Changes have already begun, and are known to your scientists and meteorologists. Violent storms, unusual weather patterns, severe and long lasting droughts, increased frequency of hurricanes, torrential rains, and a general warming of the planet. This is all cast in the category of Global Warming, yet the cause is not certain. Which of you, as citizens or even as scientists, could state the cause with certainty? We are telling you that the Earth itself will be warmer, and this affects weather patterns. Humanity has come to expect predictability in the weather. Even the monsoons of the East, or the hurricanes that hit the eastern United States, are expected and prepared for, as they are predictable. During the next few decades, until the Earth settles down into another predictable pattern, mankind will find its greatest problems with the weather to be its unpredictability.
Weather changes heralding the giant comet's approach will at first be within normal parameters. As long as meteorologists can find a similar pattern on the books or an old timer can be found to regale us with tales of the old days, no one will get unduly alarmed. The weather, after all, is a constant source of conversation, but the intensity of these discussions will change when the effects on food chains relied upon by man move outside of familiar boundaries. It is at this point that Alarm Bells will go off. All attempts to explain the changes based on Global Warming from the Greenhouse effect will run into snags as the weather will refuse to be predictable. Areas of the world which have been deserts throughout mankind's memory will become swamps under constant and repeated rains. Temperate climates used to periodic gentle rainfall will suffer intractable droughts. Then this will switch about, for no apparent reason. The reason lies deep within the Earth's core, an area the meteorologists refuse to consider, and thus their predictions on the atmosphere will never be based on the right parameters.
A key change, to which one could point, is the warming of the Earth's oceans, around the globe. This has been measured as a 6 inch rise, worldwide, on all the beaches. The waters have risen because they are warmer, and warm water takes up more room than cold water, as all elementary physics books will report. How is it that the oceans, so very deep and so very cold, have warmed up? Is it the almost imperceptible rise in the temperature of the air, a degree or so, as reported to date? Since heat rises, why would this slight rise affect the oceans? Meteorologists will tell you that the effect of air warming is air turbulence, not warmer oceans. The Oceans are Warmer because the core of the Earth has heated up, and it does so in response to its brother coming closer. This will continue, and increase, until sometime after the cataclysms are past.
Yet another sign is a slowing in the rate of rotation, a forerunner of the actual stop in rotation that occurs at the moment of passage. As with weather and warming trends, this is at first so gradual and slight as to be arguable. Humans in denial do not argue with the current data drawn, they argue with the comparison to past data. The past data was invalid in some way, was recorded with imprecise instruments, or perhaps was not measured at all. Precise weather data has only been gathered for the past few decades, a hundred years at most, and prior to that was only recorded at times of extreme weather like hurricanes and this in the form of tales. There was no mechanism to measure, for instance, the wind velocity of a hurricane, so the estimated height of a tidal wave or size of buildings flattened was recorded. Likewise with major earthquakes, which in the past have flattened cities. Without the ability to capture Richter scale, earthquakes in the past were either termed a trembler, small, or big.
The best way to counter arguments is not to point to the past but to start recording the present. All the trends and signs will only acerbate, with the oceans warmer still, the weather more erratic and unpredictable still, and the Earth gradually slowing in her rotation more and more measurably. If one gathers these statistics now, and gathers them yearly, the trends will become a clear pattern. Thus, the arguments will be with people now living, and with statistics gathered by the same methods. As the trends and signs will increase more rapidly, exponentially, as the 12th Planet enters the Solar System, this comparison can be used as a signal to many who plan to move to safety that the time has arrived. Where weather and warmer oceans will be arguable up to the end, a Slowing Rotation is not arguable.