September 26, read through the Bible in a year.

Today we read the second chapter of Second Timothy and two chapters of Jeremiah.

September 26: 2 Timothy 2, Jeremiah 23, Jeremiah 24 (click on the chapter to begin reading).

2 Timothy 2. God, through the apostle Paul gives advice to the young Timothy, such as: Be strong in grace, be not ashamed of the truth as you are an approved worker. One piece of advice stands out; “Flee youthful lusts”.

Jeremiah 23. God will eventually raise up out of the house of David the righteous branch, but until then there will be lying prophets, false prophets and empty oracles.

Jeremiah 24. Jeremiah has a vision of two baskets of figs. There is a lesson there.

 

September 25, read through the Bible in a year.

Today we read one Psalm, the first chapter of Second Timothy and two chapters of Jeremiah.

September 25: Psalm 111, 2 Timothy 1, Jeremiah 21, Jeremiah 22 (click on the chapter to begin reading).

Psalm 111. A short, beautiful psalm with this truth: The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.”

2 Timothy 1 starts out with a greeting and Paul is encouraged by Timothy’s Faith, which he got from his mother Eunice and grandmother Lois. Paul is not Ashamed of the Gospel “for I know whom I have believed, and am persuaded that he is able to keep that which I have committed unto him against that day.” Then Paul urges Timothy toe loyal to the faith.

Jeremiah 21. Jerusalem is doomed, and God delivers a message to the house of David.

Jeremiah 22 continues God’s messages to the House of David, the Sons of Josiah, and proclaims the end of the Davidic line with Jehoiachin. This is one reason  Jesus had to be adopted by Joseph according to the gospel of Matthew.

 

No “Climate Catastrophe,” but a more clouded future. A Limerick.

The clouds that we see in the sky
is really the reason for why
we will not overheat;
Shield us from solar heat.
A feedback, on which we rely.
I am a climate realist, that means I look at the totality of what is happening to the climate with increasing CO2 levels, and what it means for our future.

Climate alarmists and IPCC believe that the thermal response to increasing CO2 has a positive feedback from the increasing water vapor that results from higher ocean temperatures, melting permafrost releasing Methane and melting of the polar ice caps. All this leads to much higher temperatures. Current climate model averages indicate a temperature rise of 4.7 C by 2100 if nothing is done, 4.65 C if U.S keeps all its Paris commitments and 4.53 C if all countries keep their part of the agreement. In all cases, with or without Paris agreement we are headed for a disaster of biblical proportions.

As the chart indicates, implementing all of the Paris agreement will delay the end of mankind as we know it by at most 4 years.

Myself and quite a few scientists, meteorologists and engineers believe the feedback loop in nature is far more complicated than that, in fact, there is a large negative feedback in the system, preventing a temperature runaway, and we have the observations to prove it.  The negative feedback manifests itself in 2 ways:

Inorganic feedback, represented by clouds. If there were no clouds, the tropics would average a temperature of  140 F  thanks to the greenhouse effect. The clouds reflect back up to 300 W/m2 into space rather than the same energy being absorbed into water or soil. Clouds are highly temperature dependent, especially cumulus and cumulonimbus clouds. The figure below shows temperatures at the equator in the Pacific Ocean.

Cumulus clouds are formed in the morning, earlier the warmer it is, and not at all if it is cold, thunderstorms appear when it is warm enough. The figure shows how temperature in the equatorial Pacific rises until about 8:30 a.m, then actually declines between 9 and 12 a.m. even as the sun continues to rise. The feedback, which was positive at low temperatures becomes negative at warmer temperatures, and in the equatorial doldrums, surface temperature has found its equilibrium. No amount of extra CO2 will change that. Equatorial temperatures follow  the temperature of the ocean, warmer when there is an el niño, cooler when there is a la niña. Here is a chart of temperature increases since satellite measurements began as a function of latitude.

The tropics follow the ocean temperature closely, no long term rising trend, the extratropics are also stable.

Not so at the poles. the temperature record indicate a noticeable warming with large spikes up and down, up to 3 degree Celsius difference from year to year, especially the Arctic. So, how much has the Arctic melted? Here is a chart of Arctic ice cover for 31 May for the last 39 years.

