Welcome back to
The Liberty Insider.
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Before the break with
guest, Scott Christiansen.
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We were talking about his
experience in Mongolia. Yeah.
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You know, it's the experience
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very few people
have had not just
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because Mongolia was closed
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to the outside
world for so long.
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But now that it's open,
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it's not a place that
people gravitate to, is it?
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Well, you know.
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It's the coldest capital
city in the world, there is--
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Ulaanbaatar. Ulaanbaatar.
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It's the coldest
capital city in the world.
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And while we were
there, we saw minus 40,
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minus 41, and minus 42.
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Now you didn't
see it, you felt it.
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Wow, boy did we feel it.
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It's very-- I lived in
Idaho where it would get down
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to minus 10, minus 15.
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And I know that-- I know
when it's of that temperature,
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you linger too long
and you stop working.
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Ah! You know we moved to a much,
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much warmer place,
we're in Maine now. Maine.
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So a minus 10, minus 20,
it-- it seems warm. Yeah.
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As well as you got
that fireplace going.
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There are a lot of, you know,
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there's a lot of reasons that
people don't go to Mongolia.
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And you know the amazing
thing is that for millennia,
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Mongolians have
lived in felt tents
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on the windy plains of Mongolia
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and have survived in
conditions like that.
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Quite tough people.
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We started this program
talking about Genghis Khan,
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the world learned how tough
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those people were
long, longtime ago.
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But you know your
book on World in Distress
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by Global System Decline,
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which I found more explanatory.
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Give some examples
from your time in Mongolia.
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So what evidence
did you see there?
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And then you
also based in China,
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which is just next door.
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What it was did you see there?
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That started you
really thinking about,
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you know, just
looking at the world,
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as the Bible says,
waxing old like a garment.
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Right. The things in decline.
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Beginning to fail.
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How could you
characterize what you saw?
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Well, you know,
back in the 1990s
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of course I didn't
have this perspective
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that I have now and
that I outline in the book,
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Planet in Distress.
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But the world was
beginning to learn about
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global climate change.
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And as was I, you
know, I would read things
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and I would ponder them.
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But in Mongolia, it
was a very big deal,
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you could actually see it.
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Now what happened in Mongolia
was in Southern Mongolia
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is the Gobi desert.
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It's not a warm
desert in the winter,
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I mean, you'll see
minus 20 and minus 30,
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it's very cold place.
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Most deserts are
very cold in the winter.
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It's true. Yeah.
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They're dry. Maybe
not the Sahara, but--
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Well-- I've never been there.
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Most deserts I
can't even explain why
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but I've read over the years,
they're very cold at night.
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Oh, yeah, because
when the sun goes away,
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there's nothing to hold it.
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But in Mongolia, the desert
began to advance northward.
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And this month
and it would advance
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from 10 to 20 kilometers
a year, that's a fast march.
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Well, for ages, for millennia,
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Mongolians have staked out where
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and they were nomads of course.
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The ones in the countryside,
they would stake down
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where they would put
their houses in the winter.
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They're felt tents.
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And you don't move
you go to one place
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and you stay there.
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And of course
one family would have
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this traditional
place that it would go to.
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Well, as the
desert marched north,
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thousands of
families were displaced
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because the croplands,
the grasslands went away.
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There was nothing
to feed the animals on
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and so the
Mongolians, it's not like that
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there wasn't a
quite a bit of room,
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but they began to get crowded.
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And that wasn't just--
That wasn't the only thing
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that was something called Zud.
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You've probably
never heard of a Zud.
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No, you got me there.
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Well, the Zud is the
Mongolian word for heavy snow.
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Now Mongolia is very cold,
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but in the course
of the Mongolian winter
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there would be just a
couple centimeters of snow.
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And this is a
very important thing
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because the Mongolians
live off of their animals,
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their tents were made
out of their animals fur,
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their clothing is made
out of the animals fur.
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They eat the animals.
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And the animals
all lived outside.
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The animals lived outside.
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So there's heavy
snows would be catastrophic
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for survival of the herd.
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Well--well the
animals, in addition to that,
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one more thing that was
very important the animals,
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the Mongolians burnt
the animal droppings.
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Especially from cows,
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that's how they get their heat.
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Very much like India.
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Very much and-- And in Mongolia
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the animals live
outside and they eat--
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They eat the
surface of the grass down
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to where the plains
are smooth as this table.
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By the end of
winter, it's eaten down.
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When it snows, the
grass is sparse though,
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now when it snows the
animals have to move the snow
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to get down to the grass.
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And they end up expending
more energy moving snow
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than they can get for
grass because it's so scarce.
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So the animals
slowly starve to death.
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They don't produce any
fuel for the Mongolians to burn.
