Understanding Global Warming As a Christian with Dr. Hugh Ross

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Welcome back to another episode of A Clear Lens Podcast. This is the show that gives you the training you need to effectively communicate your

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Christian faith in today's culture. My name is Nate Sala, and I am your host. Friends, it's quite a pleasure to welcome tonight's guest.

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When I first became a believer, his ministry was particularly helpful for me to understand the world that God has made from a scientific perspective.

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He's the founder and president of Reasons to Believe, an organization dedicated to integrating scientific fact and biblical faith.

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His books include Why the Universe is the Way It Is, Hidden Treasures in the Book of Job, and tonight's particular focus,

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Weathering Climate Change. Dr. Hugh Ross, welcome back to the show. Well, thank you for having me back.

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Well, it's just such a pleasure. I'm not sure if I mentioned this to you before, but when I first became a

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Christian in those early formative years, there were a couple of books that were tremendously helpful, along with some special people in my life that were helpful, just to get me to understand my walk with Christ and get into apologetics.

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And I came across Why the Universe is the Way It Is years and years ago.

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I read it. I reread it. I think I come back to this about once a year. I just want to thank you so much for writing it.

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It's been really helpful. Yes, thank you. My pleasure. Well, you've written a number of books over the years.

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Is there a particular book that you find a lot of people come up to you and it's like their number one favorite book?

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Yeah, that would probably be The Creator in the Cosmos. It's now in a fourth edition, and of all the books

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I've written, that's the one where I get the most people coming to me and saying, this book brought me to faith in Christ.

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Yeah. I just remember this one really getting into some of those really charged questions that people have, you know.

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And one of the big ones for me was, why is the universe so large? So, very, very helpful stuff.

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I highly recommend people go out and get Why the Universe is the Way It Is, The Creator in the Cosmos, another one, just brilliant stuff.

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But tonight we're talking about climate change, Dr. Ross. Can I ask, before we get into it, what sparked your decision to write this particular book?

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Well, fine -tuning predominantly. I thought people were overlooking the extraordinary fine -tuning that makes possible the brief episode we're in now of extreme climate stability and recognize that climate instability is a norm.

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The exception is climate stability. But I was also motivated to take the politics out of the debate.

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Because you've got this political debate going on where one side says, we've got nothing to worry about or it's a hoax.

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The other side is saying, if we don't take draconian economic measures immediately, we're going to bring a catastrophe upon ourselves and all the rest of Earth's life.

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And as I looked at this whole debate, it's like, there are things we can do to stabilize the climate that boosts the economy rather than cripple the economy.

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We don't have to get into a political battle on this. If this is going to benefit the ecosystems of the planet, if it's going to stabilize the climate and put more money in everybody's pockets, especially the poor, what politician in his right mind would ever vote against it?

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I'm sure because of the politics particularly, but maybe for other reasons, a lot of Christians aren't really zoomed in on climate change.

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They're not focused on it. They're not really thinking about it. Why should Christians pay attention to this?

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Well, it's a great argument for the Christian faith. And so I basically wrote the book to equip believers on how to share their faith in a way because everybody wants to talk about climate change and global warming.

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So this gives you an easy venue to get people into a significant spiritual conversation.

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But another reason why I think it's important for Christians, we've been commanded by God in both

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Genesis 1 and the book of Job that we're to manage the resources of planet Earth for our benefit and the benefit of the rest of Earth's life.

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So we're stewards of this planet. And frankly, I'd be embarrassed to have Jesus come back and say, hey, you guys really didn't pay much attention to the instructions

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I gave you to be stewards of my creation. Yeah. Well, and I think we're going to get into this in just a moment.

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But again, touching on this idea that Christians aren't really kind of zoomed in,

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I know of a number of Christians, it's not a criticism, that are really just more focused heavenward than they are earthward, if I can make up a word.

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But it's a really great point that you bring out that we really need to be good stewards of the world that God has made.

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And that is our charge going all the way back to Genesis chapter one. But I think the question for a lot of people is how exactly we can be stewards when it comes to the climate, because the data and the science is so politicized and seems to be so polarized.

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So it seems like a lot of climate scientists agree that the Earth is getting warmer. And some would say, you know, to really dangerous levels relatively soon.

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But what is the research data really tell us? You've looked at it.

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What does it really say? Well, I waited to bring the book out because I've been studying this for over a decade.

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But it says I'm going to wait till we got really solid, indisputable temperature data.