If this trend continues, all ice may melt altogether in May in 300 to 400 years, faster if there is further warming and nothing else is changing. Let’s take a look at the Arctic above the 80th latitude, an area of about 3,85 million square kilometers, less than 1% of the earth’s surface, but it is there where global warming is most pronounced. Here are two charts from the last 2 years, ending with Sep 23 2019. (Source: Danish Meteorological Institute.)

https://i0.wp.com/ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/plots/meanTarchive/meanT_2019.png

We see clearly that the winter temperatures are rising at the poles, but the summer temperatures have remained steady ore below average year after year.

Something else must be going on. Take a look at the fall snow cover in the northern hemisphere: (Thanks, Rutgers Global Snow lab)

Yes the fall snowfall is increasing with increasing CO2!

The counter-intuitive conclusion is that it may very well be that warmer temperatures produces accumulation of snow and ice, colder temperatures with less snow accumulate less. What happens during the short Arctic summer? With more snow accumulated it takes longer to melt last years snow, so the temperature stays colder longer. This year the Arctic temperature has been running colder than normal every day between early June  and late August. If this melting period ends without melting all snow, multi year ice will accumulate, and if it continues unabated, a new ice age will start.

The second feedback loop is organic. More CO2 means more plant growth.  According to NASA there has been a significant greening of the earth, more than 10% since satellite measurements begun. This results in a cooling effect everywhere, except in areas that used to be treeless where they have a warming effect. The net effect is that we can now feed 2 billion more people than before without using more fertilizer. Check this picture from NASA, (now they can publish real science again) showing the increased leaf area extends nearly everywhere.

In addition, more leafs changes the water cycle, increases evapotranspiration, but, ant that is the good news, with more CO2 photosynthesis works better even in droughts, and more trees and vegetation reduces erosion and unwanted runoff. Good news all around.

In short, taking into account the negative feedback occurring, the earth will warm up less than 0.5 degrees with a doubling of the CO2 content, not at all in the tropics, and less than 6 degrees at the poles. Without the Paris agreement there will be no increase in the death rates in the cities, except from the slight increase of city temperatures due to the urban heat effect. With the Paris agreement we will have to make draconian cuts in our use of electricity, meaning using much less air conditioning and even less heating, and life expectancy will decline.

We need energy. It takes a lot of energy to clean up the planet. Developing nations should be encouraged to use electricity rather than cooking by dried cow-dung. Coal is limited, and we should leave some for our great great grandchildren. Oil and gas should be preserved for aviation, since there is no realistic alternative with a high enough energy density. Therefore I am an advocate for Thorium based nuclear energy, being safer than Uranium based nuclear energy, and, properly implemented will produce about 0.01% of the long term radioactive waste compared to conventional nuclear power plants. And there is a million year supply  of Thorium available. Once the electricity power plants have fully switched away from coal and gas, then and only then is it time to switch to electric cars, since they will until then have to be recharged by electricity generated from coal.  https://lenbilen.com/2017/07/14/twenty-five-reasons-to-rapidly-develop-thorium-based-nuclear-power-generation/

September 24, read through the Bible in a year.

In between  First and Second Timothy we read three Psalms and one chapter of Jeremiah.

September 24: Psalm 108, Psalm 109, Psalm 110, Jeremiah 20 (click on the chapter to begin reading).

Psalm 108, a Psalm, a song of David. Here David repeats parts from Psalm 57 and Psalm 60 and uses it to ask for God’s help in his further conquests as he subdues nations around him.

Psalm 109, of David. Leaving vengeance to God, David prays for the full measure of God’s vengeance to be poured out on his wicked enemies. He is “poor and needy” and vengeance is God’s business.

Psalm 110, of David. Two quotes stand out from this Psalm: “The Lord said unto my Lord, Sit thou at my right hand, until I make thine enemies thy footstool.“, and “The Lord hath sworn, and will not repent, Thou art a priest for ever after the order of Melchizedek.” Who is David talking about? Hint: The book of Hebrews gives the answer.

Jeremiah 20. The chief priest Pashhur hears Jeremiah prophesy bad outcomes, so he punishes Jeremiah, which leads to the word of God to Pashhur. Jeremias gives yer another complaint to God, this time even to the point of complaining he was born.

