End of the World? Not Likely, Scientists Say
The recent spate of natural disasters affecting the globe “might be” signs that the Biblical apocalypse is near, says Christian televangelist Pat Robertson.
On an Oct. 9 episode of CNN’s “Late Edition,” the preacher noted that hurricanes such as Katrina and Rita and earthquakes like the ones that struck Pakistan this past weekend and the tsunami-causing one that struck Indonesia last December are hitting with “amazing regularity.”
Scientists see Earth doing what she always does, however.
Latter days?
“If you read back in the Bible, [Paul] said that in the latter days before the [apocalypse] that the Earth would be caught up in what he called the birth pangs of a new order,” Robertson said. “Well, what was called the blessed hope of the Bible is that one day Jesus Christ would come back again, start a whole new era, that this world order that we know it would change into something that would be wonderful that we’d call the millennium.”
But before there can be heaven on Earth, there will be some “difficult days” which will be like “what a woman goes through in labor just before she brings forth a child,” Robertson said.
Seth Stein, a seismologists at Northwestern University’s Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, thinks everything is as it should be, at least as far as earthquakes go.
“I don’t think there’s any reason to believe the frequency of large earthquakes has changed over the past million years,” Stein told LiveScience. “That’s contrary to everything we know about how the Earth works.”
Earthquake Frequency
Average number each year globally:
Type Magnitude Average
Great 8+ 1 *
Major 7 – 7.9 17 **
Strong 6 – 6.9 134 **
Moderate 5 – 5.9 1319 **
Light 4 – 4.9 13,000 ***
Minor 3 – 3.9 130,000 ***
Very Minor 2 – 2.9 1,300,000 ***
* Based on observations since 1900
** Based on observations since 1990
*** Estimated
LiveScience / SOURCE: USGS
On average, there is at least one magnitude 8 earthquake every year and about 17 magnitude 7’s, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. The Pakistan quake measured 7.6.
Location, location, location
Of course, some places on Earth are more prone to earthquakes than others.
Alaska is one of the most seismically active regions in the world – experiencing a major earthquake (magnitude 7.0 or greater) almost every year, whereas no earthquakes of more than moderate intensity have occurred within the borders of North Dakota during historical times.
“The largest earthquakes are on plate boundaries, where two plates are interacting, and the largest of these earthquakes occur on subduction zone boundaries, where you have one plate going under another plate,” Stein explained.
Both the Sumatra earthquake and the Pakistan earthquake struck on subduction zone boundaries. The first happened as the India plate slid under the Burma plate and the latter one was the result of the India plate sliding under the Eurasia one.
Hurricanes are increasing
Concerning hurricanes, Robertson may be correct in observing that they’re occurring more frequently than in the past.
According to the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), the period between 1970 to 1994 saw on average about 9 tropical storms in the Atlantic basin, with about 7 of those turning into hurricanes. From 1995 to 2004, that number jumped to 14 tropical storms and12 hurricanes.
2005 is likely to surpass them all, said Kevin Trenberth, the head of climate analysis at NCAR.
“By several measures, this will end up being the most active storm season on record, it’s not just number but also how intense they are,” Trenberth said.
But scientists aren’t willing to blame the apocalypse just yet. A decades-long cycle of busy and the quiet periods is evident in records dating back to the mid-1800s. This is not the first stretch of highly active hurricane seasons. It is just the first time so many people have lived near the coast during such an active period.
Natural cycles
Trenberth cites a number of factors responsible for the trend toward stronger and more frequent hurricanes being observed. These include natural variability in hurricane frequency and intensity, global warming, and El Niño, a warming of the waters in the off the eastern coast of South America that occurs naturally every 4-12 years.
“Following an El Niño there tends to be warmer sea temperatures,” Trenberth said. “It changes the atmospheric circulation to create extra warming of the Atlantic [Ocean].”
As the surface of the Atlantic Ocean warms, more water evaporates into the atmosphere, which allows for stronger tropical storms. Global warming is believed to contribute to hurricanes in the same way, by warming up the ocean surface and putting more moisture into the atmosphere.
