Weariness of Earth

Global Dimming and the Weariness of Earth

By John Taylor; 2006 April 24

Back in our Ancaster High and Vocational School geography class in the
early 1970's I still recall when my teacher explained about the
greenhouse effect. This phenomenon, he said, keeps greenhouses warm in
winter and on a broader scale it applies to whole planets. Venus, for
example, is superheated by its atmosphere and no life can sustain
itself there, in spite of the fact that it is within the same
hospitable belt as Earth and Mars, where sunlight is theoretically
moderate enough to sustain life. He said that human pollution produces
carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas that can bring about global warming,
here, on Earth.

This seemed alarmist, an infinity from my teenaged world. An idea
popped into my head.

I put up my hand and asked, "Well, if air pollution increases, won't
clouds reflect off the sunlight into space? Won't that actually
decrease global temperatures?"

He was surprised, hummed and hawed and finally admitted he could not
answer that. He was not my favorite teacher but had to allow that he
could admit when he ran across a stumper. Little wonder though that he
could not respond when it is only in the past ten years or so that
climatologists have come up with adequate answers.

Reading science news reports carefully but in dribs and drabs over
several years, I missed the overall import of what is happening. I am
grateful for the PBS television show Nova that this week presented a
documentary that brought the findings all together in a suspenseful,
not to say frightening manner. What has been discovered is that the
cooling effect of smoggy clouds reflecting light and heat off into
space is indeed operating, much more than anybody had expected.
Overall, however, this global dimming effect is muting the greenhouse
effect, which is now seen to be an even more powerful heat trapping
effect than anybody had calculated. That is, if we were to reduce air
pollution to zero, that would actually accelerate the greenhouse
effect. It would be like releasing the string on a drawn, taught bow.
Our planet would heat up like a pressure cooker in decades, leading to
a cascading, autocatalytic effect. At some point in this scenario
methyl-hydrates presently frozen on the ocean floor would melt, rise
in great bubbles to the surface. Since these gases are hundreds of
times better heat sponges than our present greenhouse gasses, our
planet would become a pressure cooker, just like Venus.

Another frightening possibility in the short term that was mentioned
in this broadcast is that global dimming will cause an imminent repeat
of the drought and mass starvation that devastated the Sahel in
sub-Saharan Africa during the 1970's and 1980's. Climatologists, going
over the data in the light of global dimming, found that this
humanitarian disaster was caused by the cooling effect of European air
pollution, which nudged the winds that had always brought the Sahel
monsoon southwards. Instead of soaking their fields, the monsoon went
south, away from populated regions. The result was a twenty year long
draught and millions of souls starving to death. Now not the African
monsoon but the clouds and winds that bring the monsoons of India,
southern China and Southeast Asia are in peril of shifting southwards.
That shift in weather patterns threatens three or four billion people,
two thirds of the human race, with a slow, hellish death by inanition.

As I was watching this documentary, again, an idea popped into my head.

"Could this be why the Bush administration is so avid all of a sudden
to make harboring illegal immigrants into a felony? Is it getting
ready to play hardball over what they know is about to happen, a world
heating up like an oven? Are farsighted but cold-hearted leaders
readying draconian survival measures for the privileged few they
represent?"

The gas and oil burning machineries of a cynical elite causes climate
shifts, and now they brace for the inevitable reaction: massive
illegal immigration, wars, the death throes of an entire civilization.
We are in for a very cold, inhospitable future when planners
consciously adopt a devil-take-the-hindmost strategy instead solving
the illness behind the symptoms. If so, this regime and its
materialist ideologues are much worse than Nazis, worse than Stalin,
worse than Mao, who only murdered millions of people. What must it be
like to be responsible for three or four billion dead? That is a lot
of blood to have on your hands.

Of course it does no good to pick out a few and blame them
exclusively. Everybody is responsible here to some extent. Far more
than a mere regime change would be required to turn things around as
they must be turned around, immediately. A revolution is needed from
the ground up, from the very soul to the total collectivity. Only God
can ever do that. God has been calling us to do this for a long time,
as long ago as the Qu'ran, which calls followers of Judeo-Christian
religions to cooperate as like minded communities,

"O People of the Book! Come (let us join) on a platform [lit. a
formula] that may be common between us --that we serve naught except
God." (Q3:64, quoted in Rahman, Meaning of the Quran, 63)

Rahman suggests that this can mean that all paths other than the
straight one to God are deviant, that the sum of all paths taken by
men is not equal to the truth about God. And in the face of current
climatic reality, who can ever trust a human solution to suffice? And
worst of all, the worst unbelievers are not outside religion, they
have infiltrated it to its very heart. For that reason, not only the
air but the very ground under our feet is disgusted with us, as
Baha'u'llah makes unforgettably clear in a Hidden Word.

"O Ye that are Lying as Dead on the Couch of Heedlessness! Ages have
passed and your precious lives are well-nigh ended, yet not a single
breath of purity hath reached Our court of holiness from you. Though
immersed in the ocean of misbelief, yet with your lips ye profess the
one true faith of God. Him whom I abhor ye have loved, and of My foe
ye have made a friend. Notwithstanding, ye walk on My earth complacent
and self-satisfied, heedless that My earth is weary of you and
everything within it shunneth you. Were ye but to open your eyes, ye
would, in truth, prefer a myriad griefs unto this joy, and would count
death itself better than this life." (Baha'u'llah, Persian Hidden
Words, 20)

The Baha'i Faith does not deviate, it continues the Qu'ran's clarion
call for a cooperative revolution of religions starting on the most
fundamental level, that of Spirit. The Guardian gives the following
succinct, definitive explanation of the Baha'i prescription:

"Let there be no misgivings as to the animating purpose of the
world-wide Law of Baha'u'llah. Far from aiming at the subversion of
the existing foundations of society, it seeks to broaden its basis, to
remold its institutions in a manner consonant with the needs of an
ever-changing world... It calls for a wider loyalty, for a larger
aspiration than any that has animated the human race. It insists upon
the subordination of national impulses and interests to the imperative
claims of a unified world. It repudiates excessive centralization on
one hand, and disclaims all attempts at uniformity on the other. Its
watchword is unity in diversity such as 'Abdu'l-Baha Himself has
explained:

"`Consider the flowers of a garden. Though differing in kind, color,
form and shape, yet, inasmuch as they are refreshed by the waters of
one spring, revived by the breath of one wind, invigorated by the rays
of one sun, this diversity increaseth their charm and addeth unto
their beauty. How unpleasing to the eye if all the flowers and plants,
the leaves and blossoms, the fruit, the branches and the trees of that
garden were all of the same shape and color! Diversity of hues, form
and shape enricheth and adorneth the garden, and heighteneth the
effect thereof. In like manner, when divers shades of thought,
temperament and character, are brought together under the power and
influence of one central agency, the beauty and glory of human
perfection will be revealed and made manifest. Naught but the
celestial potency of the Word of God, which ruleth and transcendeth
the realities of all things, is capable of harmonizing the divergent
thoughts, sentiments, ideas and convictions of the children of men.'"
(Shoghi Effendi, World Order of Baha'u'llah, 41-42)

--
John Taylor

badijet@gmail.com