ast week a news story about the coming end of the Barnes Ice Cap caught my attention. I’ve been captivated by glaciers since I learned that all my Lake Superior agates were pushed my way by the glaciers that once covered all of Canada and half of the United States. It never occurred to me that any of it remained but one last remnant of it is found as a smudge on Canada’s Texas-sized, Baffin Island.

When my children were young I earned a reputation for tiresome pedantic lectures. It began when I told them how the glaciers gouged out our Great Lakes. I no doubt explained that even now they are full of the water that melted 10,000 years ago. One thousand decades of rainfall has not been enough time to flush the melted snow and ice into the Atlantic. It had taken millions of years for snow to accumulate on the mile-thick glaciers. Even as you read this, 10,000 years later, the ground beneath your feet is still upwelling like a soft cushion freed from the weight of a massive derriere.

I was irked that my informative narrative resulted in my family calling out “Glacier!!!” ever afterward when I undertook to explain the mysteries of the world.  My ungrateful family persists in shouting out this insult to this very day.
Even so, I managed to put this mortification to good use with my nephews. One evening as I tried putting them to bed and they resisted sleep, I told them the story of “Mr. Boring.” I described how Mr. Boring talked about glaciers. I told them his super power was being able to put people to sleep. I demonstrated this by repeating all the “boring” details I had used to enlighten my children, my nephew’s cousins, about glaciers. To my great satisfaction my nephews liked Mr. Boring. For several years they kept asking me to tell them more Mr. Boring stories.

If you, dear reader, have not already succumbed to Mr. Boring I will add that the last trace of the great North American glacier won’t be around for much longer. It survived for two and a half million years but now global warming will cause it to melt over the next two hundred years. 
The gist of the story about the Barnes Ice Cap is that if Greenland’s and Antarctica’s ice sheets are draining into the sea for the first time since our ancestors stood up on their back legs, the Barnes Ice Cap is toast. There is an obvious explanation for this but I am troubled that it is not acknowledged by the Christian driven politics that disputes man’s ability to heat up the Earth. Why, the very first chapter of Genesis spells it out. Man was created in God’s own image and God, a force of unimaginable power maker of Heaven and the Earth, surely passed on a trace of that power to the image of Adam. To doubt this is to doubt Genesis.  Not so coincidentally, it also denies the prophecies of the Book of Revelation.

We carbon copies of God have proven remarkably adept just like our creator. Our scientific investigations of God’s creation have established that the creation is vastly more spectacular than the Red Sea’s refugees could ever have imagined.
The latest count of galaxies in God’s creation now stands at 200 trillion. That means that each of the 7.5 billion souls on today’s Earth has 26,000 galaxies that they don’t have to share with anyone else. Assuming that each of these galaxies has 100 billion stars each, every human could lay claim 3,153 billion stars apiece. To put that in perspective imagine visiting each of your personal lucky stars over 100 years. You would have to visit 845,573 stars every-second-of-your-100-year-lifetime to see them all. 

The Republican Party has become the home of Americans who are counting on the Rapture to turn out the lights on 2.6 quadrillion stars. Many of these Republican Christians are impatient for the Palestinians to be driven from Israel because this is one of the requirements to fulfill the rapture’s prophecy. Their hero is another proof of the prophecy, a great man – like Jesus, who is the new King David. Who better to turn up the heat than Donald Trump?

If God has been patient enough to take two thousand years to get us to this point surely 7.5 billion humans can be counted on to bake their lonely planet over a couple hundred years to the point of rapture. Surely, God knows what she’s doing! I don’t know where the heaven is that God plans to put her rapturists but I have no doubt she’ll make room there for President Trump too.

Harry Welty is a local eccentric and perennial candidate for public office in Duluth who also pontificates on his blog: www.lincolndemocrat.com.