Earthquakes, tornadoes, hurricanes, tsumanis. Wildfires, pipeline explosions. It seems like there are more of all of these going on, and I'm sure people are thinking, and asking one another, What's going on? Many people may see divine action here. For tens and hundreds of thousands of years, mankind has seen supernatural beings as being behind the actions of the forces of Nature.
In the last couple of years there have been earthquakes in Haiti, Japan, New Zealand, Peru; and in the US in California, Colorado, and Virginia—and one here in the Midwest, I believe (I forget where it was centered).
There are always earthquakes because the Earth is a geophysically active planet, with tectonic plates continually moving and shifting, colliding with and sinking beneath one another. I don't know whether statistics would show that they have been more frequent lately. If so, there is surely an explanation. Someone said that the Earth's poles recently shifted—which is not an unheard of occurrence, by any means—and that that is behind the recent earthquake activity.
Climate change, and specifically the warming of the planet, means that there is more energy—that is, heat—in the atmosphere, and that very simply means that, when there are storms, there is more energy available to those storms and they are going to be more violent.
So, I don't think that we are seeing signs of "the last days" or Armageddon, as some people may think.
Update, September 3, 2011
Here is an interesting article on the recent prevalence of natural disasters, with comments from meteorologists:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/03/disasters-in-us-an-extrem_n_947750.html?icid=maing-grid7|maing5|dl3|sec3_lnk1|92672
Copyright © 2011 by Richard Stein
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