The point is these are signs of His imminent return.
And the seven angels with the seven trumpets prepared to sound them. 7 Then the first angel sounded his trumpet,
I don’t think we can hear the angels. They make “sounds” constantly as they communicate with each other and with God. They worship him in song all day every day. They hang in a dimension we don’t access, yet, as living beings.
Just a little bit of figurative language? People through the ages have taken these writings to mean anything and everything. Should it be stretched like silly putty?
Indeed, but wasn’t that millions of years ago?
I was being facetious, but obviously not obviously enough. 
It’s saturated with it.
Something is now different than earlier.
Usually, changes in the climate happen slowly. It takes thousands of years for the global climate to change much, unless something truly devastating happens. Earlier, rapid devastating changes have been caused by huge space rocks hitting Earth, or possibly massive eruptions of volcanoes. This time, the change is really rapid and the culprit is a single mammalian species.
When climate change is rapid, many species will go extinct because they cannot adapt fast enough. Now, climate change is only one part of the problem. Growing human demands are turning natural environments to production fields. Infrastructure, loss of forests and comparable changes are preventing many populations to respond to the climate change by blocking spread towards poles. Spread of invasive species is leading to homogenization of the global biota. Overfishing is changing the marine fauna. The combination of human actions and climate change is more deadly than climate change alone.
If humans would disappear, the nature would slowly recover. It would take millions of years to fully compensate the ongoing loss of biodiversity. This potential recovery is based on the assumption that whatever humans will do, it will not be enough to make Earth resemble its ‘bad’ sister planet, Venus. Attempts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions should at least have the beneficial effect of keeping us away from the path leading to a second Venus.
LOL
Yeah the problem is self-correcting. If the weather becomes catastrophic and the seas rise then the human population will decrease and emissions will decrease, perhaps even stop altogether as our technological civilization collapses. And eventually all that CO2 will be returned to fossil fuels once again after a hundred million years.
No the earth itself is not at risk. That of course is the exaggeration of the film with Keanu Reeves “The Day the Earth Stood Still.” There is no need to save the earth from mankind.
There is only the need to save mankind from mankind. Does anybody care about that?
Not enough Chinese, Western, Russian, Indian people are suffering from incontrovertible climate change by orders of magnitude yet. We’re coping far too well due to our infrastructure and will continue to do so for many decades, centuries yet, even with sea levels up twenty feet. What we need is decade long droughts. No sign.
Oh, okay. I was concerned for a bit there!
The drought in California is so severe that people are turning to pseudoscience to get water for their parched land. “Water-dowsing” is an old folk practice, about as scientific as demon-exorcism. These water-dowsers or water-witchers, use metal or wood “divining rods” to find a spot to dig a well. Ranchers and farmers are paying good money for their services, which is cheaper than hiring a geologist.
This is just more evidence that people made desperate from climate change turn to desperate measures.
If you have access, here’s a NY Times article:
Two Rods and a ‘Sixth Sense’: In Drought, Water Witches Are Swamped
If you don’t have access to the Times, here’s a short video from Ars Technica on water dowsing
I think this video explains what @T_aquaticus was talking about, when the earth was its hottest ever, so hot even the polar ice caps melted! But there were no humans around, and the warning occurred at at a slower rate than today.
Exactly. I have always thought it was misguided to say that we need to save the Earth. What we are trying to save is conditions that we humans prefer.
The main point I am trying to make is that it is us humans who are judging the value of Earth’s climate based on what we want. Why is biodiversity good? Because humans decided it is good. There is nothing objectively bad about extinction events. It is all related to the Naturalistic fallacy.
Based on what we want and need. And some of us also want healthy marine environments, etc.
It’s better for the environment,
Extinction is a normal part of life on earth. More that 99% of everything that has ever lived has gone extinct. But…we should not be accelerating extinction.
How do we measure what is better for the environment?
I can’t help but think of the early history of life. This was a period where certain single celled organisms discovered photosynthesis and started pumping a highly toxic and reactive element into the atmosphere which would have devastated many species at the time. There would have been a great die off of species sensitive to the waste products, and the chemical make up of the oceans across the globe were permanently altered. That devastating, toxic, and highly reactive element was oxygen. Was that bad?
Are there really good subjective reasons to preserve the environment? Absolutely YES. I’m not arguing otherwise. I just think we should put it all in the proper context so we understand where our judgements are coming from and who they are for. We aren’t trying to protect some esoteric planet, but we are trying to save something that we humans find important. IOW, putting a good human face on the issue might be worth doing.
I think there may be some of the more radical green (environmentalists) types that wouldn’t – nature worshippers, in essence, and it’s okay if our species goes extinct.
One subjective way to estimate the value of biodiversity is to look what kind of ecosystem services we utilise. It would be ridiculously expensive to replace ecosystem services with human technology and labor.
Loss of species is likely to make ecosystems less stable. We don’t know where the tipping point of an ecosystem failure is but there is data suggesting that higher biodiversity increases the stability and diversity of ecosystem services. Production of oxygen, actions of decomposers, purification of waters, reduction of floods, biological control of pests, timber, pollination, food we eat, recreational value. These are all ecosystem services. Unstudied organisms are potential sources of compounds that could be used as drugs.
Lots of selfish reasons to protect biodiversity.
Exactly.
Whew.
“Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.” -Colossians 4:6
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