Foreshadow Now, ‘Season of the End Times’:

Blog note. Jesus indicated that ‘fearful sights’ (various natural disasters) would occur leading up to the time known as the Tribulation and Great Tribulation (a combined seven year period of great destruction on earth). Although these types of things have occurred in the past for centuries and thousands of years, they could be identified as the ‘season of the times’ due to the ferociousness of these events. They would be occurring in greater intensity, severity, frequency, size, duration, scope … just like the pains that a woman experiences in labor the farther along she is in the labor process. We are in the ‘season of the times’ that comes just before the seven (7) year Tribulation/Great Tribulation period

… And great earthquakes shall be in diverse places, and famines, and pestilences; and fearful sights and great signs shall there be from heaven. (Luke 21:11).
… And there shall be signs in the sun, and in the moon, and in the stars; and upon the earth distress of nations, with perplexity; the sea and the waves roaring; (Luke 21:25)
… Men’s hearts failing them for fear, and for looking after those things which are coming on the earth: for the powers of heaven shall be shaken; (Luke 21:26)
… This know also, that in the last days perilous times shall come. (2 Timothy 3:1)

Jesus is giving a series of prophecies about what to look for as the age of grace comes to a close. These verses are several of many such prophecies from throughout the Bible. 2017 was the worst year in recorded history for the intensity, frequency, severity, duration and occurrence of a large number of severe natural disasters worldwide. Earthquakes, volcanoes, hurricanes, typhoons, cyclones, torrential flooding, unprecedented wildfires in unusual places, devastating droughts, excessive/scorching heat setting records everywhere, record snowfalls in Europe and Russia. Snow in the Arabia. This list can go on. Most studied Eschatologists believe these ‘fearful sights’ and massive natural disasters are all part of the ‘CONVERGENCE’ of signs that this Biblical and prophetic age is closing. Most people who study prophecy are familiar with the routine reference(s) made that these things will be like a woman having labor.

Revelation 6:7-8 And when he had opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth beast say, Come and see. 8 And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth.

(‘fourth part’ = 25% = *7.7 billion x .25 = 1.93 billion people) *estimated earth population as of March 2020.

Worst Megadrought in Centuries Emerging in U.S., Scientists Warn

Climate change is driving drought that could be worse than anything in recorded history, scientists warn, based on climate model and observations on the ground

Ruth Schuster Haaretz Apr 16, 2020 9:05 PM

Climatologists have been predicting megadrought in the western United States and northern Mexico but it seems to have already begun, scientists suggest in Science on Thursday. While the combination of natural circumstances could have caused a megadrought at this time anyway, this one – exacerbated by global warming – could be the worst in thousands of years, the team warns.

The Mediterranean region, eastern North Africa, the Middle East and Chile are also undergoing accelerated desertification, the recent wet winter in Israel notwithstanding. Natural climatic cycles caused megadroughts in the Mediterranean region 120,000 and 10,000 years ago, each lasting thousands of years.

Over in the western United States and northern Mexico, drought clusters began in around 2000 and scientists have been cautioning that climate change might be pushing the region toward extremes. Now they aren’t warning any more. It’s apparently here.

The study by Park Williams, Edward Cook, Jason Smerdon, Kasey Bolles and Seung Hun Baek, of Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory; John Abatzoglou of the University of Idaho; and Andrew Badger and Ben Livneh of the University of Colorado, Boulder, is based on weather observations, tree-ring data going back 1,200 years and dozens of climate models.

“Earlier studies were largely model projections of the future,” Williams says. “We’re no longer looking at projections, but at where we are now. We now have enough observations of current drought and tree-ring records of past drought to say that we’re on the same trajectory as the worst prehistoric droughts.”

Tale of a tree

As many trees grow in girth, rings form under the bark. Dendrochronology is the art of counting rings to estimate a tree’s age, and the form of the rings speaks volumes about the environmental conditions. Trees typically grow better in nice, warm wet weather, resulting in a wider ring. In a drought, the ring will be thin.

