all the worldwide airplane crashes in the past 15 years combined.
"It's a form of suicide, isn't it? We build houses that kill ourselves in earthquakes. We build houses in flood zones that drown ourselves," said Roger Bilham, a professor of geological sciences at the University of Colorado. "It's our fault for not anticipating these things. You know, this is the Earth doing its thing."
WHAT AMAZING INSIGHT: IN THE END TIME PRIOR TO THE TRIBULATION GOD IS ALLOWING NATURE TO PUNISH US DUE TO OUR SINS OF ECONOMIC GLUTENOUS GREED AND SHAMEFUL EXPLOITATION OF HIS RESOURCES.
- zampanoposted 13 years ago0
DeanCrosby: Unless you have written permission, you might want to be careful plagiarising from Associated Press - They are very aggressive with copyright issues and have gone after a few bloggers.
It is much safer, and much more ethical, to link to the article in question.
How barbaric. I prefer the free exchange of ideas. That is in the spirit of community, and for the common good. This is the result of, and is part and parcel of a philosophy that all things have a dollar value, even words and ideas. Love Greece, hate cholesterol.
There are a few problems with that:
1) On Hubpages, we are the first to complain when somebody steals our work - this is no different. I am not a big fan of media conglomerates, but we can't scream 'Copyright' only when it suits us.
2) It opens up the possibility that AP could serve Hubpages a DMCA notice or complain to Google. While it is unlikely that Google will withdraw HP's adsense, it could 'slap' the site and reduce its ranking. Freedom of ideas is all well and good, but this is an income stream for many of us.
3) As I pointed out in the reply, it is much easier to link to the article - people can still read it and comment. Many forum regulars, such as Sparkling Jewel and KerryG, do this - it still allows great debate and permits the free exchange of ideas.
I try to stay away from cholesterol, too
- Sophia Angeliqueposted 13 years ago0
Not really - as Dr Dean says - God has been disproven. Now you must prove the Star Goat does not exist. No compulsion - just use reason.
There's only one thing worse than posting a long-boring-doom-and-gloom-armageddon-rapture-second-coming-copy-paste-story... and that's quoting a long-boring-doom-and-gloom-armageddon-rapture-second-coming-copy-paste-story... with a short meaningless response.
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