by Fred Vaughan
Some time ago while on a business trip I asked
a very sharp traveling companion a question regarding his
religious standing, I found to my dismay that although he does
not attend the church of his upbringing with his disgruntled
wife, he does nonetheless believe its precepts because of its
"accurate predictions"of latter
day phenomena. When pressed concerning which phenomena, he
explained what was so convincing to him although certainly not to
me. Since the Soviet Union had typically been read into
Revelations by my father-in-law in much the same way, I asked my
colleague jovially whether "bears"
had played into the final formula of the church of his apostasy
as well. He knew instantly who the
"bears"were and said with good
humor, "Oh, yes. They were one of the opposing
teams!"
"Go bears!"I cheered, not being
able to resist a mild blasphemy.
We laughed somewhat awkwardly but suffice it to say that neither
he nor I (for different reasons) have returned to our religious
underpinnings based on his convictions. But he is one very clever
individual. In addition there are others I know who give some
credence to the end of the world being nigh at hand including a
relative who just the other day attested that what is happening
in Iraq and the Middle East was foretold in the bible. Evidently
it is a quite natural frame of mind to interpret current events
in light of traditional Christian scriptures -
such concepts as Armageddon, the Apocalypse, Rapture,
Christ's
"return," resurrection of the dead,
the "Millennium,"etc. were
introduced there. Some would deny the association but it seems
natural enough to me for anyone who entertains such
possibilities which is, after all, the truly absurd aspect! My
traveling companion considered it likely, however, that God would
wait "thirty years or so after the year 2000 AD
just so people can sneer at millennial fever and then,
Bam!"He gestured with a closed fist. My God!
Maybe, on the other hand, a millennium is like
"K"years, popularly 1,000 but in
actuality 1,024, (except as erroneously used in Y2K) such that
2048 AD would be the next significant eschatological date. There
was, of course, the possibility that the operative phenomenon
would be the transpiration of integral numbers of
"the number of man and his number is six
hundred threescore and six,"[Rev. 13:18] in
which case 1998 AD would have been ominous! Man has, after
all, demonstrated extreme folly at approximately such intervals:
The origin of Christianity (or Christ's
crucifixion, depending on how one looks at it), the emergence of
Islam, European famine and Black Death, the Mother of All Battles
or …
But if you think this article is going to be about that kind of
"millennial fever,"
you're wrong! I think of all such reasoning as
a "crock!" When people use terms
like millennia, they invariably presume much more than is
warranted. That the happenstance of our civilization adopting the
decimal number system and that the value of the right-most three
"digits" in the representation of
the number of times the earth has revolved about the sun since
some arbitrary point in time in that system happens to be zero
seems to me to have no more significance than someone I know
having been 38 when she had, in fact, been born in nineteen
hundred and 38 which excited her no end at one point. (Guess
when!) That is one thing.
Another thing is that civilization has survived less than nine
such intervals - certainly insufficient for
statistical significance even if there had been nine
unambiguously validated extraordinarily prophetic events at such
intervals.
However, there are phenomena for which millennia are
reasonable units of time - the natural
(uninterrupted) life expectancy of conifers in temperate rain
forests, for example. And there are subatomic phenomena, the
half-life of which make them easier to understand when they are
averaged over such time scales. And the atmospheric temperature at
the surface of the earth is such a phenomenon. Climatic variations
caused by the elongation of the earth's orbit,
volcanic activities, sunspots, giant meteors, etc. create spikes in
the data which obscure trends when averages are made over
appreciably smaller time scales. In the figure below this
temperature data has been plotted with the area colored in below
the curve. The abscissa is number of millennia prior to the year
2000 AD. (The curves below have been brought up to the minute by
including data since the year 2000 in the circles continuation
toward disaster.) In one sense the data seem harmless enough on
this scale. Even the great ice ages, although apparent at the left
of the plot and 15 or 20 millennia ago, seem fairly minor dips in
the temperature when averaged over the whole earth for whole
millennia.
But what is truly scary with regard to fever is the
juxtaposition of data on atmospheric concentrations of
CO2 over the same time interval as the temperature
data. It would be difficult to argue that the underlying
phenomena were not directly related. See the line plot in the
figure. A second figure is provided to show the data
with finer precisions since the industrial revolution. The data
for CO2 are taken from the concentration in bubbles in
ice cores from as much as two miles deep in glacial ice near the
poles. The temperature data are derived from tree rings and other
fossil growth indicators.
An advanced degree in eschatology from Oral Roberts University is
hardly a prerequisite for interpreting this data. A hair
raising prediction leaps from the page like
"an angel flying through the midst of
heaven, saying with a loud voice, 'Woe, woe,
woe, to the inhabiters of the
earth.'" [Rev. 8:13] All that
remains to be revealed in these latter days is exactly how much
the inflection in the temperature curve will lag the one in the
CO2 concentration curve - maybe
"thirty years or so after the year 2000 AD just
so people can sneer at millennial fever and then,
Bam!" (If Einstein had been a fundamentalist
Christian he might have said, "God would have
done it that way.") We now know that 1998 was not the
year of revelation - the year of man. I
guess we'll have to wait and see
- the science of global warming is after all,
like Christian eschatology, rather imprecise. But
don't ignore it!
S/he who hath ears to hear, let her/im hear!
Problems worsen even as the US administration and congress
vehemently ignore them!
* The circled data are update the plots to the current year.
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by Richard May
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