Written history goes back about 5,000 years but, unlike scribes, trees are an objective source of data. Tree-ring data has been central to the theory that the Toltec and Aztec civilizations were brought low by megadrought, to name just one example. In our parts, the great Assyrian empire may also have been fatally weakened by drought.

The new study is based on dendrochronological data from thousands of trees in nine U.S. states, from Oregon and Montana down through California and New Mexico, and part of northern Mexico, starting 1,200 years ago. The researchers detected the four megadroughts lasting decades: in the late ninth century, 12th century, 13th century and 16th century.

As for the drought conditions today, the team didn’t need tree rings: we have records going back to 1901. They calculated drought severity from 2000 to 2018 using a soil-moisture model.

“Pretend that the ground is covered by buckets. We use precipitation data to fill the buckets up, and we use temperature, humidity, wind and sunlight to drive evaporation,” Williams explains. Then they filtered human-caused climate trends from the climate data and reran the bucket simulations. Thus, they estimate that the intensity of the 2000 to 2018 drought would have been reduced by about half.

The current drought is already outdoing three prior ones from the ninth, 12th and 13th centuries, according to their calculations. The fourth historic one, which lasted from 1575 to 1603, may have been worse, but the process today is still gaining momentum. Today’s drought is also afflicting a wider area than the preceding ones: this is a fingerprint of global warming, the researchers say.

“As of 2018, climate models suggest that the extra heat in our study region due to global warming was 1.5-1.6 degrees Celsius,” Williams tells Haaretz. (The equivalent in Fahrenheit would be about 2.4 to 2.6 degrees.)

If hotter air holds more moisture and the western United States is drying, where is that rain going to fall? Climate change models predict more precipitation across most of the eastern side of the country.

Hand of La Niña and of humans

Archaeologists have demonstrated that people began destroying their local environs from the time they settled down thousands of years ago – for instance, by deforestation and resource depletion. The first settlers in the ancient northern Israeli city of Acre devastated the indigenous Mediterranean forest and fauna, depleted the water supply and drove a local temperature increase: the stone construction retains more heat than natural vegetation.

To be clear, regional megadrought is driven by nature, and that’s still the case. A study published last year, led by Lamont’s Nathan Steiger, correlated the historic megadroughts – and apparently this one – with the weather phenomenon La Niña, which pushes storm tracks northward, depriving the Midwest of rain.

If La Niña happens every few years, how could it explain a megadrought every few centuries, let alone one lasting almost 100 years?

La Niña represents a pattern of Pacific sea-surface temperatures and is said to happen every three to seven years. But it isn’t actually cyclic, Williams explains: that’s an average. (El Niño isn’t cyclic either). “So you can have decades or centuries with an anomalously high frequency of La Niña years. Further, La Niña and El Niño are the extremes, but between those extremes you can have strings of decades when the sea-surface patterns are somewhere between average, but tilted more toward La Niña or El Niño,” he says: During megadroughts, it appears there are some major La Niña events that were superimposed on background conditions conducive to drought.

Now, because of global warming, there is more evaporation and the hotter air tends to hold more moisture, which intensifies the desiccation of soils already starved of precipitation.

The drought isn’t theoretical. The California wildfires were fueled by aridity. Lake Mead and Lake Powell along the Colorado River have shrunk dramatically. Fluctuations if one thing but global warming clearly makes the situation worse. 

Worse yet: Given the trajectory of emissions and global warming, the drought in the western U.S. has no natural end in sight – the same as in the Middle East. It could last centuries, Williams says.

“Because the background is getting warmer, the dice are increasingly loaded toward longer and more severe droughts,” he adds.

The suffering won’t be limited to American farmers. Separate research has shown that a redux of the 1930s Dust Bowl-type catastrophe would cause a global food shock cascade. 

Could the megadrought gaining momentum in the region it be irreversible? “Even if we stop emitting greenhouse gases tomorrow, the globe will continue to warm for decades as the ocean continues to warm due to the gases already in the atmosphere,” Willliams answers. “So the odds that this particular drought ends in the next several years would not be significantly affected.”

