Saturday 6 March, 2010

World
UK
Science/Nature

The tsunami striking Thailand on December 26, 2004

By Charles Gardner

The powerful Chilean earthquake that has killed hundreds and damaged half-a-million homes is said to have shifted the earth’s axis and slightly shortened its days, according to NASA scientist Richard Gross.

And in a terrifying separate incident, a series of deadly 26ft ocean waves struck a cruise liner in the Mediterranean, killing two passengers and injuring 14 others.

More than two million people are estimated to have been affected by the 8.8-magnitude tremor and subsequent tsunamis in Chile – the most powerful quake to hit the nation in 50 years.

Gross, a research scientist at Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, calculated that the planet’s axis shifted by 8cm during the quake, shortening the days by 1.26 microseconds – a microsecond is one-millionth of a second.

And this is even more of a shift than that caused by the 9.1-magnitude quake off Indonesia that set off the deadly tsunami of 2004.

Climatic changes, as we keep saying on this site, are less to do with Global Warming as they are portents of a coming apocalypse spoken of in the Book of Revelation, the last book of the Bible.

And as I’ve said repeatedly – but intentionally because most people are unaware of it – the increasing incidence and severity of earthquakes we are experiencing (Haiti has yet to recover from its devastating disaster) is a sign given by Jesus himself that his Second Coming would be imminent. He compared it to a woman’s labour pains which, as we all know, come at shorter intervals and with increasing severity as the time of birth approaches.

Bearing in mind the tsunamis as well as the incident in the Mediterranean, Luke’s account of Jesus’ end-time prophecy also records him as saying: “There will be signs in the sun, moon and stars. On the earth, nations will be in anguish and perplexity at the roaring and tossing of the sea. Men will faint from terror, apprehensive of what is coming on the world, for the heavenly bodies will be shaken. At that time they will see the Son of Man coming in a cloud with power and great glory. When these things begin to take place, stand up and lift up your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.”
Interestingly, a massive shifting of the earth’s axis as a result of a major earthquake is a key part of the storyline for the movie 2012 AD.

And I was intrigued to hear a speaker on BBC Radio 4’s Thought for the Day say that the last major Chilean earthquake took place 175 years ago almost to the day. He said that Charles Darwin witnessed it during his famous HMS Beagle voyage and that it helped to further undermine his religious faith, posing the question in his mind as to how a God of love could allow this. And yet he recognised that Christians were at the forefront of helping those in need and so supported (with regular donations) the South American Missionary Society.

Meanwhile Conservative MEP Roger Helmer is making a very helpful contribution to the climate debate and has now drawn attention to Christopher Booker’s new book ‘The Real Global Warming Disaster’ as “a brilliant read”.

Challenging ‘Warmists’ to read it, he writes: “I defy anyone to read this book and still believe in the Great Carbon Myth.”

In a review he says: “Of course he’s not referring to the rather modest warming we’ve experienced over the last hundred years, which is entirely natural, and on balance is likely to be beneficial. He’s referring to our extraordinary and hubristic plans for ‘climate mitigation’, which will make no difference whatever to climate, but looks set to bankrupt our Western economies. As Booker says, King Canute himself would laugh at our attempts to hold back rising sea levels. Have we learned nothing in a thousand years?”

As a result of a so-called ‘hockey stick’ graph showing a sudden rise in global temperatures by a scientist who, as it turns out, excluded or underrated data that did not back up an idea that was evidently pre-conceived and certainly not science, the United States has been pressed to make expensive commitments on the basis of catastrophic climate change.

In fact Britain is also sinking millions into the barmy religion with commitments to ‘compensate’ Third World countries deemed to have drawn the short straw over climate change while expensive wind turbines erected in Scotland to help tackle global warming with their low carbon emissions were rendered pretty ineffective during our arctic winter!

As Roger Helmer said, “The hockey stick graph now takes its place alongside the Piltdown Man as one of the most comprehensively discredited artifacts in the history of science.”

The Euro MP also relates how in 2004 Professor Sir David King, Chief Scientific Adviser to the British Government, tried to persuade Russia to ratify the Kyoto protocol (to limit carbon emissions) at a time when their scientific opinion was deeply sceptical. And the Russians apparently refused his demand that the sceptics be excluded from a conference on the issue. Russia did sign the treaty in the end – not because it believed the Warmists, according to Helmer, but as part of another deal and in order to access UN funds.

He said this affair illustrates that Warmists know that if they debate on equal terms with informed sceptics, they always lose. So they are proverbially unwilling to do so.

Booker also makes the point – already forcefully put by academics and energy company chiefs – that Britain’s energy security is on the line; that wind power will not fill the gap; that the EU’s Large Combustion Plant Directive, requiring half-a-dozen major coal-fired power stations to close by 2015, will decimate our generating capacity; and that unless we build new coal and nuclear capacity fast, the lights will, quite literally, go out.

This is the gloomy prospect facing a Conservative government if it wins power in the coming election.

But the climate scientists won’t give up. A weather ‘expert’ in Australia has claimed that we have just experienced – now don’t laugh – the hottest January the world has ever seen! I know it was hot in Oz because my niece got married there during the month and I’ve seen the DVD of the ceremony showing all the guests desperately fanning themselves with their orders of service as they sweltered in 40 degrees Centigrade. (Don’t they have air-conditioning Down Under?)

The climatologist responsible for this claptrap was basing his claim on a global average, but surely no matter how sizzling it was down south, the big freeze has affected the entire Northern Hemisphere, home to most of the world’s population. It makes you wonder whether to believe anything scientists tell you.

Thank God there is someone we can trust – and his word is true, as current climatic events prove.

Photo: Public Domain