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And it was about a year and a half ago, a group of scientists said, we're going to look not just at one temperature proxy, but 74 temperature proxies, not just from the

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Antarctic and the Arctic, but from all over the world. And for the first time, we've got a reliable, indisputable temperature record of the past 10 ,000 years.

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In fact, even the past 17 ,000 years. And what it reveals is that the climate is far more stable than what people thought two years ago.

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They were saying it's been stable, the plus or minus two degrees centigrade. The new data tells us it's been stable for 9 ,500 years to within plus or minus 0 .65

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degrees. And that requires an answer. Why is it so exceptionally stable for that period of time, especially given that we live in an ice age cycle?

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Ice age cycles drive extreme climate instability. If you look at the whole ice age cycle, this is the only window where we got climate stability.

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And so I basically try to answer that question. Why is it that we have this extreme climate stability in the midst of a window where we'd expect the very opposite, where the climate we would expect?

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If you look at the ice age cycle, the global mean temperature goes up and down by 18 degrees

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Fahrenheit over timescales of a few centuries. It explains why humans living during the last ice age couldn't launch civilization.

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The climate was just too radically unstable to make it possible. But the moment it stabilized, we launched civilization.

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The other thing that's interesting in the temperature records, we hit a maximum 8 ,700 years ago.

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And the temperature has been very slowly declining since then by about one degree centigrade over 9 ,000 years.

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But over the past 70 years, it's gone up by one degree centigrade. So we're right where we were 9 ,000 years ago.

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And the concern is if we maintain this pace of a degree every 70 years, we're going to melt the polar ice cap.

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And one of the things I put in the book is the danger of melting the polar ice cap, that will cause huge amounts of snow to fall on Siberia and Canada.

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And our research on the ice age cycle tells us every time you warm the planet more than two degrees centigrade where we are right now, you very quickly drop into an ice age.

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People today should be far more worried about global cooling than they are global warming. That's the consequence of global warming.

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Wasn't that where we were around the 70s? It seemed like the headlines were, hey, we're heading into an ice age or global cooling.

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That's what I remember being a young child. Yeah, that's true.

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But that's when we didn't have good temperature records and we didn't have a good understanding of the significance of the polar ice cap.

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I mean, that polar ice cap reflects sunlight with 60 % efficiency. So that keeps things nice and cool.

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But if you melt the polar ice cap, that liquid ocean water in the Arctic reflects sunlight with only 6 % efficiency.

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So now you have the Arctic Ocean absorbing a whole lot more heat from the sun.

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And what happens to that heat? It makes water vapor. What happens to that water vapor?

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It falls as snow on Siberia and Canada. The only reason why

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Canada is not covered with thousands of feet of ice today, it's a virtual desert.

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It simply doesn't get enough precipitation. It's plenty cold enough, but there isn't the precipitation.

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If you triple the precipitation within a few centuries, you've got a thousand feet of ice covering all of Canada.

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And hey, last time we had an ice age, it went all the way down into Southern California. In the wintertime,

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San Diego was totally clogged with ice. Wow. Well, let's talk a little bit about these cycles.

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So you mentioned cycles of weather patterns. I mean, are we, from the beginning of the

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Earth, as far as we can tell, the weather is cyclical?

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I mean, like, how many years are we talking? Is it 500 years? Is it a thousand years? Two thousand?

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Like, what are these cycles that you mentioned? Well, it's only cyclical when the planet is very delicately balanced between no ice at all and a huge amount of ice.

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And that's where we've been for the past two and a half million years. We've been at that very delicate balance.

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For most of Earth's history, our planet has had no ice at all. And when it did have ice, it covered 80 to 90 % of the planet.

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What's unique about our time is we cycle between 10 % ice coverage and 20 to 23 % ice coverage.

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And that actually explains why billions of humans can live on the planet at one time.

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We're critically dependent on the Ice Age cycle to feed billions of human beings and to feed all of our animals.

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And I give several reasons in the book, over 15, but I'll give you just two right now.

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Number one, we need ice melting from the last Ice Age to water our great agricultural plains.

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You look at the major rivers of the world. They're flowing out of the ice that was laid down during the last

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Ice Age. And number two, when you come up out of an Ice Age, you get a rapid melting of thousands of feet of ice.

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And that causes the continental land masses to rebound. And when they rebound, you get volcanic eruptions all over the planet.

