Congress and the White House avoid the issue like the superbug plague it is and do nothing to stop the overuse of these plague-proliferating antibiotics—the sole purpose of which is to produce cheaper meat and generate more revenue for the farmers. Hence, the tide of unnecessary superbug deaths rises at a shocking rate. We could soon be facing global pandemics of lethally untreatable, inherently invulnerable supervirus diseases, created by pig/poultry farms worldwide.
Now it was Brad’s turn to raise his head and question her findings.
“So global warming inflicts the White Horseman of Pestilence on Homo sapiens,” Bradford Chase said. “You need war, famine, asteroid strikes—all kinds of disasters to wipe out a species as tough as Homo sapiens.”
“I describe those scourges on page five,” Dr. Cardiff said.
The men turned to page five and lowered their eyes.
The Red Horseman of War and the Black Horseman of Famine will soon make their presence felt. As global warming accelerates global drought, nations will increasingly threaten each other over shared rivers and lakes, which, to their horror, are already shrinking dramatically. In Revelation 9:13–18, a global war kills off one-third of humankind, and nothing will drive Homo sapiens to apocalyptic violence faster than thirst and famine.
Revelation 16:4–7 describes the world’s rivers turning to blood, and Revelation 16:12 describes the Euphrates—the greatest agricultural river of that region and of that time—drying up. As we shall see, there is ample evidence that the Euphrates may well vanish, and those rivers could turn bloody before they die, particularly when their shrinkage generates wars of survival—the bloodiest kind of war there is—among those nations sustained by them.
The Red Horseman of War will wreak his most horrific havoc when the world’s major mountain glaciers melt away. Global warming will then have destroyed many of the rivers supplying the world’s most productive croplands and largest cities, including, as we have mentioned, the Yangtze, Yellow, Mekong, Salween, Indus, Brahmaputra, and Ganges rivers.
Africa’s eternal curse has always been aridity, not swampy rain forest. Production of one ton of grain requires 1,000 tons of water. African farmers need 88 percent of all their available water to raise their crops. Africa’s water shortages are already passing the point of no return, and UN studies predict during the next fifteen years water disputes will provide the casus belli for most of Africa’s wars. Already Egypt, which is watching the Nile dry up before its eyes, is threatening Ethiopia and Sudan militarily over their diversions of that river for irrigation and electrical power production. Moreover, the massive Ruwenzori mountain glaciers, which run along the border between Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, have lost 50 percent of their mass in 50 years. Known as “the Mountains of the Moon,” the Ruwenzori glaciers are the Nile’s highest and most important water source. When the Mountains of the Moon vanish, their deaths could well be the Nile’s coup de grâce. Some experts estimate that the Ruwenzori glaciers could disappear within 30 years.
During the next 40 years, the populations of those three nations will more than double, drought conditions will worsen, and the Nile might very well run dry before reaching the Red Sea.
Other African countries that are at odds over their individual access to shared lakes and rivers include the Congo Republic, Angola, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Botswana, and Mozambique—all of which are battling one another over rights to the Zambezi, Okavango, and Cuito river basins. Mali, Guinea, and Nigeria are inextricably bound to the Niger River, and Ghana relies on the Volta River for most of its electrical power. Both rivers are disappearing.
Fifty years ago, Africa’s Lake Chad covered more territory than Israel. Now that once-massive body of water has shrunk by over 90 percent, and scientists predict that within two decades, global warming, which will accelerate overuse of water in that region, could easily eradicate the lake. The 30 million people who rely on Chad’s waters for their very existence would be forced out of their homes.
Nor is the nightmare restricted to the nation of Chad. Nigeria, Niger, and Cameroon border Lake Chad, and four other countries—Sudan, Libya, Algeria, and the Central African Republic—share its hydrological basin. That region, which already faces chronic food shortages, will face irreversible famine. Sanitation facilities and personal hygiene will, of necessity, deteriorate, and infectious diseases will become pandemic. Children, who are especially vulnerable to diarrhea-related illnesses, will be the first victims.
