Dried-up bed of Iraq’s southern marshes of Chibayish in Dhi Qar province—known as the home of the Biblical Garden of Eden 7/24/2022 (Kuwait Times)
In the Bible, God repeatedly demonstrates that one of His judgements is to withhold rain:
Deuteronomy 28:24: The Lord will change the rain of your land to powder and dust; from the heaven it shall come down on you until you are destroyed
God’s use of drought can be seen in: 1 Kings 8, Haggai 1, Zechariah 14, Hosea 13, 1 Kings 17, Deuteronomy 11, etc. In the book of Jeremiah, we see this description of drought conditions, in the context of God’s judgement on Judah and Jerusalem prior to the captivity:
Jeremiah 14:1-6: The word of the Lord that came to Jeremiah concerning the drought: “Judah mourns, and her gates languish; her people lament on the ground, and the cry of Jerusalem goes up. Her nobles send their servants for water; they come to the cisterns; they find no water; they return with their vessels empty; they are ashamed and confounded and cover their heads. Because of the ground that is dismayed, since there is no rain on the land, the farmers are ashamed; they cover their heads. Even the doe in the field forsakes her newborn fawn because there is no grass. …
If we look worldwide from 2020 and onward, we see advancing global drought. Historically, we know there are regions of the world (specifically African nations like Somalia, Ethiopia and Kenya) that have long histories of struggling with drought. But, by 2022, drought had risen so dramatically worldwide that it made headlines as a global crisis. Here are some of the descriptions of the ongoing global drought year by year, starting with 2020:
- In August of 2020, 93% of Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, and Utah were in drought as was 75% of Wyoming, Arizona and Oregon. These areas had no signs of drought in 2019 (Carlowicz).
- In 2020 conditions advanced steadily month by month – with the end of the year finding 49% of the continental United States in drought (NOAA). By the end of 2020, U.S. drought conditions were stated as the worst in the last seven years (Mersereau).
- South America saw intense drought in 2020, from its initial beginnings in southeastern Brazil in mid-2018 (NOAA).
- South Africa’s drought in 2020 was declared a national emergency, for the second time since 2018 (de Wet).
- East Africa experienced significant drought in 2020, with no respite as winter approached (Funk) (Anyadike).
The drought continued in 2021:
- Drought headlines spread around the world in 2021, with half the U.S. mainland suffering from drought, and as for the rest of the world, only Antarctica was unaffected (Tebor).
- By August 2021, 99% of the land west of the Rocky Mountains was in drought – which was stated as the most severe episode in the known historical record (Gleick).
- In May of 2021, extreme drought was impacting the Canadian prairies in Saskatchewan and Manitoba (MacIntosh).
- As of April 2021, Mexico was facing one of the worst droughts in decades (Widespread Drought in Mexico).
- In June of 2021 Brazil was on record with the worst drought in a century (Harris).
- Since April of 2021, the Parana River (2nd largest in South America) in Argentina has stranded barges, tug boats and container vessels as the water level dropped to its lowest level since the 1940s (France24).
- By October 2021, the continuing severe drought in Madagascar has coupled with famine, leaving some to resort to eating locusts (United Nations).
- In September 2021, President Uhuru Kenyatta declared the ongoing drought in Kenya a national disaster (Mutai).
- Since July of 2021, China had seen 27 districts affected by severe drought in that year. In response to its water crisis, China has been using the ‘Ganlin-1’ weather modification drone since January in an attempt to seed the skies (Ranjan)
- In November of 2021, Turkey’s 2nd largest lake – Lake Tuz – completely dried up (Taft, 2021
“People have been living with drought for 5,000 years, but what we are seeing now is very different.”
Mami Mizutori
2021 Quote from UN Secretary General’s Special Representative for Disaster Risk Reduction (Harvey)
In 2022, nations began to grow increasingly alarmed. Global drought resulted in some stark imagery from around the world and headlines would abound; here are just a few:
- The summer of 2022 in Europe was the hottest on record (Copernicus) and it was reported that Europe was facing its worst drought in 500 years (Blenkinsop).
- Water levels in European rivers dropped to the point that ‘hunger stones’ appeared – including one in the Elbe River whose inscription translates as “if you see me, then weep” (Henley).
- The heatwave of the summer of 2022 left China with the worst drought in 60 years and resulted in sections of the Yangtze River, the third largest river in the world, reaching its lowest levels since 1865 (Huang).
- Images of the Euphrates River in 2022 showed large parts of the river had dried up (ANF News). Iraq’s Mesopotamian Marshes—situated between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers and known as the location of the Garden of Eden—began resembling a desert in 2022 (Kuwait Times). The level of the Tigris River dropped to 35% of its average in 2022 where it entered Iraq (Henna).
- Lake Sawa in Iraq dried up for the first time in history in 2022 (Novo).
Drought in 2022 lowers Elbe River to reveal 1616 carving of hunger stone, which states “if you see me, then weep” (Twitter)
- The Horn of Africa was facing its worst drought in 40 years with the March-May 2022 rainy season the driest in 70 years. This was the fourth failed rainy season since October-December 2020—and as we entered the fall of 2020, the October-December rainy season was also projected to fail, which would bring the total to five seasons in a row. This has resulted in a humanitarian crisis across Ethiopia, Somalia and Kenya with restricted access to water and millions of livestock deaths (OCHA).
- In 2022 California had the driest year ever recorded for the state (meteorologists). The years 2020 to 2022 are now on record as the driest thee-years in the history of the state (Ryan Endean).
- Lake Powell is the second largest reservoir in the U.S. and is a critical part of the western U.S. water supply. In 2022 it returned to its low point of 1967, sitting at just 26% of capacity (Carlowicz, Lake Powell Still Shrinking).
- In the U.S. the Mississippi River water level dropped to near record lows in 2022, with barges running aground in October (Brewer).
- In Argentina it was reported drought was so severe that farmers were forced to abandon farm land (Cahn L. )
- India experienced an unprecedented heatwave that resulted in March 2022 as the hottest ever recorded (Pandey). Four Indian states had drought conditions in 2022 due to reduced rainfall (Sajwan, 2022)
Here are just a few images from around the world in 2022:
The dried-out bed of the Jialing River, tributary of the Yangtze River, in Chongqing, China, 8/21/ 2022 (Wall Street Journal)
A view from space in 2022– dried up Lake Sawa Iraq, as seen by Copernicus Sentinel-2 (SWM).
Elephant carcass, which died during the drought, in Namunyak Wildlife Conservancy, Samburu, Kenya 10/12/2022 (CNN)
Destroyer USS Kidd sits on dry section of Mississippi River 10/18/2022, Baton Rouge, La (Hilary Scheinuk)
Colorado River at Lake Powell, Hite, Utah in 2022 (Danita Delimont / Shutterstock)
A view from space of the dire condition of six of the world’s rivers can be found here.
The drought that has occurred around the world may be the worst in modern history. Certainly, some news outlets considered this, as the combined effects of the droughts of China, Europe & the U.S. resulted in headlines raising the possibility that 2022 may have been the driest year ever recorded (BBC News).
But in addition to drought, we now have to look for the last piece of 2 Chronicles 7:13, where God states that He will “command the locust to devour the land.”
Next – Chapter 11: A Plague of Locusts
