The sun has been hot of late. All over the planet new heat records are being set, from Scotland to Ireland, from the Middle East to Canada and down to Southern California. Places all over the world have been experiencing their hottest ever recorded weather this month, and it looks like it may continue for some time to come.
At least 54 people, to the point of writing, have died in Montreal, southern Quebec, which has seen record temperatures. In Northern Siberia temperatures are a huge 40 degrees higher than they are normally at this time of year. Africa has just recorded the hottest temperature ever recorded on planet Earth. In Ouargla, Algeria, an incredible 51.3 Celsius (124.3 degrees Fahrenheit) has been recorded, beating the previous record set fifty years ago in Morocco.
Heat records have fallen all across the globe. In North America alone:
- The University of Los Angeles published its hottest ever recorded temperature of 111 degrees on July 6th.
- Mount Washington, N.H., tied its all-time warmest low temperature of 60 degrees on July 2.
- Denver recorded an all-time high temperature of 105 degrees on June 28
- Montreal recorded an all-time high temperature of 97.9 degrees on July 2. This broke a temperature record that had stood for 147 years.
- Ottawa posted its most extreme heat and humidity combination on July 1.
- Burlington, Vt., set an all-time warmest low temperature of 80 degrees on July 2.
In Europe:
- Shannon, Ireland recorded its all-time high of 85.1 degrees on June 28.
- Belfast achieved a record high of 85.1 degrees on June 28.
- Castelderg hit its all-time record high of 86.2 degrees one day later, June 29.
- In Scotland, Glasgow achieved a record high of 89.4 degrees on June 28.
- Motherwell, another prominent Scottish city, recorded 91.8 degrees at the same time.
In the Middle East:
- Quriyat, Oman recorded the world’s hottest low temperature ever recorded on June 28 of an incredible 109 degrees.
In Eurasia:
- Yerevan, Armenia set a record temperature of 107.9 degrees on July 2.
- Tbilisi, Georgia set a record 104.9-degree temperature on July 4.
- Many other locations all over southern Russia have also tied record-high temperatures in the past month period.
This is a trend that has continued for quite some time. Dallas has never before in history hit 90 degrees or more in November. It did so a number of times in 2017. Pakistan, last April, recorded what was up to that point one of the hottest temperatures ever recorded on Earth, of 122.4 degrees. This record was beaten in just the last few weeks. Within the last year, San Francisco, Shanghai, Spain, Death Valley, Iran and Pakistan have all recorded their highest ever recorded temperatures.
In April this year, Earth recorded its 400th warmer than normal month in a row. The last time a whole month on earth was cooler than normal was February 1985.
Something clearly is happening, yet nobody seems to quite know why the world is experiencing these ever-increasing record setting high temperatures, and these temperature rises are making scientists look anew at one of our oldest companions, our own sun. What they are finding there is confusing.
Our sun is more active now than at any other time in the previous 1,500 years of human history. Scientists based at the Institute for Astronomy in Zurich have used ancient ice cores to map the activity of the sun over the past millennia, and what they have found is surprising. They have concluded that over the last century alone, the increase in sunspots from the sun has directly correlated with parallel rises in the earth’s global temperatures. In other words, when the frequency of sun spots increases, the temperature on Earth seems to also rise correspondingly.
The Sun has been actively monitored for sunspots, and data collected, since the development of the first reliable telescopes, in around 1610. Since then some remarkable conclusions have been drawn.
It was noted, for example, that between 1645 and 1715 there were very few recorded sunspots on the Sun’s surface. This corresponds to a period in earth’s history known as the “little Ice Age,” a period of prolonged and very cold global temperatures. Solar scientists strongly suspect there to be a link between the two events.
Using ice core samples, it has also been possible to identify other such specific times when the earth’s temperature experienced sustained and substantial periods of cooling, also, at just the same time when sunspot activity on the sun’s surface was minimal.
Dr. Sami Solanki, solar scientist, notes that this trend for cooling events seems to have come to an end. The sun has been substantially more active in the last seventy years, more active than at any time in the last 1,500. It is almost as if seventy years ago, the sun suddenly awoke and came to life. The sun changed from being largely dormant, with brief periods of sunspot activity followed by long periods of inactivity, to the much more active phase we see today. (1)
“Studying” the sun is becoming an oxymoron for the scientists involved: the more they learn, the more they do not understand. As an example, take something as basic as its composition. What is our sun made of? Solar scientists cannot tell you anymore, because at this point they really do not know.
Like any star, scientists do know that the sun consists mainly of hydrogen atoms fusing two-by-two to make helium, unleashing immense energy in the process. However, it is in the sun’s composition with regards to the smaller concentrations of heavier, metallic elements where scientists draw a blank.
It is in understanding the composition of a star’s heavier, metallic elements that solar scientists can then make judgments about the age, power and ultimately how a star is going to die.
