The Plague’s the Thing….

Yes, I do feed the birds in winter, and yes, they know I do and line up for it like Marines looking for chow. And while those sparrows don’t do a whole lot of migrating to warmer climes when the snow flies, there are plenty of birds that do take that trip in flocks so vast that they can block out the sun.

That’s also true of bugs. Swarms of locusts are being picked up on radar, so vast that they appear to be approaching rainstorms. It isn’t the first time this has happened, but it does appear to be on the increase.  The desert locust upsurge, as it is being labeled, is attracting the kind of attention that worried Pharaoh (a/k/a Ramses III) when Moses was trying to pry the Israelites loose from his employment schemes.

https://onezero.medium.com/locust-swarms-are-getting-so-big-that-we-need-radar-to-track-them-dc79c06496a0

From the article:  In June of 2020, in addition to the devastating COVID-19 pandemic and Black Lives Matter protests, a remote sensing analyst named Raj Bhagat observed an odd signal on India’s weather radar. What appeared to be rain moving southwest, turned out to be a massive locust swarm.

Prior to this weird anomaly, earlier in the year smaller clusters of locusts had begun to ravage crops and people’s livelihood in India. Bhagat works at the World Resources Institute India and stated the new clusters and timeline in the city of Lucknow “were perfectly matching.” –

The idea of using remote sensing technologies like radar to spy on locust swarms is not new. A 1955 letter in the journal Nature reported the first such sighting on British naval radar the previous year. HMS Wild Goose had detected a humongous 48-kilometer-wide swarm of desert locusts flying over the Persian Gulf. (48 kilometers will equal just under 30 miles wide. That’s one big swarm of bugs.)

Bhagat says he thinks his sightings are the first weather radar detections of locusts in India, though his observations haven’t been confirmed yet. Ryan Neely III, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Leeds in the U.K., is building a specialized system to do the same kind of analysis. It is absolutely possible to use weather radar to spot the insects, he says. They are, after all, not that dissimilar from large raindrops. – article

Are there plagues at work here? Anyone got an answer? Anyone? Bueller?

This Time magazine article puts some science into the mix, since the Israelites left Egypt at or near the end of the Bronze Age and the pestilences described in the Old Testament coincide with archaeological evidence from that period.  https://time.com/5561441/passover-10-plagues-real-history/

The thing is, if we’re facing those plagues again, so far, we haven’t had a whole lot of stuff going on other than locusts and disease-carrying mosquitoes, and a few volcanoes going off here and there. So far, no red algae to poison the water, either. No swarms of frogs running amok through grocery stores (they’d be after the bugs anyway), and no wild animals roaming the streets unless you want to count the coyotes and the looters and pillagers plaguing us right now. (Pun intended.)  Pestilence: well, we do have the coronavirus and the flu, both of which can do some damage, but the livestock aren’t affected by either of those. I’d be more concerned about migratory birds being killed off by wind turbine blades. We have had the whole meme about first-born being killed off every time we’ve gone to war lately. Quakes? Yes, we’ve had a few spectacular versions of that lately.

We’re living on a live, active planet with a mind of its own, so in regard to volcanoes, the entire East African rift zone is alive, active and every now and then gives the east coast of that continent a jolt. And Erta Alé is a volcano in the Danakil Depression that is directly connected to the roiling, molten interior of the Earth. That’s what the real problem is. Kilimanjaro is an active volcano on that rift zone; she’s quiet right now, but occasionally she sends up a few releases of visible gases to let us mere mortals know that she can blow her stack any time she wants to. But that isn’t the only volcanic activity going on.  The South Pacific and the Indonesian islands are also tossing their fair share of particulates into the atmosphere.  Anak Krakatau (Child of Krakatoa) has been rebuilding for over a decade and erupts repeatedly. Iceland’s volcanoes are all alive and well, and regularly erupt, but those descendants of the Vikings know how to deal with it.  And after all, according to the Gilgamesh cycle, on Tablet Ten, there is a description of a massive tidal wave’s damage that perfectly matches the damage from the tidal wave that occurred with the Honshu quake on Japan’s northern island. Every now and then, Mt. Rainier rattles, as does Kilimanjaro.  Anyone besides me wonder what would happen with those rioters in Seattle if Mt. Rainier decided  to burp good and hard? If a whole bunch of volcanoes decided to erupt at the same time, the volume of gasses and particulates from ash vented into the upper atmosphere could literally shut off sunlight until the weather cycles precipitate it out.

So maybe all those destructive riots and pillaging episodes are just another symptom of a greater issue, one that needs to be more closely examined.

Category: "Teh Stoopid"