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04/25/93
Apocalypse Now? Not to worry ... just yet
By Jeffrey Weiss / The Dallas Morning News
David Koresh was wrong: He was not the Messiah.
The world did not end when he did. And he became one in the long
legion of doomsayers notable for calling the wrong doom.
But even a pack of false prophets doesn't mean that every lamentation is loony. Cassandra's insight was true when she warned the Trojans about the soldier-filled Greek horse. And Jeremiah was on target with his predictions of calamity in Jerusalem.
Our age has would-be seers in abundance. If anything is different than earlier days, it has to be their access to the public.
Jeremiah, persecuted for his street-corner predictions some 2,600 years ago, might have been just as badly treated today. But he'd go on Nightline to complain and the whole world would know about it.
The ever-thickening info-net that serves and binds us means that we can tie into myriad dire threats. Secular and religious, they foretell the End of the World. Or maybe just the end of the world as we know it.
Mr. Koresh's failure as a ghastly prophet wannabe doesn't mean the world isn't in bad shape. Remember that even paranoids have enemies.
Or, as author and journalist James Cabell once said; "The optimist proclaims we live in the best of all possible worlds. The pessimist fears this is true.'
The Branch Davidians are among many people delving the Bible for literal clues about the future. Teachers at the Dallas Theological Seminary have been making the same effort for decades.
Charles Dyer, a professor at the seminary, recently had a book published on the topic: "World News and Bible Prophesy.'
Like Mr. Koresh, Mr. Dyer has examined the book of Revelations.
"It's the only book in the Bible that gives a blessing for reading
it but a curse for misinterpreting it,' he said.
The way he sees it, Mr. Koresh had a kink in his timeline. Mr.
Koresh was searching for evidence of the Tribulations; the predicted natural disasters and moral and political upheavals of the final years before the reign of the Messiah.
But a careful reading of the Bible, Mr. Dyer said, shows that the Tribulations follow the Rapture-the moment when the faithful are swept into the air to be united with the returned Jesus.
That hasn't happened, obviously. And that means the Tribulations can't have started yet, Mr. Dyer said.
John Walvoord, former president of the seminary, is the grand old man of this kind of Biblical exploration. He's the author, among other books, of an 800-page tome that examines every biblical prophesy he could find. He concurs with his younger colleague in his assessment of Mr. Koresh's theology.
"In the case of Koresh, I think he was off his rocker,' he said.
That doesn't mean Mr. Walvoord can't see patterns in the world
today that offer clues that the Final Days might be coming. Just as sprinters ease into the starting blocks before a race, God may be getting the world ready.
"The whole world is being lined up exactly as you'd expect if the Rapture is going to take place,' Mr. Walvoord said.
One need not be religious to find reasons to worry.
For instance, the frogs are disappearing.
That sounds like proof that Kermit is right when he sings, "It's
Not Easy Being Green.'
But this is no joke. For about 10 years, many scientists who study amphibians have found that places formerly hopping with frogs and toads suddenly aren't.
"We know in some parts of the world that the frogs are not just declining. They're gone,' said Dr. John Wright, curator of herpetology at the Los Angeles Museum of Natural History and a member of the Declining Amphibian Populations Task Force.
Mostly in the mountains, all over the Americas, populations that have been around as long as anyone knows are nowhere to be found. In North America alone, one-third of 86 species of toads and frogs appear to be in trouble.
"Many of them are in highly protected areas like national parks,' Dr. Wright said. "These frogs may actually be an early warning system that is saying something about the quality of our environment.'
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Much of the private money paying for the task force's work was raised in Dallas with the help of Jim Murphy, curator of herpetology at the Dallas Zoo and another member of the task force.
Nobody knows exactly what's killing the frogs. The most popu-lar theory is that an increase in ultraviolet radiation may be part of the cause. Frogs spend lots of time basking in the sun, like sunbathers at a beach. That, and the structure of their skin, may make them particularly vulnerable to UV radiation.
"There's even some suggestion that people might be, too,' Dr.
Wright said. "UV has the same effect on frogs as it does on people. It lowers the immune system.'
But UV radiation has been pumped out of the sun for the hundreds of millions of years that frogs have been around. That makes it even more mysterious that so many are, well, croaking, today.
"Unless I've missed it, I've heard of no smoking gun, yet,' Mr.
Murphy said.
It's just possible, however, that today's decline in frogs is linked to millions of cans of hair spray that were spritzed into Dallas hair during the 1960s. The link is ozone.
Ozone is a particular kind of oxygen molecule normally found in the upper reaches of the Earth's atmosphere. This molecule keeps UV radiation from getting to the ground. During the past decade or so, scientists have noticed that the ozone shield is being breached, particularly around the South Pole.