“The more metallic a star, the opaquer it is (since metals absorb radiation), and how opaque it is relates to its size, temperature, brightness, life span and other key properties.” (2)
Solar scientists use our own sun’s metallicity as the yardstick for measuring the metallicity of all other stars. If these measurements are wrong, then science’s fundamental understanding of how stars work, at the most basic levels, are also likely wrong.
Astronomers have traditionally believed they had a good understanding of our sun, gauging its metallicity at 1.8 percent metal – a happy convergence that led them to believe they understood not only the length of their solar yardstick but also how our own sun works.
That belief has now been challenged, and shaken. Increasingly precise spectroscopic measurements over the last twenty years have progressively revealed a far lower metallicity than believed possible, of just 1.3 percent.
However, this has been contradicted using helioseismology, through which one can also infer metallicity in the sun using sound waves of different frequencies which penetrate into the sun’s interior. This process, confusingly, reveals a metallicity of 1.8 percent.
This should not be the case. Both measurements should correlate together, yet they don’t. One measurement is 1.3 percent and one is 1.8 percent, a huge difference when dealing with something as massive as the sun. This is a problem not only for solar science, but for physics and astronomy in general. It means that the standard solar model currently employed by all scientists could effectively be wrong, meaning that our understanding of the nature of the universe itself could also be wrong.
As Dr. Martin Asplund, an astrophysicist at the Australian National University explains, “Either astronomers do not understand how to measure elemental abundances of stars using spectroscopy, or our understanding of stars’ interiors…is incomplete.”
Sunny Vagnozzi, a physicist at the University of Stockholm in Sweden, goes even further, “If we get the sun wrong, we get everything wrong.”
The confusion doesn’t stop here though because something even more bizarre is happening inside our sun. Incredibly, a huge hunk of the solar core seems to be missing. Right in the very center of the sun, an enormous mass the size of 1,500 earths has simply disappeared. (3)
This is the equivalent to 9×10 to the power of 24 tonnes of matter, simply gone from the core of the sun. And nobody has the slightest clue where or how this has happened.
Aldo Serenelli, of the Institute of Space Sciences in Barcelona, believes he has a solution to this problem. He believes that the matter missing from the core of the sun has been replaced by dark matter, which is theorized to make up about 27% of the universe. Serenelli believes that several billion mega tonnes of dark matter have accumulated at the center of our sun and is being kept there by the huge forces of gravity exerted by our sun.
This conclusion, however, questions traditional beliefs about the fundamental properties that make up our sun. The reality is that scientists simply do not know why there is a huge, gaping hole at the very core of our sun. Neither do they really understand how the sun works; and these discoveries are bringing many within the astronomical community to one awkward conclusion: that they cannot reliably predict the actions of the sun, because they do not understand its workings even remotely well enough. And perhaps nor do they really understand the universe with the certainty they once believed they did.
These events in the sun are the birth pangs. These are part of the beginning of the “signs in the sun” (Luke 21:25) spoken of by Jesus himself, signs that have largely been overlooked up to this point. The signs we are seeing in the sun today are the same types of manifestations of birth pangs that we are witnessing in all other areas, all of them increasing in intensity and frequency. There are signs in geopolitics, in the geophysical world, in worldwide socioeconomic events, and now, clearly in the astrophysical world.
It can be no coincidence that the beginning of this solar unpredictability occurred at the very same time as all the other birth pangs did, with the rebirth of Israel 70 years ago, in 1948. (4)
“Now learn the parable from the fig tree: when its branch has already become tender and puts forth its leaves, you know that summer is near. Even so, you too, when you see these things happening, recognize that He is near, right at the door. Truly I say to you; this generation will not pass away until all these things take place” (Mark 13:28-30).
It has always been my understanding from the Old Testament prophet David, that a biblical generation is “three score years and ten.”
“The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away” (Psalm 90:10).
“Threescore years and ten” is seventy years. Today, in 2018, it has been exactly seventy years since the rebirth of the nation of Israel, since the fig tree came into bloom. Consequently, when we look at the activity of the sun over these same seventy years, we see a demonstration of Bible prophecy playing out before us, not on earth, but at the heart of our own solar system. The cosmos itself is testifying to the lateness of the hour.
The Bible speaks about a time yet to come, when temperatures on this earth will rise to the extent that people will be scorched and burned up by it. The Bible also identifies the cause of this torment; it will be because of the sun.
“The fourth angel poured his bowl on the sun. Then the sun was given the power to burn people with fire. People were burned because the sun was so hot. And they spoke wrongly about the name of God, cursing him because he had the power to send these troubles. But they would not stop the wrong things they were doing. They would not respect and honour God” (Revelation 16:8-9).
As the signs in the sun now testify to the lateness of the hour, how will you respond? Will you repent, or will you harden your hearts?
“Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as you did in the rebellion” (Hebrews 3:15).
The time left to us is increasingly short, so believe in the Lord Jesus, and live.
“Sirs, what must I do to be saved? They replied, “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved—you and your household” (Acts 16:31).
- http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3869753.stm
- www.quantamagazine.org
- New Scientist, 21st October 2017, Page 28
- http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3869753.stm