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Those volcanic eruptions fertilize the great agricultural plains. So the plains of North America, South America, Europe, India, and China all had a major fertilization event about 15 ,000 years ago.

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And then with the melting ice left over from the last Ice Age, they got plenty of water.

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That explains why we're able to grow the quantity of food that we can. That's just two out of 15 benefits we get from living during an

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Ice Age. But the downside is an Ice Age gives you extreme climate instability.

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The miracle of the epoch we're in right now is we have extreme climate stability in the midst of an

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Ice Age cycle. But again, that explains why we can have advanced technology, billions of human beings.

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And I actually argue in the book that this was all part of God's plan. He wanted to redeem billions of people unto himself from their sin and evil in a short period of time.

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The only way that's physically possible, given the laws of physics, is that we'd be living on this planet in the midst of an

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Ice Age cycle where there's a brief epoch of extreme climate stability. So I argue in the book, we need to see this as a supernatural gift from God.

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It takes extraordinary fine -tuning to pull it off. And what really blows me away as a scientist, this narrow window where you've got extreme climate stability falls on top of another narrow window where the sun has extreme luminosity stability, which falls on another narrow window where we have no nearby supernova eruptions appearing in our galaxy.

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And if you read the book, I give you 10 other narrow windows. None of them are dependent on one another.

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They all coincidentally overlap precisely to give us this period where we humans can launch and sustain the civilization and the technology is necessary to take the good news of salvation to billions of people where they can receive

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Christ as their Creator, Lord, and Savior. Yeah, amen. Like the Goldilocks Zone.

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Yeah, only there's a whole lot of Goldilocks Zones. That's right. They all overlap perfectly.

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Well, and so you say right now we're in a current Ice Age cycle. Why are some of the climate scientists, though, that I'm hearing,

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I'm sure a lot of our listeners are hearing, they're not talking this way. Are they not as sort of zoomed out on the issue and looking at everything in its totality?

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Are they just kind of zoomed in on the last maybe 100 years? What's the explanation, you think? No, I think it's the fact that they're narrowed in on their subdiscipline of research.

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I mean, I spent several years reading the climatology literature, and what

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I discovered is these people are writing with a very narrow focus in their subdiscipline.

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They're either atmospheric physicists. They study the stratosphere. They look at the fossil record.

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They're not integrating all the different scientific disciplines. You know, and I get a lot of encouragement from scientists in academia.

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They appreciate the fact that we founded Reasons to Believe, took top scientists out of academia, and set them free to do the interdisciplinary research.

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And that's one thing you see in the book. You notice I dive into all different disciplines—geophysics, astrophysics, solar physics, paleontology, zoology, the atmospherics, the chemistry—and try to integrate them all together, because that's where I think the scientific community has been lacking.

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They've not had the big picture because they're so focused on a couple of trees rather than the whole forest.

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Yeah. I mean, you even say all of those fields hold relevance for understanding the

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Earth's climate. So maybe perhaps this is the first book of its kind on climate change that is interweaving all those disciplines.

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It's the first interdisciplinary book on the subject. And a lot of scientists, too, have complimented me for saying, thank you for not just focusing on carbon dioxide.

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There are many different greenhouse gases. And then we've got black carbon soot. I mean,

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Canada, for example, is warming five times faster than the rest of the planet on average.

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There's now research that tells us it's not predominantly because of carbon dioxide. That is a big factor, but perhaps an even larger factor is black carbon soot being blown up from India and China and being deposited on the

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Canadian Arctic. Wow. Maybe it's also Quebec's fault, because everybody blames

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Quebec. Well, OK, so you mentioned carbon dioxide. And that's where I wanted to go next, because I'm sure a lot of our listeners are thinking this.

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I am, too. A lot of us remember Dr. Ross watching An Inconvenient Truth and seeing

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Al Gore kind of get up. There was a big the infamous what is it, the hockey graph or the hockey stick graph.

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And he's talking about the rise of carbon dioxide due to manmade carbon emissions. So here's my question.

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Is climate change really due to mankind's activity or does mankind have nothing to do with it or is it somewhere in between?

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It's very complicated. I mean, Al Gore was focusing all of his attention on carbon dioxide.

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You've got methane, you've got nitrous oxide, you've got the hydrochloric carbons, you've got the black carbon soot.

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So it's not just carbon dioxide. But where he is correct is that human activity is predominantly responsible for the global warming.

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But you need to put it in a big picture. For the last 9500 years, the natural cycles have been cooling the planet.