Even if humanity is collectively behaving like a deer in the headlights (vis-à-vis climate change, not the coronavirus), maybe nature will help. “It’s still possible for natural climate variability to end the drought on its own,” Williams qualifies. “In the longer term, we’re still just in the beginning of the human-caused warming trend, assuming we don’t majorly curb greenhouse gases immediately. That means that with continued emissions, human-caused warming will make it increasingly difficult for natural climate swings to swing western North America out of drought.”

And like in Israel, the year 2019 was a relatively wet one for the Midwest; 2020 isn’t shaping up that way.

(Night Watchman Note: What will happen when millions of Christians suddenly ‘disappear’ in the ‘twinkling of an eye”??? Those who may be first-responders, doctors, nurses, support staff, policemen, firefighters, farmers, homeless volunteers, those in the red cross or other emergency aid and relief organizations, in the national guard or military, pharmacies, grocery stores, etc. You get the picture.)

1 Corinthians 15:52

In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed.

Jesus Christ’s Offer of Salvation:

The ABCs of Salvation through Jesus Christ (the Lamb)

A. Admit/Acknowledge/Accept that you are sinner. Ask God’s forgiveness and repent of your sins.

. . . “For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God.” (Romans 3:23).

. . . “As it is written, There is none righteous, no, not one.” (Romans 3:10).

. . . “If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.” (1 John 1:8).

B. Believe Jesus is Lord. Believe that Jesus Christ is who He claimed to be; that He was both fully God and fully man and that we are saved through His death, burial, and resurrection. Put your trust in Him as your only hope of salvation. Become a son or daughter of God by receiving Christ.

. . . “That whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal life. For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. For God sent not his son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved. (John 3:15-17). For whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved.” (Romans 10:13).

C. Call upon His name, Confess with your heart and with your lips that Jesus is your Lord and Savior.

. . . “That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved. For with the heart man believeth unto righteousness; and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation.” (Romans 10:9-10).

. . . “If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say that we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us.” (John 1:8-10).

. . . “And he is the propitiation for our sins: and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world. (John 2:2).

. . . “In this was manifested the love of god toward us, because that God sent his only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through him. And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Saviour of the world. Whosoever shall confess that Jesus is the Son of God, God dwelleth in him, and he in God.” (1 John 4:9, 14-15).

. . . “But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. Much more then, being now justified by his blood, we shall be saved from wrath through him. For if, when we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, being reconciled, we shall be saved by his life.” (Romans 5:8-10).

. . . “For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.” (Romans 6:23).

. . . “Jesus saith unto them, I am the way, the truth, and the life, no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.” (John 14:6).

. . . “For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ: for it is the power of God unto salvation to everyone that believeth.” (Romans 1:16).

. . . “Neither is there salvation in any other: for there is none other name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved.” (Acts: 4:12).

. . . “Who will have all men to be saved, and to come unto the knowledge of the truth for there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus.” (1 Timothy 2:4-6).

. . . “For God did not appoint us to suffer wrath but to receive salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ.” (1 Thessalonians 5:9).

. . . “But as many as received him, to them gave the power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name.” (John 1:12).

True Church / Bride of Christ Spared from God’s Wrath:

 Romans 5:8-10. “But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. Much more then, being now justified by his blood, we shall be saved from wrath through him. For if, when we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, being reconciled, we shall be saved by his life.”

Romans 12:19. Dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath: for it is written, Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.

1 Thessalonians 1:10. And to wait for his Son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead, even Jesus, which delivered us from the wrath to come.

1 Thessalonians 5:9. For God hath not appointed us to wrath, but to obtain salvation by our Lord Jesus Christ,

Romans 8:35. Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?

Jeremiah 30:7. Alas! for that day is great, so that none is like it: it is even the time of Jacob’s trouble, but he shall be saved out of it.

Revelation 3:10 Because thou hast kept the word of my patience, I also will keep thee from the hour of temptation, which shall come upon all the world, to try them that dwell upon the earth.