The blame goes to chlorofluorocarbons, gases used chiefly as refrigerants, solvents, foam-blowing gas, and once as spray-can propellants. These gases apparently drifted skyward over the years. And these chemicals destroy ozone.
No ozone-lots of UV. Lots of UV-lots of cancer. And lots of dead plants. And just maybe, lots of dead frogs. Or so goes the theory.
In 1987, the industrialized nations of the world signed the Montreal Protocol, which called for the halving of chlorofluorocarbons production by the end of the 1990s.
And that, many hoped, would be the end of the threat. But just last week, researchers for NASA released a discomfiting report that world ozone levels were lower last year than had ever been seen before.
This wasn't just a South Pole problem, either. The ozone over much of the Northern Hemisphere was thinner than anyone had predicted- even taking known chemical destruction into account.
The 1991 eruption of Mt. Pinatubo in the Philippines may have caused the statistical blip, pumping natural ozone-eating chemicals into the air. But maybe not.
"We're not exactly sure what causes these effects,' said Richard Stolarski, a scientist at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Goddard Space Flight Center.
If the problem is caused by Mt. Pinotubo, the effects should settle out in one or two years, he said.
Scientists are considering ways to keep us all better informed about how dangerous UV is getting.
"One of the things we are trying to look at this year is putting out a UV index,' said Jim Miller, a meteorologist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
In the meantime, don't panic, suggested Dr. James Gleason, a scientist from the Universities Space Research Association working at Goddard.
"I'm going to the beach this summer, but I will put lots of sunblock on my children,' he said.
Radiation isn't the only threat from the sky. Worry about the risk of being killed by really big meteors.
Risk is computed using a formula that includes the number of people affected by an event and how often the event happens. And that puts the chance of getting killed in a plane crash at about the same level, of being killed by a big rock from beyond, said Donald Yeomans, a researcher at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.
But that just shows how statistics can dance. Plane crash victims die a few at a time, a few times a year. A major meteor strike hits the Earth about once every 500,000 years and would wipe out at least a third of the world's population. Not to mention frogs.
"The risk comes from the fact that if the Earth gets hit by an asteroid or comet larger than about a mile, the dust thrown up would block the sunlight,' Mr. Yeomans said.
Many scientists blame such an event for the death of the dinosaurs.
So how worried should we be?
"Like anything else, you need to have a little insurance,' Mr.
Yeomans said. "You don't want to ignore it completely.'
He doesn't. "It's my job to monitor the near-Earth population' of big rocks, he said.
"Near' to Mr. Yeomans means about 30 million miles.
"If it gets into that distance, it can evolve into an
Earth-crossing orbit in time,' he said. "Lots of time.'
We know of about 300 near-Earth objects big enough to worry about.
Scientists figure that's about 10 percent of the total out there.
"It's not a type of risk where you need an Earth-orbiting shield,' Mr. Yeomans said. "It's worth thinking about and its worth a modest amount of money. But it's not worth losing sleep over.
Fear of rocks from space may be a welcome distraction from worrying about a plummeting economy.
Not for Ravi Batra. The economics professor at Southern Methodist University has made his predictions of fiscal doom into a cottage industry. He is best known for two books: The Great Depression of 1990 and Surviving the Great Depression of 1990.
He acknowledges that the world's economies didn't quite vanish into the abyss.
"I am off about the severity of the problem but not the timing of the problem,' he said.
Big countries have kept the recession-that did start in 1990 -- from becoming a depression, he said.
"All we are doing is postponing it through government borrowing,' he said.
But that's old news. Dr. Batra has a book out this month with a new warning: The Myth of Free Trade. A Plan for America's Economic Revival.
Dr. Batra figures that the United States killed most barriers to free trade about 1973.
"What I found was most shocking,' he said. "Inflation-adjusted wages have been dropping for 80 percent of the work force. This has been happening even though productivity has gone up every year.'
In the old pre-tariff days, international competitors were kept out. Internal competition fueled the fires of progress and kept wages rising, Dr. Batra said.
His solution: "competitive protectionism.'
That means bringing back tariffs. It also means breaking up big
domestic companies, in the way that AT&T was divested into a flock of Baby Bells.
"Replace foreign competition with domestic competition,' he said.
Without that kind of massive restructuring, Dr. Batra stands by his
decade-old prediction of economic Armageddon.
"President Clinton has one more year at the most,' he said.
Other seers found immortality with far less specificity.
Nostradamus, who lived about 400 years ago, left a series of still-famous predictions that are murky as psychologist's rorschach ink blot. One purports to offer a clue for our near future:
"The year 1999, seven months, from the sky will come a great King of Terror: To bring back to life the great King of the Mongols, before and after Mars to reign by good luck.'
Good luck, indeed.
Ready or not, here we come.
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