Sunshine in
our lives is a gift from God that we cannot live without. It not only lights our way but, when taken in
by plants, produces energy that sustains our physical body.
It is vital to our
very existence that we receive our regular dosage of sunlight for Vitamin D, which is essential
for healthy bones. In the UK we get most of our vitamin D from sunlight
exposure by going outside, during early April to the end of September.
We
all need to take responsibility for any of the deficiencies in our bodies and
to take top up supplements where needed, especially as we get older. To stay healthy, we need regular exercise and
exposure to limited amounts of sunshine.
As Mankind plays Russian Roulette with our climate,
by burning fossil fuels and slowly destroying the Ozone layer, which helps to
filter out the harmful effects of sunlight, the world order is changed.
Temperatures
are steadily climbing, causing the ice at the poles to melt and the water
levels to rise. People who live at sea
level are losing their homes and whole islands are being lost. Most food production takes place at the lower
levels.
There is a trend
towards using renewables to produce the electricity that people insist that
they need, but the truth is that large amounts of coal are still being burnt.
One such example is
in Germany, where more than a third of the country's electricity is still
produced by burning coal - mostly dirty brown lignite. The Hambacher Forest is threatened with total
destruction and there's not much of it left now.
The forest sits atop one of the largest
coalfields in Europe and, since mining started in 1978, the trees have been
gradually stripped away to allow the excavators access to the riches that lie
beneath - millions of tons of coal, coal that keeps industry running in this
part of Germany.
The coal that is extracted here is brown
coal, also known as lignite, which emits particularly high levels of carbon
dioxide. Not only is there production of
much CO2, but 90% of the forestation has already been lost and the trees are not
replaced to reduce the CO2 through photosynthesis.
This is just one area where sheer greed has
taken away the natural forest and Germany's Niederaussem plant, supplied by the
Hambacher mine, ranks second in Europe for emissions of mercury.
Burning
coal damages health by producing particulates, ground-level ozone and nitrogen
dioxide. Brown coal is worse than
ordinary coal - for health and the climate - because more must be burned to
produce the same amount of energy.
Contamination from Germany and Poland
stretches across Europe, including to the UK, depending on the wind direction. We are passively being exploited, not only
here, although Germany is the biggest source of lignite in the world, followed
by China and Turkey - in 2016, the EU was responsible for 37.5% of global
production.
God’s gifts are all around us, but their
exploitation is damaging the whole planet, as Global Warming continues to accelerate. We must all start to play our part in
securing the safety of this planet, otherwise there won’t be anything left for
humanity by the end of this century.
Like the example of Vitamin D, which we
need to give us a strong healthy skeleton of bone, we equally must make sure
that the resources that we have are sustainable and well founded.
It can’t be ignored or left to others. We all have to take responsibility and ask in
our prayers for the Universal God to show us the right way for us to act.
Jenny and Michael Ayers
Monday, 15th July 2019