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So the Mongolians
started getting very, very cold
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and burning less and less fuel.
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And with the animals starving,
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the Mongolians don't
have anything to eat.
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Their entire world collapses
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and in the past
they had a couple Zud's
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but it began in the 1990s.
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They began to
have Zud's every year.
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What this did was it
forced the Mongolians
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to abandon their nomad
life, move to the capital city,
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and engage in
whatever they could find,
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very often they
engaged in things
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that were well
illegal and demeaning
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and immoral just
because they needed to live.
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This is the pattern
all over the world is--
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is the nomads or country
dwellers moving to the cities.
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It leads a social
decline in many ways.
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Well, you know,
for a millennia these--
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these wonderful
people that have been
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so hardy and so self-sufficient
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and it's interesting
if you take a look at
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climate change and
its impact on society.
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What you see is that
a couple degrees here
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and couple of little
change in precipitation there
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can have a profound
and destabilizing effect
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on an entire society.
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There's a lot of controversy
surrounding climate change.
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But, you know,
what's fascinating for me
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in reading Spirit of Prophecy--
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You traveled and I
think-- Yeah, please.
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Controversy and you hear
it in the media, in the U.S.,
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but I've traveled
enough in the world
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and I've talked to
other people that have.
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If you travel a bit
it hits you in the face
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because everywhere you go,
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the climate is
radically different
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than it was
within living memories.
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Within memories.
Something is going on.
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You would have to be,
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you know, a
virtual ostrich. Well.
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To say there's
no climate change.
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Where I think
the debate should be
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and this is indifference to
political views of the U.S.,
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I think you could, apart
from biblical understanding,
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you could debate
what's causing climate change.
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But to say
there's no climate change
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is to be a
flat-earther, it seems to me.
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Let's talk about
that for a second.
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What's causing climate change?
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When Adam and Eve sinned
what was the very first thing
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that they noticed in
terms of something that changed.
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The leaves were changing.
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No, that wasn't the first thing.
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The first thing
that they noticed was
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that there was a
chill in the air.
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I had forgotten that.
In Spirit of Prophecy.
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Yes, first page. The exact page.
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Now I remember that.
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But the other
sentence resonates with there
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I remember that they saw
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the cast coming over the leaves,
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sort of death
manifesting through them.
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When they--after they left
the Garden of Eden it's true.
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But you know what.
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That's an ambiguous statement
because people would say,
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well they--they
lost their coverings,
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they became aware
of their nakedness,
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you know, so that's what it was.
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But a couple pages later
in the Spirit of Prophecy
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we read that God made
skins for Adam and Eve
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because of the--
Because of the climate
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which had been very
stable, now had marked changes
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and it was very extremely hot.
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But they also lost
their covering of blood,
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so that may have
taken away warmth.
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Well, my point is sin
when it came into the world.
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Its first noticeable
impact was climate change. Yeah.
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And after sin has
become the dominant force
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in our world today how is it
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that it could change
the climate back then
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and not change it now?
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So my argument is that
among all the other systems
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that are being impacted.
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This is a biblical argument.
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That's
consistent biblically. Yeah.
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What I was saying
the scientifically
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people could sort a question
whether there is classic.
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I mean, there's a certain
questioning of global warming,
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but to me it can only
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be a question of
what's causing it,
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not whether
there is such a thing.
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Yeah, okay. You're
right, I see it, yeah.
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It's so of evident--I can
hardly think about a place
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in the last 30 or so years
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that I have
traveled around the world,
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that wasn't
having abnormal weather
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and natural systems
that have killed them.
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There's a political mindset
that is very conservative
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and does not like change
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and does not like
expense. Well, fine.
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But the interesting thing is
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from a Christian's point of view
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and especially from an
Adventist point of view
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when you point out that
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this is consistent
with prophecy. Absolutely.
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And that is related to sin
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that same mindset can
look at this and say, oh!
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and the realization should be
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if all of this
data is around us,
00:09:06.82\00:09:09.49
then that means
that we are much closer
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to Christ coming. Absolutely.
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And I think it's significant
that in the United States
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the conservative Christian world
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seem to have gotten religion
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as far as the
environment is concerned.
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I saw it happen about
the last four or five years,
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I've got--
Couldn't remember my date
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but after Katrina,
certainly, there was a shift.
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Where, and I read the articles
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where they would
quoting the Bible
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and we should be
stewards of the environment,
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we should
protest the man's misuse
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of what he has that we should be
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custodians and so on.
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That's new and I think what an--
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what an opportunity
for Seventh-day Adventists
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to speak to this.
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Not that we say
that man can solve it
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by his own efforts.
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But we need to see
the symptomatic misuse
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of what God gave us
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and we can speak to
the moral situation.
