Climate Change and the Prophecies

We know now, that dramatic changes in climate are beginning to take place: increases in storminess and hurricanes, growing deserts and melting ice fields are already apparent. Is it merely coincidence that great earth changes have been prophesied by several of the Native American nations for decades, and in the case of the Maya, for centuries? One theme in particular, is common to both: that catastrophe is now inevitable but that there is still some time to ameliorate it. The prophecies are more precise than the scientists about how much time.

Blair asked the International Working Group under Stephen Byers and US Senator Olivia Stone “How long have we got before climate change becomes runaway?” They reported last February. It is interesting to compare what these two traditions say: the western scientific community of model-makers, geologists and environmentalists, and the chieftains and medicine men whose shamanistic inheritance is “the oldest spiritual path on planet earth”

You can’t go round believing in all the prophecies you hear – even if you can figure out what they mean! For example, more than one psychic has foreseen a disastrous earthquake along the San Andreas fault in California, but many of the predicted dates have already passed. The latest earthquake in this area was comparatively mild.

In Mayan prophecies, the great cycle of the Fourth World comes to an end in 2012. (They believe that the third world was ended by a great flood.) Now is not the time to be aggravating the coming earth changes with human disturbance.

The Mayans, whose ancestors built astronomical temples over four centuries before the Aztecs, measure time in long cycles of 5,200 years. Within the present age there are a number of periods. The “Age of the Nine Hells” began on the year in the Mayan Calendar in which Cortez landed on the shores of the Aztec empire. You can imagine how appropriate the name for this age seemed to the indigenous peoples of Central and South America. This age ended in 1987 (at the time of the Harmonic Convergence). We are now living in the “Time of Warning”, known also as the “Time of Quickening” because everything is speeding up, and this is to be the last Age of the great cycle which ends in 2012.

The Hopi, too, have prophecies, dating from about 1100 AD which suggest that, in a time of terrible war and upheaval, those who stayed with and followed the ways of native peoples would be safe; other versions say the Hopi might need to plant corn in the snow (unknown in Hopi territories), the sun being darkened for days at a time (cf Revelations), and the need to live on stored food for a long time.

The Kogi, hidden in the jungles of the higher Sierra Nevada in Columbia have warned that if we continue to extract oil and water from Mother Earth and to live as we have been doing, the Mother will be injured and become unable to support life. They believe these liquids are the blood of the Mother and should be left in the earth. They show that the water sources high in the Sierra Nevada mountains have dried up. ‘They have sold the clouds from the paramos [the high grassland}’.

It is true that we would need over one and a third earths to sustain our present way of life, and by 2050 we would need two earths. The amount of petroleum used in a year in the 1950’s, the world now uses in 6 weeks.

Climate science tells us that there is a long delay between emissions and climate response. This means that today’s climate reflects the lifestyle of the fifties and sixties; we don’t feel the effects our current consumption patterns are having. The people alive in 30-40 years’ time will feel that. The latest climate models also tell us that today’s warming is setting off secondary warming effects (positive feedbacks). For example, the melting ice reveals dark earth which absorbs more heat; vegetation, which absorbs much of human CO2 emissions, tends to wither in hot weather, and forests often catch fire, releasing the CO2 which they have absorbed. Ocean algae, which also pump down carbon dioxide, cannot survive in warmer water. The carbon dioxide level in the atmosphere seems now to be increasing faster than ever before. And things could get worse. Denuded rainforest peatlands and unfrozen bogs in Siberia also contain millions of tonnes of greenhouse gases. Climate modellers’ extreme scenario, a “runaway”greenhouse effect, is today on the cards.

What would be the results of a runaway global warming, or as it is now referred to, an abrupt climate change?

At the end of the Permian Age, a runaway global warming did occur. An initial temperature rise, probably of about 6°C, from volcanoes emitting sulphurous gases, led to a chain reaction in which warming ocean beds released methane, and the rotting bodies of living things fuelled the increase in carbon dioxide, raising global temperatures further. Eventually 95% of then existing species died out, and there are layers of black mudstone without fossils. Life on earth took 50 million years to recover

The Met Office’s Hadley Centre near Exeter hosted an international conference last February on “Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change”. The scientists hedged. What was meant by “dangerous”? they asked. But they convinced the environment correspondent of the Independent, Michael McCarthy, that any ensuing political action would be insufficient to prevent the “runaway scenarios”. Blair’s international working group’s view was that, to stay clear of the threshold to unstoppable warming, global temperatures should not exceed an increase of 2°C. (The earth has warmed 0.8°C since pre-industrial times so far). That two degree rise would become inevitable when carbon dioxide in the atmosphere reached 400 ppm (parts per million). It is around 379 now. At the current rate of increase that gives us less than 10 years. Other scientists seem to think there may be 15 years or more. McCarthy, having calculated the effect of methane, nitrous oxide and other greenhouse gases, thinks that we have already passed the point of no return.

Is it fanciful to think that if the Mayans are right at all, they may be telling us that, up to 2012 there is a chance for human kind to change our fate, but if we have not moved enough to protect life on earth by then, we will have no chance afterwards?

In their epic quest after the Mystery of the Crystal Skulls, Ceri Louise Thomas and Chris Morton quote Don Alejandro, a Mayan elder:
“The Time of the Thirteen Heavens will begin after sunset on the 21st December in the year 2012. The next day after that is written in our long count calendar as 13.0.0.0.0. This number in our sacred calendar represents a new form of understanding, a new form of government, a new way of understanding each other so that we will no longer see each other with indifference and mistreat each other on this earth…It is a time for all the governments and all the peoples to build peace……………
“We must appreciate our Mother Earth our brothers and sisters the animals, our elders the trees, and not pollute our rivers, our lakes and our oceans, so that this planet Earth may be populated again and we may once again be able to breathe”

(Populated again? So Don Alejandro is foreseeing great catastrophe even in the best outcome. Does he know that the Permian event was so devastating because the rotting of dead plants and animals deprived the air of oxygen?)

“We need the help of all peoples, all cultures, all religions and all nations. We must stop killing our brothers and sisters on this planet before it is too late. If we continue as we are going, the current cycle of time will simply end. Dusk will come in 2012 and a new day will not dawn. Because if Mother Earth dies, it will mean death for us all.”

Whatever our view about prophecy, it is that sort of time in the earth, I think, when we must all respond in some manner. We can deny the emergency and ignore the changes in the natural world, or we can recognize it and take some personal responsibility for our impact on the planet and other life forms. If we do this it will change us and the kind of life we want to live. We can live in gratitude for all the loveliness and wealth which still surrounds us and which we can treasure for future generations. For just as we think of (and sometimes argue with) those who have lived before us, we need to be aware of and in dialogue with those of the future, who may or may not have the opportunity to live.