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Meanwhile, Up In The Arctic, Things Have Gone Off The Rails
So, NATO has more or less collapsed and the alliance that gave the world relative peace and prosperity for more than 75 years is gone. In its place is the expectation of spiraling conflicts and economic volatility. There is also the expectation of a resurgent and very politically active Catholic Church under the next pope, but I’ll save that for another post.
While all this has been going on, the accelerating decline in our natural earth has continued. Since this decline puts pressure on human society by replacing a benign environment with a hostile environment, where severe storms, heat waves and droughts put enormous pressure on agricultural production, thus increasing food prices and decreasing food availability, this decline contributes very significantly to spiraling conflicts, famines and pestilences (See Matthew 24:6-8).
Our warming planet does not warm evenly. At the equator, warming is slowest – it is barely noticeable. But at the poles, warming is progressing faster than anywhere else. Of our two poles, it is the north pole area – the arctic, where warming is most readily noticeable in the form and less and less ice cover during the winter. Below is a graph from the Charctic page from the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado, Boulder (this center is federally funded and will almost certainly lose funding under the Trump administration, along with all other generators of climate data. Click above and explore the site while you can).
Above you can see that we are starting off 2025 well below the record sea ice minimum. That is to say, during the absolute coldest part of the year, there is less sea ice in the arctic than there has ever been. If you visit the Charctic site, you can toggle back and forth between Arctic and Antarctic and see that the Antarctic is flirting with record low sea ice at its hottest part of the year.
Juxtapose this new low in the Arctic with the fact that our extreme northern (boreal) forests and tundra have gone from absorbing CO2 from the rest of the world, to being a source of CO2 emissions. This is because the vast amount of carbon stored in extreme northern soils has warmed to the place that it is beginning to off-gas. This, along with the waking boreal soil bacteria (which emit methane as they go about the business of anerobic digestion) will contribute mightily to the accelerating warming of our planet. The chart below is somewhat famous. This is the “sawtooth” chart which shows the level of CO2 in our atmosphere as measured at the NOAA Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii. As of January, 2025 the average daily atmospheric CO2 measured at the observatory was 426.65 ppm.
I have written about tipping points many times on this blog, and while we don’t know where the tipping point for atmospheric CO2 is, we do know that as the temperature increases in the Arctic, the polar vortex slows its gyration, and that is a very serious thing because it then leads to a destabilization of the northern weather patterns and a slowing of the jet stream, which is what determines the direction and speed of our storms. Long story short: warming in the arctic means stronger, less predictable, and slower (in other words, longer) storms hitting the northern hemisphere.
The bottom line here is that, as our political and economic spheres are beginning to move into crisis, our environment continues its quiet march toward crisis. Mankind is not prepared for the confluence of these crises, even though the trials of the end times have been foretold for millennia.
Planet in Distress 