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And so this is a
moment of opportunity again
00:09:58.69\00:10:01.43
for a message to talk to,
00:10:01.44\00:10:04.12
you know, not to
the political world.
00:10:04.13\00:10:06.75
But in the political
world they'll debate about it,
00:10:06.76\00:10:08.54
but we know the answer.
00:10:08.55\00:10:09.57
We can say that
this is a sign of sin.
00:10:09.58\00:10:12.02
Man's brought it down himself
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and therefore
well it won't solve it
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and I think we need to be
more spiritually responsible.
00:10:15.89\00:10:18.66
Well, I fully
agree when you look
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at the impacts of
the world falling apart,
00:10:21.12\00:10:23.85
especially on the
3.5 billion people
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who make less than $2.5
a day, they have no buffer.
00:10:26.85\00:10:31.07
You know, we have ADRA,
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the Adventist
Development Relief Agency--
00:10:32.62\00:10:33.90
Remind you that
there's little time left,
00:10:33.91\00:10:35.86
but there's no much buffer
00:10:35.87\00:10:36.96
in the United States. Well.
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I live in a
neighborhood, for the town,
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I live in pretty nice houses
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but those people are
mortgaged to the hilt. Yeah.
00:10:43.30\00:10:46.36
They lose their job or
the wife gets pregnant,
00:10:46.37\00:10:49.01
they're out
instantly, it's sudden death.
00:10:49.02\00:10:51.27
It's easy natural to see someone
00:10:51.28\00:10:53.96
who's on a $1.50 a day
00:10:53.97\00:10:55.33
and down to a
dollar a day, they stop.
00:10:55.34\00:10:57.53
But it's pretty
much the same here.
00:10:57.54\00:10:59.32
Our threshold is higher
00:10:59.33\00:11:01.49
but the margin
maybe just as small.
00:11:01.50\00:11:04.10
You know, we're told
that as the events built
00:11:04.11\00:11:09.40
and culminate
toward end of time,
00:11:09.41\00:11:12.48
it'll be terrible and
we're beginning to see that now.
00:11:12.49\00:11:16.05
But what we are
also told is that
00:11:16.06\00:11:18.65
this is going to open people's
minds to spiritual topics.
00:11:18.66\00:11:23.28
This is an opportunity
to communicate with people
00:11:23.29\00:11:26.02
who never listened before.
00:11:26.03\00:11:27.58
When our lives of comfort
are threatened and removed.
00:11:27.59\00:11:30.17
We began to be much more serious
00:11:30.18\00:11:31.94
about spiritual things.
00:11:31.95\00:11:33.53
If it is anything else,
00:11:33.54\00:11:35.25
it's an
opportunity for us to witness
00:11:35.26\00:11:37.47
and to proclaim
God to a sinful world.
00:11:37.48\00:11:39.46
One can only imagine
the horror that peasants
00:11:41.98\00:11:45.91
and others in Europe
and on the fringes of Europe
00:11:45.92\00:11:48.94
must have felt
as the Mongol Horde
00:11:48.95\00:11:51.64
and Genghis Khan
swept down upon them.
00:11:51.65\00:11:54.71
I don't think anything that
00:11:54.72\00:11:55.82
we can imagine
today could fulfill that.
00:11:55.83\00:11:58.43
And yet, today we
are literally living
00:11:58.44\00:12:01.51
under a more catastrophic
threat of global meltdown
00:12:01.52\00:12:06.01
of natural systems as
well as the artificial systems
00:12:06.02\00:12:09.85
that man has constructed.
00:12:09.86\00:12:12.50
As I have discussed
this with author Christensen,
00:12:12.51\00:12:16.98
I really put to mind
of the Tower of Babel,
00:12:16.99\00:12:20.54
following the
cataclysm to end all cataclysms
00:12:20.55\00:12:23.60
for that early era, the flood.
00:12:23.61\00:12:26.86
Man had determined
that he would defeat it,
00:12:26.87\00:12:29.02
built the tower,
gathered together
00:12:29.03\00:12:32.38
and decided that he
would somehow challenge God.
00:12:32.39\00:12:36.36
But there was no way
that man's false system
00:12:36.37\00:12:39.36
could survive against God's ways
00:12:39.37\00:12:42.59
and God's decisions. We
need to be careful today.
00:12:42.60\00:12:47.07
But when we look
at system collapse,
00:12:47.08\00:12:48.98
we don't seek a human solution
00:12:48.99\00:12:51.86
and that we don't
ignore the obvious need
00:12:51.87\00:12:54.06
to seek God in this
time of our global distress.
00:12:54.07\00:12:58.63
For Liberty Insider,
this is Lincoln Steed.
00:12:58.64\00:13:02.06