CHARLENEM National Correspondent
The United States will experience more intense heat waves, changes in yearly temperatures, coastal flooding, and rising sea levels as Earth’s climate is now changing faster than at any point in the history of modern civilization, cautions a recent federally mandated study on climate change.
These environmental changes are primarily the results of human activities, according to authors of the Fourth National Climate Assessment Volume II, “Impacts, Risks, and Adaptation in the United States (NCA4).”
The impacts of climate change are already being felt across the country and climate-related threats to Americans’ physical, social, and economic well-being are rising, reports the 1,600-page document released by the United States Global Change Research Program.
›Authors say the severity of future impacts will depend largely on actions taken to reduce greenhouse gases–gases that trap heat in the atmosphere near the Earth’s surface.
The study further found that human health and safety, quality of life, and the rate of economic growth in communities across the U.S. are increasingly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change.
Efforts to respond to climate change have expanded in the last five years but have been insufficient to avoid substantial damages to the economy, environment, and human health over the coming decades, according to the study. It found that rising temperatures, extreme heat, drought, wildfire on rangelands and heavy downpours are expected to increasingly challenge the quality and quantity of U.S. crops, livestock health, price stability and rural livelihoods.
“The Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan told us to watch the weather and the Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad taught us that Allah would be curtailing America on her borders,” said Dr. Ridgeley Abdul Mu’min Muhammad, director of Muhammad Farms located in South Georgia.
The temperature fluctuates between high 80s to the 30s and 40s, and for the last three years, there’s been no Fall or Spring, he said. “We’ve had Summer to Winter, Winter to Summer…and what’s happening is the plants don’t know what to do,” Dr. Ridgeley Muhammad stated. That forced replanting some crops three times, only for a frost to come and kill everything, he continued.
“There’s a lot of destruction going on in terms of the environment and effects to the farmers in terms of production. The famine could be at any moment, and the weather conditions are extreme. This is not normal,” he stated.
Warnings based on science and scripture
Scientists and environmental activists warn climate change threatens the health and well-being of the American people by causing increasing extreme weather, changes to air quality, the spread of new diseases by insects and pests, and changes to the availability of food and water.
Increasing heavy rains are leading to more soil erosion and nutrient loss on midwestern cropland and threatening safe and reliable water supplies and clean air.
The impact will be felt greater by people who are already vulnerable, including lower-income and other marginalized communities, who have lower capacity to prepare for and cope with extreme weather and climate-related events, study authors noted.
Low-lying Norfolk, Virginia, houses the world’s largest naval base, supports multiple aircraft carrier groups, and is the duty station for thousands of employees, according to the study. Most of the area around the base lies less than 10 feet above sea level, and local relative sea level is projected to rise between about 2.5 and 11.5 feet by the year 2100, which could mean weakened infrastructure and vanishing land.
Weather and climate-related impacts on over 3,500 primary U.S. military installations and associated sites worldwide have included flooding from storm surge and non-storm surge events, extreme temperatures, drought, wildfire, and wind.
For 40 years the Hon. Elijah Muhammad warned, and for 42 years absent his teacher, so has the Min. Farrakhan that the severe weather in the form of rain, hail, snow, and earthquakes are rooted in scriptures and inextricably linked to the injustice, oppression and murder of Blacks and Indigenous people as part of God’s Judgement against America.
“These disasters are going to get worse, until the modern pharaoh says, ‘Alright, Jehovah. Come and get your people’,” said Min. Farrakhan during his November 18 address from Mosque Maryam. “But you are so hateful of the future that Black people have if they separate from you,” said Minister Farrakhan. To Black people he instructed, “Don’t worry about ‘where are we going to go.’ You should tell them to worry, where are they going to go.”
He pointed out through scripture that God took a covenant from the people of the Book who received prophets, that when that one written of in the Torah, the Gospel, the Qur’an, comes, each should aid that man.
“This is your way to get out from under what you are justifiably due for the evil that you have done to us for all these years,” Min. Farrakhan warned.
“The birth pains are in view now. So, each of you watch. The natural disasters that are going to increase, and God is going to bring heavier chastisement on us to force you to agree with His judgment of America,” he continued.
President Donald Trump said he believes some of the climate assessment, but not that the economic impact could be devastating.
The assessment addresses the United States, but not other countries, such as China, Japan, and Asia, Mr. Trump told reporters on Nov. 26. “Right now, we’re at the cleanest we’ve ever been. And that’s very important to me. But, if we’re clean, but every other place on earth is dirty, that’s not so good. So, I want clean air. I want clean water, very important,” said Mr. Trump.
According to the study released by his administration on Nov. 23 and which draws from more than 300 experts from federal, state, and local governments, as well as industry, academia, tribal organizations, and non-government organizations, the impacts of climate change beyond America’s borders are expected to increasingly affect the nation’s trade and economy, including import and export prices and U.S. businesses with overseas operation and supply chains. The potential for losses in some sectors could reach hundreds of billions of dollars per year by the end of this century, notes the study.