About Robertson’s comments, Trenberth said that he “thinks its part of the general [socio-political] climate that seems to exists in the country today, fostered partly perhaps by this administration and their lack of credence to science.”
Source: Live Science, Written By: Ker Than (Live Science Staff Writer)
Tim says
Being an evangelical Christian, I tend to DISagree with any but the most basic statements of faith from Pat Robertson (or Oral Roberts, or any other of their ilk). It’s a shame that the most radical and out spoken become the moutth piece for a our faith, but that’s the media, I suppose.
You know – this might be the end of days, but hey – neither Pat, Oral, you or myself are likely to know it. I tend to agree with science on this issue – the earth is doing exactly what it has done since the dawn of time. The reason it SEEMS more tumultous is becuase of the increased population (resulting in astonishing death tolls for even average events) and the saturation of media in every corner of the earth (resulting in the loss of blissful ignorance of otherwise unknown disasters).
That’s my $.02
Dezz the Bounty Killer says
Good article. I follow this kind of stuff. You guys should check this site out. It shows the regularity of earthquakes. http://www.iris.edu/seismon/
Growing up in a very religious household, I am pretty well versed when it comes to the Bible. I don’t care much for Pat Robertson at all, but he has a very valid point. I think disastors like this makes us think about our own mortality and how short our life span really is. Are we close to the end of this “world”? Probably. If you believe what the Bible says then yeah it’s pretty damned close.
I don’t know, I personally have a gut feeling that this isn’t the end of the proverbial “shit hitting the fan” timeframe. I think there will most likely be more disastors of this magnitude in the near future.
Hopefully aliens will come and beam me up before then.
Kyle Nin says
The natural disasters aren’t the reason the world is supposed end. They are just what is supposed to happen when the end is nearing. In other words, it’s a warning. I don’t think anyone said that the disasters are going to blow up the Earth, or something.
It’s just the fact that SO MANY are happening SO OFTEN. If someone said thousands of years ago that something like this would happen, would you believe them? I think that’s the question people should ask themselves.
Belief.
grant burton says
Johan Norberg: Don’t worry, be happy
October 12, 2005
BELIEF in the future is perhaps the most important value for a free society. It is what makes so many interested in getting an education, or investing in a project, or being nice to their neighbours. If we think nothing can improve or that the world is coming to an end, we don’t work hard for a better and more civilised future. And we will all be miserable.
Enlightenment philosophers created the belief in the future in the 17th and 18th centuries by letting us know that our rational faculties can understand the world and that with freedom we can improve it. Economic liberalism proved them right. When Adam Smith explained that it’s not from the benevolence of the butcher that we expect our meat but from his self-interest, it was much more than an economic statement; it was a world view. It was a way of saying that the butcher is not my enemy. By co-operating and exchanging voluntarily, we both gain and make the world a better place, step by step.
Since those days, mankind has made unprecedented progress. We are wealthier, healthier and happier than we have ever been. We live longer, we live more safely and we live more freely. For every successive generation, we have been able to build on the knowledge, technology and wealth of earlier generations, and add our own. We have reduced poverty, created more wealth and increased life expectancy more in the past 50 years than we did in the past 5000 years.
I am not just saying that the glass is half full rather than half empty. I am saying that it used to be empty. Just 200 years ago, slavery, feudalism and tyranny ruled the world. By our standards even the richest countries were extremely poor. The average chance of surviving your first year was less than the chance of surviving to retirement today.
The glass is at least half full and it is being filled as we speak. And if I had it here before me, I would propose a toast to the creativity and persistence of mankind. In other words: Don’t
But although we are happy, we don’t seem to notice, and we do worry. When we ask people about what has happened in the world, most say that things get worse, poverty is on the increase and nature is being destroyed. Last week I published a survey showing that Swedes think all the indicators of living standards and the environment that are improving rapidly are in fact deteriorating. When we read the papers, we see problems, poverty and disasters. Powerful international movements oppose globalisation and capitalism because they think they increase misery and hunger. And scholars write books saying that we are all sad and depressed.