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The launch of human civilization has been warming the planet. If it wasn't for the launch of human civilization, the natural cycles would have quickly dropped as deep into an ice age.

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That was prevented thanks to the launch of human civilization. And so for 9500 years, the two have been an almost perfect balance.

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And the natural cycles have actually superseded very slightly the human activity warming.

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And so we've had a very slight cooling. What's happened in the last 70 years, human activity for the first time is superseding the natural cooling cycles.

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So we're actually warming the planet faster than the natural cycles are cooling it. And that is due to carbon dioxide.

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And that's understandable. I mean, look at the exponential rise of technology since the end of World War II.

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And with that and the rising population, the rising wealth, it's not at all surprising that human activity is now outstripping the natural cooling.

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Is this dangerous? Is this going to lead us into what some suggest, the death of the polar bear and vegetation and life on Earth and stuff like that?

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Well, the big danger is we could melt the polar ice cap and we melt the polar ice cap.

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And the polar ice cap is about half the size that it was 70 years ago. So we are at risk.

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And I think we should be very focused on making sure that we manage things in Canada and Siberia to sustain the polar ice cap.

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Because if that melts away, we're going to have all of Canada and Siberia covered in thousands of feet of ice.

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And that's going to dramatically drop the temperature of the whole planet. And we're going to have climate instability again.

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So we would be wise to forestall that. And I argue forestall because we can't put it off forever.

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But we can certainly forestall the melting of the polar ice cap for at least a thousand years, maybe even 1500 years.

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And I'm arguing that's a worthwhile goal to undertake, especially if we can undertake it in a way where we boost the world economy rather than what

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Al Gore is suggesting. You know, let's just stop driving cars, turn off your air conditioners, shut down all the factories, get used to living on a quarter of what your income is right now.

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He's ignoring another biblical principle. Human beings are fundamentally selfish.

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When you tell them to lower their standard of living by a factor of three or four, with rare exceptions, they're not going to do it.

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And so we actually are going to make this crisis worse. Too much alarmist talk is actually going to cause people to panic and freeze.

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And I have a whole two chapters in the book I want to call Unintended Consequences. You know, this political agenda could actually make things worse rather than better.

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And so it never pays to alarm the taxpayer. Yeah. At this point,

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I'm trying to anticipate skeptics. I mean, this is an apologetics ministry.

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Well, both of ours are. And so I'm trying to anticipate rejoinders that I've heard in the past from skeptics, such as why would

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God create a world like this where the weather can go up and down and fluctuate?

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Like, why not just create a world where it's always 72 degrees and the surface high?

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You know what I mean? Like, how would you respond to something like that? Well, we had that kind of situation in the

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Garden of Eden. But notice only two people were living there. I mean, given that God's goal, and you see this explicitly in the book of Revelation, that God intends to redeem an uncountable number of humans unto himself.

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And at that time, the Greeks had a number system that went up to a billion. So we have to put that in context.

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God wants to redeem at least billions of individual humans from their sin and evil and draw them into a relationship with himself.

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What is it going to take to make that happen? I've heard skeptics say, well, why didn't

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God just create things where there's no gravity, where there's no entropy, where there's no electromagnetism?

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While you read the book, Why the Universe is the Way It Is, I make the point, we need a universe with gravity, electromagnetism, and thermodynamics in order to provide a motivation for us humans to depart from our sinful ways and pursue virtue and God's offer of redemption.

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And notice those laws of physics immediately disappear once evil no longer exists.

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God created this universe to eradicate evil once and for all, while he enhances our free will capability to experience love.

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But once that has happened, we get radically altered laws of physics. But for now, we need gravity, we need thermodynamics, we need electromagnetism.

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And that means if you want billions of people living on a planet, it's got to be a certain diameter.

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You have to have an ice age cycle where you got this radical climate instability, and you got to figure out a way to open up a brief window of extreme climate stability.

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So that's what the book is really all about. You know, putting this in the context of God's ultimate goals and purposes, what must happen?

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And basically make the argument, there's no way you can explain this naturalistically. This is a clear signature of the supernatural handiwork of God.

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Yeah, amen. I'm thinking that 1 ,000 -year period or 1 ,500 years left in this particular cycle keeps ringing off in my mind.

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And I'm sure for some Christians that were hearing this, I wonder if they're thinking, so is that it for the end?

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Is that 1 ,500 years from now when we flip out of this cycle, that's when Jesus returns? Are you suggesting that 1 ,000 years from now it's endgame, or is it just another way of living for people down the line?