Regional water shortages are already bankrupting farmers and livestock herders, both of whom are watching their crops and grasslands dry up at record rates. With the cost of feed soaring, farmers and herders in that region are already contesting croplands and pastures. Fishermen around Lake Chad have watched their catches fall off by more than 60 percent.”
General Hagberg looked up to disagree. “Wars in Africa are as old as the species, and while ruinous for those involved, they hardly constitute a global apocalypse.”
“They will in India, Pakistan, and China,” President Raab said. “Continue with the paper.”
Armed conflicts will plague billions of people in China, India, and Pakistan, who will be forever devastated by the destruction of the Himalayas’ glacially fed rivers. India’s mountain glaciers are the Indus River’s major suppliers of H2O, and the destruction of that river system will turn all of Pakistan into irretrievable desert. When India and Pakistan run dry, the likelihood of another Pakistan–India War will increase. This time, however, the stakes will be apocalyptic—so much so that a conflict could easily go nuclear.
Turkey’s damming up of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers is diverting water away from Iraq and Syria, which they desperately need. The Turks brazenly proclaim that they will sell that dammed-up riverwater throughout the region. They almost seem to say: “You have all the oil? Fine. We’ll take your water and sell it back to you.”
Central Asia’s Aral Sea—the fourth-largest inland sea on earth—is now a toxic bone-dry waste.
“I didn’t include the methane cannon in this paper, since we discussed it before,” Dr. Cardiff said. “We should add, however, that when global warming raises the ocean temperatures beyond the methane-release tipping point, it will liberate the seven trillion tons of methane gas in those waters, and Revelation 16:3 describes the seas turning to blood. A greenhouse gas of apocalyptic proportions, methane has forty-five times the global-warming power of CO2. Even now, methane plumes are bubbling up out of the arctic seabed north of the Scandinavian countries in the West Spitsbergen region as well as throughout Siberia and Alaska. In the arctic, atmospheric methane concentrations are already three times higher than the world average. Unleashed in sufficient quantities, those methane exhalations will effectively transform the planet into one gigantic hot box.”
“You said before,” Bradford Chase pointed out, “that this methane cannon could turn Mother Earth into Planet Venus, destroying most of the living species on land, in the sea, and in the air.”
“Exactly so,” Dr. Cardiff said.
The men continued with their reading. Dr. Cardiff was pleased to see that Revelation had piqued their interest.
Revelation adds many other catastrophes to the more abstract categories of pestilence, famine, and war. Seismic events, including earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, loom large in Revelation’s end-time prophecy, and they have posed a serious apocalyptic threat both in the past and in the present. Revelation 16:18–21 describes an earthquake in Judea “such as had not occurred since men came to be on the earth. . . . And the great city [of Babylon] split into three parts, and the cities of the nations fell.” Revelation 6:12 describes with the opening of the Seventh Seal a terrible earthquake and the sky turning black. Afterwards, in Revelation 8:1–5, an angel fills a censer with holy fire and hurls it at the earth, inflicting earthquakes, thunder, and lightning.
Seismic disasters threaten a number of countries today, including Israel and Palestine. Situated on the Alpide Fault Belt,
Israel and Palestine are increasingly menaced by massive tectonic plate collisions, specifically those of the northbound Arabian and Indian Plates, which are colliding with the Eurasian Plates along Israel’s Dead Sea rift. That rift created the Beqaa Valley, which runs through the Jordan River and flows into the Dead Sea. At the southern tip of Sinai, the Dead Sea Rift meets the Red Sea Rift, then crashes into the East African Rift and the Aden Ridge in the Afar Depression. This trio of rifts is sometimes called the Afar Triple Junction, and it makes that region singularly vulnerable to seismic destruction. Satellite photos of this region delineate these fault lines with frightening clarity, and recently that rift inflicted 500 tremors on Israel in one three-month period. Israel and Palestine face potential seismic ruin just as they suffered massive quake disasters in 749 B.C., 362 B.C., 31 B.C., A.D. 363, A.D. 1033, A.D. 1202, 1837, and 1927.