American writer Gregg Easterbrook has pointed out that old problems, horrible as they were at the time, seem less threatening in retrospect because we know that we solved them. But the problems of today are uncertain and unsolved, so they stay in our mind.
A few weeks ago, the first story in the leading news shows on television was that there is a “growing environmental threat” in Europe. The problem was shipping, which is rapidly becoming the biggest emitter of sulphur dioxide in Europe.
However, if you listened closely to the report, you understood that this was not because of growth of emissions from shipping – which grew very modestly – but because of a rapid reduction in emissions from other sources. Total sulphur dioxide emissions in Europe (including shipping) have been reduced by about 60 per cent in 15 years. So the real story was one about a dramatic improvement in environmental conditions, but shipping was now the thing we have to deal with and so it was news.
I am an optimist. I happen to believe that this perceptual bias is a good thing. That’s what keeps us alert, so that we solve problems and improve the world. But we have to understand that this also means that our minds are constantly occupied by problems. And therefore we think the world is worse than it is.
Progress also always creates some new challenge and problem solvers think more about the challenges than the progress. We live longer than ever. Isn’t that fantastic? No, because it results in higher costs for pensions and health care. At last poor countries make economic progress. Isn’t that wonderful? No, because we are afraid that Polish plumbers and Indian programmers will take our jobs. There is always something to be scared about. In the 1970s, when temperatures were declining, we worried about a new ice age. Now they are increasing and we worry about global warming. We used to worry about everybody who was depressed, now new antidepressant drugs have reduced suicide in rich countries by one-fifth. And so we worry about so many people taking pills.
The media exploits this interest in problems and disasters. We want to hear the latest horrible stories because our Stone Age brains think that this is important information on which we must act. At the turn of the millennium, a New York University survey made a list of Journalism’s Greatest Hits. Would you expect news stories about new vaccines, fantastic inventions, the rise in living standards or the spread of democracy from 0 per cent of countries 100 years ago to 60 per cent today? You would have been disappointed. The greatest hits were all about war, natural disasters, dangerous chemicals and unsafe cars.
Risks, horrible acts and disasters are easily dramatised and cheap to produce. That is why crime is such a popular theme on the news. Studies from the US show that the more time people spend watching news on TV, the more they exaggerate the extent of crime in their cities. A fascinating study about Baltimore showed 84 per cent feared that criminals would harm them or their loved ones, but at the same time almost everybody – 92 per cent – said they felt safe in their neighbourhoods, of which they had first-hand knowledge. They all think there is a lot of crime in Baltimore, but they all think it takes place somewhere else in the city, in the places they know about only from the media.
These results appear again and again in surveys. People think that the environment is being destroyed, that the economy is going to bits and Germans think the reunification of Germany was bad for most people. But they also think that their local environment is good, that their personal finances are improving and that German reunification was good for their personal situation.
At the same time that extreme poverty has been cut in half in developing countries, many people think poverty is on the increase because they see the poverty for the first time on TV. Partly we care about it because poor Vietnamese and Chinese make the shirts we wear. If you don’t understand the context, you think that it is the fact they make our shirts that has made them poor. Never mind that people who work for an American multinational in a low-income country earn eight times the average income in that country.
The long-run prospects for the world are amazing. Today we have more people living longer lives in freer societies and we have more scientists alive than lived in all previous periods combined, and they all get an education that is almost as long as a lifetime in earlier periods. Biotechnology, nanotechnology and robotics will create vast improvements. We will be richer, we will live longer and we will be healthier. Continents that we thought were doomed to misery will soon have the living standards we have today.
Johan Norberg is head of political ideas at Timbro, a Swedish think tank. He is author of the best-selling book In Defence of Global Capitalism, which the Sydney-based Centre for Independent Studies republished this week. This is an edited extract from the 22nd annual John Bonython Lecture in Sydney l
A. Nony. Mouse says
Religious people scare me.
Someone should make a horror movie about them.