It notes how wildfires are increasingly encroaching on American communities, posing threats to lives, critical infrastructure, and property. In October 2017, more than a dozen fires burned through northern California, killing dozens of people and leaving thousands more homeless. The assessment continued, communities distant from the fires were affected by poor air quality as smoke plumes darkened skies and caused the cancellation of school and other activities across the region.
In November of this year, the Camp Fire in California, which consumed the entire community of Paradise in Butte County and burned over 153,000 acres, may cost over $7 billion in damages, according to preliminary estimates.
In wealthy wine country, fires in Napa, Sonoma, and Lake counties caused an estimated $1.2 billion in damages and destroyed over 5,000 structures, including five percent of the housing stock in the city of Santa Rosa.
In the last two decades, according to the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, climate-related and geophysical disasters killed 1.3 million people, left 4.4 billion injured, homeless, displaced or in need of emergency assistance around the world. While the majority of fatalities were due to earthquakes and tsunamis, 91 percent of all disasters were caused by floods, storms, droughts, heatwaves and other extreme weather events. Climate-related disasters cost $2.2 billion or 77 percent of the total $2.9 billion in direct economic losses between 1998-2017. In absolute monetary terms, the U.S. recorded the biggest losses over the last 20 years of $945 billion.
Geographically, changes across the country since the 3rd National Climate Assessment in 2014 have included record-breaking fires along with drought in the Southwest and Hurricane Harvey’s 2017 landfall in the Southern Great Plains, which proved one of the costliest natural disasters in U.S. history. In the Southeast, flooding in Louisiana is increasing from extreme rainfall, and water, energy, and transportation infrastructure are affected by snow storms, drought, heat waves, and flooding in the Northeast.
In the Midwest, increasing heavy rains are leading to more soil erosion and nutrient loss on cropland. In the Northern Great Plains, flash droughts and extreme heat show the challenges to sustain ranching operations and effects on rural prosperity and mental health. And in the U.S. territories in the Caribbean, damages from the 2017 hurricanes have been compounded by the slow recovery of energy, communications, and transportation systems.
“It doesn’t surprise me, because those are things that we’ve been seeing. Those are impacts that in our communities, for example, we’ve been seeing changes and shifts in our patterns and cycles– when the berries are supposed to be blooming, how many vegetables there should be, when certain trees are supposed to be blooming, medicinal plants, where they’re supposed to be – and now, it’s all changing and it’s been for a number of years,” stated Kandi White, Native Energy & Climate Campaign Director for the Indigenous Environmental Network.
The North Dakota native told The Final Call she doesn’t want people to fall into apathy after they read the assessment or finally sit up and take notice, because it’s not too late to do something about it.
“It’s one of those situations where even when people were talking about this whole debate that was created around climate change and mocking global warming, I would always say, it’s not just global warming! It’s climate change. It could be a severe drought in one location and it could be flooding in another location or vice versa but too much of what you don’t need when you don’t need it,” Ms. White argued.
A time like no other
However, these continued disasters striking America and the divine reason behind it are right from the pages of scripture Min. Farrakhan continues to warn. The reason has been and is the Caucasian White man’s mistreatment of the poor, Black, once-slaves in Americas midst, the country’s refusal to let them go and the refusal by Black people to let America go. God has chosen Blacks, a peculiar, rejected, lost people and has made his appearance in the world to choose them as his own, teaches the Hon. Elijah Muhammad.
The winner of the test of wills between the United States government and the will of almighty God has already been declared, written by the prophets, said Min. Farrakhan in his lecture entitled, “Submission: The Will of God.”
Dr. Abdul Haleem Muhammad, Southwest Regional Representative of Min. Farrakhan is based in Houston and is an urban planner. “Amongst men there are two arguments: one is that climate change is caused by man, the activity of man and mankind. And others are saying that this is maybe a natural occurrence,” he stated.
Scientists, activists and environmental advocates continue wrangling over what to do about climate change in terms of regulation, government intervention, or a free market solution.
“But for the Muslims, it comes from our righteousness and our willing to submit to the will of Allah, because we believe that rain, hail, snow and earthquakes are caused by the Son of Man,” said. Student Min. Haleem Muhammad.
“America and the world it represents of White supremacy is under divine judgment of God and until mankind submits to the will of Allah, the weather will only get worse in its intensity and frequency,” he added.
“As the Bible teaches us that ‘a time would come that had never come before,’ and that those who understood ‘their hearts would be failing them with fear and their eyes would go away in their holes’ for looking at the things that they saw coming on their people–the trouble! The destruction! And the plagues,” wrote the Hon. Elijah Muhammad in his groundbreaking 1973 book, “The Fall of America.”
He continued, “Look at the earthquakes that are taking place. Those earthquakes are on their way here. We are feeling the earth shaking under our feet across the country! As the Holy Qur’an prophesies to us, ‘you will hear it coming from distant places with vehement raging and roaring!”
“America is beset all around now with troubles and destructions which have happened. America thought that she was immune to the troubles and destructions which are going on in other nations.”
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