 

September 23, read through the Bible in a year.

In between  First and Second Timothy we read one chapter of Proverbs and two chapters of Jeremiah.

September 23: Proverbs 16, Jeremiah 18, Jeremiah 19 (click on the chapter to begin reading).

Proverbs 16, Proverbs of Solomon. God looks at the heart, take heed and do what is right in the eyes of the Lord, not men.

Jeremiah 18, Jeremiah is at the potter’s house and learns the importance of the potter and the clay. God’s warning is rejected by the people and Jeremiah is persecuted.

Jeremiah 19. It is getting worse. Jeremiah bought a clay jar, went to the valley of Hinnon, later called Gehenna, proclaimed disaster over Judah and Jerusalem over their offerings to Baal or Molech and broke the clay jar to signify how big the disaster was going to be.

 

September 22, read through the Bible in a year.

In between  First and Second Timothy we read one Psalm and one chapter of Jeremiah.

September 22: Psalm 107, Jeremiah 17 (click on the chapter to begin reading).

Psalm 107. God to the rescue. It is a telling of four “saysos” ass the Southerners used to say “Let the redeemed of the LORD say so“. They got in trouble and finally cried out to the LORD and He saved them out of their distresses. This is a remarkably positive Psalm.

Jeremiah 17. Judah’s sin is deep and worthy of punishment. Jeremiah gives a profound confession and delivers a beautiful prayer for deliverance. Then he reminds the people to  keep the sabbath holy.

 

September 21, read through the Bible in a year.

In between  First and Second Timothy we read one Psalm and one chapter of Jeremiah

September 21: Psalm 106, Jeremiah 16 (click on the chapter to begin reading).

Psalm 106 is a follow-on of Psalm 105. While Psalm 105 tells of the story of God’s people from Abraham to Moses, Psalm 106 continues from the crossing of the Red Sea (or Sea of Reeds) to the sins committed ,even to the child sacrifices to the gods of Canaan. The psalmists prays for deliverance from the heathens and return and restoration of the promised land. It begins and ends with a Hallelujah.

Jeremiah 16 tells of the Day of Disaster and ends with the promise that God will restore Israel.

September 20, read through the Bible in a year.

Today we read the last chapter of  First Timothy and one chapter of Jeremiah

September 20: 1 Timothy 6, Jeremiah 15 (click on the chapter to begin reading).

1 Timothy 6.  Even if you are under the yoke of slavery, honor your masters. Don’t listen to those that teach error, and especially to those that think that with godliness comes financial gain. Remember: The Love of Money is the Root of all evil. Final instructions to Timothy: Guard the Faith.

Jeremiah 15. More calamities awaits the people, for the LORD will not relent. Jeremiah feels dejected, but the Lord reassures Jeremiah.

Climate change is now officially the new secular religion. How did this get started?

The Climate Catastrophe Warriors are at it again. It is now the official religion of the left, having reintroduced the concept of sin as in “Climate Change Sins” and they now offer confessionals. It strangely fits with the custom of having Climate Charlatans offering indulgences in the form of carbon offsets and offering to sell electricity produced 99% from wind power. To top it off, Pope Francis is all in with the  Climate change.

Many years ago, around 1977 Dr. James Lovelock bought a number of HP Gas Chromatographs to set up in the most remote corners of the earth to study pollution and its effect on the climate. What he found was an unexpectedly large amount of dimethylsulphide (DMS) (ref 3) in the atmosphere, and that acted as amicrobes_sar11

condensation point for cloud formation. He was then a paid consultant for Hewlett Packard, so he came over from his native England a couple of times a year, always willing to hold a seminar for us engineers working at Hewlett Packard Analytical, and at one of them he sprung “Daisy-world” on us, before it was published, mostly to see if we could poke holes in his hypothesis. It involved a world that consisted of only two flowers, black daisies and white daisies. The computer simulation starts out with a cold world and a weak sun. The sun warms up until suddenly black daisies appear and cover the earth. This warms the earth some more and white daisies appear. As the sun varies in intensity the mix of white and black daisies changes and this keeps the earth at a stable temperature, as they have different reflective properties. He then went on to say that the whole earth is like a living organism.
Some time later he presented the paper and the next year we asked him how it was received. “You won’t believe it”, he answered. ”Now there are people who actually believe the earth is a living organism. They demand follow-up articles that justifies their belief.” He had partly himself to blame, the name he chose was the GAIA hypothesis, Gaia being the Mother earth Goddess. Talking about religion the Mother Earth people now had their goddess, and expressions like. “The earth has a temperature” became commonplace. For me, being a Christian I read with wonderment what God has to say about the Ecosystem.