A recent 5.3-magnitude earthquake ripped a hole in the Temple Mount Plaza near the Dome of the Rock, and many experts now fear that quake was only a precursor to far greater seismic destruction. The Jordan Valley Fault is especially dangerous, generating 7-magnitude-plus earthquakes every 1,000 years, the last one along this fault having occurred in 1033. Earthquakes now threaten Jerusalem—Israel’s most populous city—among other urban centers. Some scientists believe these colliding rifts, in the near future, could kill as many as 500,000 people in Israel alone, a country of only 7.5 million people.
Next to the Pacific Ring of Fire, the Alpide Belt is the second most seismic region on earth with 17 percent of the world’s largest earthquakes and 5 percent to 6 percent of all earthquakes globally. Its tectonic plate collisions are so powerful that many seismologists believe its southern African Rift—which is riven by 30 active volcanoes and enormous geothermal violence, all of which drives the northbound Arabian plate relentlessly into the Eurasian plate—could split Africa into two landmasses within a few million years.
“Okay, we’re getting earthquakes in the Mideast, like Revelation said,” Bradford Chase groaned, looking up from the briefing paper. “That’s hardly the end of the world.”
“Those seismic events trigger supervolcano explosions,” Dr. Cardiff said, “which have exterminated more species historically than any other extinguishing pulse, including comet or asteroid strikes. Look at page six.”
Seismic events also trigger supervolcano eruptions, which have extinguished more past species than any other “extinction pulse”—including asteroid and comet strikes—and today supervolcanoes threaten the United States, Italy, and Asia.
The potential devastation of these supervolcanic events cannot be overstated. One supervolcano almost exterminated all of Homo sapiens, and another one obliterated every major civilization worldwide. The first one—the Lake Toba Supervolcano in Northern Sumatra, Indonesia—detonated 74,000 years ago. Releasing prodigious quantities of greenhouse gases—the same emissions that we are currently pumping into the atmosphere—it exterminated 99 percent of humankind, reducing a surprisingly wide variety of human species to two frail branches. Humanity’s survival depended on as few as 1,000 breeding pairs for its survival. When one branch ended with the Neanderthal die-off, the sole surviving line became Homo sapiens. That massive explosion in the Sumatran Volcanic Front is now known as Homo sapiens’ “genetic choke-point,” the point at which human genetic diversity ended forever. Today, mitrochondrial geneticists can trace Homo sapiens’ lineage back to a single Adam and a single Eve because of the Lake Toba Eruption. In a sense, Homo sapiens was born out of a supervolcanic eruption.
In A.D. 535 another supervolcano detonated in the Pacific Ring of Fire 20 miles northeast of Krakatoa, the massive volcano that shook world civilizations 1,300 years later. Devastating agriculture worldwide, this proto-Krakatoan eruption destroyed all the major civilizations in Europe, Arabia, and China. Obliterating European agriculture, it inaugurated the so-called Dark Ages. The droughts, which this global warming unleashed, ravaged countries and communities worldwide. Mexico’s fabled Toltec empire—ruled by the god-king, Quetzalcoatl and famed for its golden city of Tula—is only one example of a great civilization brought to its knees by global warming and its malevolent offspring, drought.
Again, that near-extinction event flooded the atmosphere with hothouse fumes and debris. Initially the volcanic particulates saturated the upper atmosphere. Darkening the sky, they blocked the warming sunlight and cooled the earth. When they came down, however, the greenhouse gases took over, heating the atmosphere. These greenhouse gases launched a 500-year heat wave, known now as “the Medieval Warm Period.”
These supervolcanoes still pose an apocalyptic threat, and historically, they were decisive—perhaps even the predominating factor—in four out of the last five major extinction events.
“The past is dead,” General Hagberg said. “We don’t have to worry about that stuff anymore. Like you said, we haven’t been hit with a species-threatening eruption in seventy-four thousand years, and that one threatened the species only because we were were so few and inhabited only two continents.”
“Really?” Dr. Cardiff said with a small smirk. “Read.”
The general and Bradford Chase reluctantly returned to her briefing paper.
