From the archives (2001):
AS GOD SEEKS TO WAKE US UP, EXPERTS FORESEE HUGE VOLUMES OF PRECIPITATION
By Michael H. Brown
@www.spiritdaily.com
As we continue to head into the steeper curve of God's wake-up call, expect loads of precipitation. Record warm temperatures since 1989 are causing huge amounts of moisture in the air. You'll see the results in extreme situations, as recently occurred in Buffalo, and you'll see great fluctuations in temperature.
While winter may start milder than normal -- and may in fact be somewhat warmer overall -- when it gets cold it will be cold, and when it does snow, there will be lots of it. This is a classic characteristic of the Lord attempting to nudge us. One failing of modern prophecy is that it has neglected the subtle ways that God warns His people.
We are in a time of extremes. Initially, Buffalo was in the news because it wasn't getting any snow; 2001 was the first time in recorded history that this city had gone through Thanksgiving without so much as a flake. When the snow did come, however, it was tremendous: since Christmas Eve parts of the Buffalo area (certain towns under a small band of lake-effect snow) have gotten six feet. The snowfall Christmas Eve was the third most recorded, just behind a record set in 1998.
The same is true of rain. Our storms are dumping more precipitation, as witnessed by floods around the world and stunning accumulations during hurricanes in Texas, North Carolina, and Central America. In China, it is either drought or incredible downpours: 68 inches fell in 1998 in Qinzhou in eight weeks and despite the effort of sandbaggers, five million homes near rivers were destroyed with another 12 million damaged. Million. And it's no coincidence: China is currently a focus of evil in the world and even forces women to abort their young if they've exceeded a birth limit.
God is sending warnings, and He is sending angels. We have been carrying photographs of angelic-like formations in the northern lights. There is meaning in this. If we look in the Bible we see the many times that God has sent angels to help us when we stray and to smote us when He can't otherwise get our attention.
They are signs of the times, and we note that President George Bush -- in his very inaugural address -- mentioned the angel that comes with the whirlwind (in our translation, from Nahum, it says that the Lord comes "in hurricane and tempest').
The northern lights are related to solar activity, and the sun, which controls the weather (including cloud cover), has been acting in unusual ways.
That has caused swerves in climate. Temperatures are rising (both October and November set all-time records for warmth) and so is the intensity of storms. Dr. Stephen Schneider, a climatologist at Stanford University, told us that there has already been a ten percent increase in rainfall, and half of that increase has occurred in the top ten percent of intense events.
"If there's more moisture in the atmosphere, which means an increase in humidity, that means there's more moisture for all the weather systems to feed upon, whether they're thunderstorms, cyclones, or snowstorms or hurricanes, for that matter," adds another scientist, Dr. Kevin Trenberth, formerly of the National Weather Service's climate prediction center.
There are going to be more intense storms. There is going to be an event or series of events in the next couple years in which a surprising burst of precipitation, a deadly burst, will fall upon the United States, with the same occurring in other parts of the world. You will read of floods. You will read of ones that break records. At least one will be spectacular.
Only with prayer can we protect our areas. Already in the Philippines there have been supertyphoons and in Hong Kong "black rain" alerts and in Africa floods such that the residents sought refuge on tiny patches of dry land and were then attacked by snakes and hyenas. In the Congo, lightning killed all 11 members of a soccer team. Here in the U.S., the Mississippi flood of a few years back inundated an area three times the size of Israel!
In Canada, it was an ice storm that immobilized a fifth of the nation's work force.
"We've looked in our weather files to see something like this, but nothing exists there," government climatologist David Phillips told us. "Maybe in the X-Files, but not in the weather files."
see also: Buffalo gets six feet