We find this in Genesis 1:6-8 (NIV) And God said, “Let there be an expanse between the waters to separate water from water.” 7 So God made the expanse and separated the water under the expanse from the water above it. And it was so. 8 God called the expanse “sky.” And there was evening, and there was morning—the second day. But God didn’t say: “It was good
The creation story is interesting reading. God takes a whole day out His busy schedule of creation just to create the clouds. In days three to five of creation He adds the statement “And God saw that it was good”, on day six it was “very good”. Could it be that God knows the ecosystem is fragile and we are going to mess it up beyond repair? Exactly why was it then very good? Could it be it was very good after the whole creation was complete, all the components that make up a stable ecosystem was put in place? First then could He finally say: Genesis 1:31 God saw all that he had made, and it was very good. And there was evening, and there was morning—the sixth day.
Let us hurry back to our quest for something other than pollution that acts as a negative feedback to make the temperature system stable. With some anxiety (we are part of the ecosystem, so we better try to understand it), but also assurance, we return back to the GAIA factor.
As is mentioned before, Dr. Lovelock had found unusually high amounts of dimethylsulphide (DMS) in places far from any pollution source. Something must have put it there. It turns out DMS is a waste product from phytoplankton, an abundant life form in the oceans, low on the food chain. As ocean temperature rises, phytoplankton levels increase, suggesting a possible feedback mechanism. The DMS molecules act as a condensation kernel for the formation of Clouds. This is something that it is hard to get a grip on. Clouds have a positive feedback as they hold in heat once captured by the earth, but this is more than offset by the large negative feedback caused by the albedo factor. The white clouds act as a reflector, and with more clouds, more of the solar energy gets reflected back out into space. The total reflection back into space from clouds and aerosols is about 31% or 400W/m2. This negative feedback factor can be as high as    – 1.9 W m-2/°C. This means there is a strong negative feedback in the ecosystem keeping the earth from getting overheated, since water vapor is a much stronger greenhouse gas than CO2.
None of this mattered to the Mother Earth people believing in GAIA. They formed a coalition with the communists and socialists and Global Governance advocates and convinced U.N. that CO2 was bad and needed to be controlled, and so IPCC was formed to give the scientific justification why it was necessary to control CO2 emissions. I do not know how many Global Climate models there are out there, but I have seen (ref.1) a chart with 73 Climate models, all pointing to a rapidly warming earth, plotted versus reality, which shows a more or less stable temperature versus time. But the models are all paid for by Government money, so the more, the merrier. They all do a lousy job modeling clouds, so no wonder they fail. (ref. 2) But they produce the result the funding agencies demanded for continuing funding, so the charade goes on. The models are all based on a positive feedback with increasing temperatures. When it gets warmer, the atmosphere can hold more water vapor, and since water vapor is a much stronger greenhouse gas than CO2, it gets warmer still. In reality, the opposite is true. With increased water vapor there will form clouds earlier and lasting longer, leading to a negative feedback that tends to keep temperatures more stable. More CO2 will aid in that stability. Granted, there is still increasing temperatures with increasing CO2, but instead of a gain of   a factor of 2 to 3, which the models predict, there is an attenuation of about 2 to 3, so the real temperature rise is one ninth to a quarter of what the models predict.
But the models are useful for one thing: To create an urgency in people, so they will go along with Global Governance, making an unelected bureaucracy take control of the energy resources.
But even that is a side issue. The real issue is people control, as expressed in Agenda 21. The world has about 7.7 billion people, and some have calculated that an ideal, sustainable world has room for only 700 million people, if enough areas are set aside for wildlife and nature preserves. After all, the animals and the original plants and trees were here first!
This attitude is expressed in a number of recent government advisers.JonathanGruber
The “architect” of Obamacare, Jonathan Gruber’s abortion advocacy is of a particularly pungent eugenics variety. He’s on record repeatedly making the case from social science that abortion is a “social good” because it reduces the number of “marginal children,” by which he means urban poor—those he says can be counted on to commit crimes if they were ever born.
The Presidential Science Advisor John Holdren has a plethora of population control suggestions:John_Holdren_official_portrait_small
Indeed, it has been concluded that compulsory population-control laws, even including laws requiring compulsory abortion, could be sustained under the existing Constitution if the population crisis became sufficiently severe to endanger the society.
One way to carry out this disapproval might be to insist that all illegitimate babies be put up for adoption—especially those born to minors, who generally are not capable of caring properly for a child alone. If a single mother really wished to keep her baby, she might be obliged to go through adoption proceedings and demonstrate her ability to support and care for it. Adoption proceedings probably should remain more difficult for single people than for married couples, in recognition of the relative difficulty of raising children alone. It would even be possible to require pregnant single women to marry or have abortions, perhaps as an alternative to placement for adoption, depending on the society.
On Involuntary fertility control :…
A program of sterilizing women after their second or third child, despite the relatively greater difficulty of the operation than vasectomy, might be easier to implement than trying to sterilize men.