Moreover, supervolcanoes are still alive and menace us. Active supervolcanoes are overdue to erupt in Italy, Asia, and the U.S. The Italians are so concerned, they are drilling a 2.5-mile hole into one of their active supervolcanoes—Campi Flegrei near Naples—in hopes of better understanding and monitoring the apocalyptic threat it poses. Indonesians continually monitor the Tambora megavolcano, which after erupting in 1815, destroyed much of the northern hemisphere’s crops and livestock and turned 1816 into “the year without summer.” America’s Yellowstone supervolcanic caldera is the most dangerous of the three—far larger and far more deadly—and it has been bulging and overheating for decades. Web sites are dedicated to monitoring its rising caldera and its mounting surface temperatures. Statistically, it is also overdue to blow—at least when one charts on a graph its historical eruption cycles—and such eruptions are cyclical.
Revelation 8:7–13 predicts widespread wildfires, saying that one-third of the world’s grass and trees will be destroyed. Globally unprecedented wildfires already plague the American Southwest, the Amazon rain forest, Australia, Europe, Asia, and Africa. Some experts have labeled the current period: “the Age of the Mega-Fire.”
Revelation 16:8–9 says the sun will be “granted to scorch the men with fire. And the men were scorched with great heat.” Not only is the planet facing record-setting increases in temperature, greenhouse emissions ultimate threaten the ozone layer, which protects us from the sun’s ultraviolet rays. If global warming sufficiently degrades that protective ozone layer—and it is well on the way to doing precisely that—the penetrating ultraviolet rays will “scorch the men with fire . . . with great heat.”
Revelation 8:7–13 also predicts the annihilation of all the planet’s sea creatures, and Homo sapiens is doing its best to fulfill that prophecy. During the last half century—less than an eye-blink in the long history of mass extinctions—90 percent of all large fishes have vanished. During the next 30 years, one-third of all amphibians and one-quarter of all land mammals will face eradication, 90 percent of the lion population having already died off. Homo sapiens will have advertently or inadvertently exterminated over one-half of the planet’s species by the century’s end.
Calling this sixth extinction event “the Holocene Mass Extinction,” scientists have dubbed it “the fastest extinction event in evolutionary history.” Most mass extinctions take thousands, even millions of years to do their work. Homo sapiens is accomplishing its Holocene Extinction Event in one century.
Nuclear weapons are man-made stars exploding on the earth, and Revelation is filled with references to stellar fire razing the world. Revelation 8:7–13 describes pillars of fire, flaming mountains, and a blazing star obliterating the planet. The angel—whose face was the sun and whose feet were fiery pi
llars—conjures stellar fire, with which to incinerate the earth. Revelation 12:4 describes thousands of stars hurled at the earth. This divine conflagration turns the rivers and seas to blood, and at Hiroshima, the rivers and other bodies of water ran red with blood as burn victims plunged into the cooling waters and drowned. Even worse, the burn victims often learned to their horror that “the cooling waters” were stinging seawater, and they drowned with sea salt inflaming their wounds.
Many scientists believe that the most urgent threat is the one of nuclear terrorist attacks. Given our inability to contain the planet’s nuclear bomb-fuel stockpiles, we are on the brink of that possibility becoming a reality.
As if summoning images of Revelation’s stellar fire, nuclear weapons are miniature suns, exploding on the earth—man-made death stars, in point of fact—but while the press makes these weapons sound incomprehensibly complex and impossibly difficult to construct, fabricating and detonating a simple terrorist nuke is, in fact, far simpler than the media reports. If one terrorist drops a 100-pound, grapefruit-size chunk of bomb-grade Highly Enriched Uranium (HEU) from a height of six feet onto another 100-pound, grapefruit-size chunk, the two chunks will detonate with a yield of approximately half the Hiroshima bomb. Firing one ball of HEU into another HEU ball inside a section of old cannon barrel in the back of a panel truck in front of, say, the New York Stock Exchange will achieve a Hiroshima-style blast with far less HEU.
Moreover, acquiring the nuclear bomb-fuel is not prohibitively difficult. Nuclear bomb-fuel facilities in Russia—even in the United States—are shockingly insecure . . . especially if the terrorists can plant or coopt a trusted accomplice inside the facility. Many nuclear proliferation efforts are stunned that terrorists still have not nuked an American city.
The 2012 Codex Page 29