The development of a long-term sterilizing capsule that could be implanted under the skin and removed when pregnancy is desired opens additional possibilities for coercive fertility control. The capsule could be implanted at puberty and might be removable, with official permission, for a limited number of births.
Toward a Planetary Regime:

Perhaps those agencies, combined with UNEP and the United Nations population agencies, might eventually be developed into a Planetary Regime—sort of an international superagency for population, resources, and environment. Such a comprehensive Planetary Regime could control the development, administration, conservation, and distribution of all natural resources, renewable or nonrenewable, at least insofar as international implications exist. Thus the Regime could have the power to control pollution not only in the atmosphere and oceans, but also in such freshwater bodies as rivers and lakes that cross international boundaries or that discharge into the oceans. The Regime might also be a logical central agency for regulating all international trade, perhaps including assistance from DCs to LDCs, and including all food on the international market.

The Planetary Regime might be given responsibility for determining the optimum population for the world and for each region and for arbitrating various countries’ shares within their regional limits. Control of population size might remain the responsibility of each government, but the Regime would have some power to enforce the agreed limits.
We will need to surrender national sovereignty to an armed international police force:
If this could be accomplished, security might be provided by an armed international organization, a global analogue of a police force. Many people have recognized this as a goal, but the way to reach it remains obscure in a world where factionalism seems, if anything, to be increasing. The first step necessarily involves partial surrender of sovereignty to an international organization.
This is more than enough to give a hint on what the Obama Administration meant by “Fundamental transformation
This is what happens when people start to serve “The Creature rather than the Creator” and that is “The Lie”.

The connection between “The sin” and “The lie”, represented by Muslims annihilating Christians, and progressives annihilating people is their hatred for the Cross. The Muslims deny Jesus Christ as redeemer by his substitutionary death on the cross, and the progressives deny the cross as redemption of mankind, substituting God with man as redeemer.

This explains the hatred of the cross. It is an offense and a stumbling block for the unbeliever.

Lennart Bilén, 2019

(1) Real temperature over time versus predicted by models.

CMIP5-73-models-vs-obs-20N-20S-MT-5-yr-means1

(2) Model cloud cover versus reality

Cloudmodels

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(3) https://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/05/16/ocean-bacteria-are-programmed-to-alter-climate-gases/comment-page-1/#comment-2216450

September 19, read through the Bible in a year.

Today we read the fifth chapter of  First Timothy and two chapters of Jeremiah

September 19: 1 Timothy 5, Jeremiah 13, Jeremiah 14 (click on the chapter to begin reading).

1 Timothy 5 outlines the proper treatment of church members, honor the widows and honor the elders. Then Paul urges Timothy to drink a little wine for his stomach’s sake.

Jeremiah 13. Jeremiah buys a Linen Belt, It got ruined. Then God tells about wineskins. Both are object lessons for what is to befall Jerusalem, for pride precedes captivity.

Jeremiah 14. There will be drought, sword, famine and pestilence, the people plead for mercy.