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This is purely a speculative question. Well, I'm sure you're aware that evangelical

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Christians, some of them are amillennialists, some of them are postmillennialists, some of them are premillennialists, all of them are going to like this book.

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Because I basically show you a way you can get enough time, regardless of what you think about the millennium.

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If you want Christ ruling here personally on planet Earth for 1 ,000 years, there's enough time to make that happen before we get this extreme climate instability.

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So all Christians should be happy, regardless of their eschatological perspective.

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I'm sure they will be. I'm sure they will be. Again, we're discussing, if you're just joining us live, we're talking about Weathering Climate Change by Dr.

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Hugh Ross. The first of its kind, a fresh approach on climate change and how Christians can understand it, especially as it pertains to apologetics.

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Now, that is going to be the final question, is how we work this out maybe more practically on the apologetic side.

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But I do have another question. So considering the polarizing political spectrum that climate change sort of exists in in the moment, is there any effective sort of solution that doesn't require politics at all that everyone can agree upon?

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Or is this always going to be something where we just butt heads and never agree? Now, that's one of my motives for writing the book, get the politics out of the debate.

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And so I devote three chapters in the book. Here are things we can do that will benefit all life on planet

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Earth, not just ourselves, but all the entire ecosystems of the planet. They're all going to benefit.

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The poor are going to benefit more than the rich. But everybody's going to have more money in their pocket.

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And if that's the case, who in their right mind is going to vote against it? Who's not going to want to do it?

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You don't need alarmists. You're basically giving people an economic incentive to do what

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God has asked us to do. I mean, the Al Gore approach says we have to choose between our economic benefit and the benefit of all life.

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But God commanded us to manage the planet for both our benefit and the benefit of all life, which means there will be solutions that are win, win, win.

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And so I load the book up with these win, win, win solutions that we can basically get started on right now.

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I mean, you've got the alarmist saying we need to do something tomorrow, not next year, but tomorrow.

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I say, if you want people to do something tomorrow, give them a strong economic incentive.

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If they're going to make 30 percent on their investment, guess what? They're going to jump on it. And, you know, that 30 percent is not out of the question.

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Several things I suggest have that kind of payoff and more. And so let's just put this in front of the people.

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And you don't need politicians. You don't need scientists. Just give them the economic incentive.

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And I want to give you one example I put in the book that I believe we should be using our fossil fuels as an incentive.

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And so one of the recommendations I put in the book, let's give the sub -Saharan peoples in Africa all the kerosene they want to burn for whatever purpose they want.

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Air conditioning, heating, cooking, whatever on the condition they work with us to replant the

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Sahara Desert. We can shrink the Sahara Desert down to one tenth of the size that it is right now.

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And if we were to do that, we could plant North Africa with grain that would feed the poor of the world.

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It would soak up huge quantities of greenhouse gases. And it's going to put more money in the pockets of all those people living in North Africa.

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And the wildlife will return. So the ecosystem is going to benefit. And we could have national parks there.

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I mean, there really aren't national parks in the Sahara Desert right now. But we could restore that, make it a beautiful place that people want to visit.

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And so everybody wins. That is brilliant. I mean, that's a chess move right there.

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That's thinking about three, four steps out. That's really good. I wonder though,

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I mean, look, we're having this conversation. Literally while fires are going off all over California, I saw on somebody's social media that who shared a photo from Oregon.

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The sky was just red, all red. Like at some point we do have to, because everything's alarming right now.

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We do have to calm down and figure this out. Do you believe that there is a time that we could come together as a nation?

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Or is this, you know, everybody seems to be so angry and afraid. Do you see that happening realistically?

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I do. I mean, for example, there's a lot of anger and politics directed at Brazil. Because you've got the

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Amazonian Brazilians just cutting down the Amazon jungle, burning the wood and turning it into pasture land because they want to make money on cattle raising.

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Unaware of the fact that the soil in the Amazon is so nutrient poor that after a decade, you're not going to be able to raise cattle.

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You're going to have a desert on your hand. We really are in danger of turning this huge Amazon jungle into a desert and everybody loses.

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Rather, we should go to the Amazonian people and say, you know what, we're going to let you cut down the trees.

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But here's how we want you to do it. Selectively cut down the old big trees that are in danger of dying.

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And if they die, they decay and release greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. And we all know the old big trees are where you're going to make the most money.

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That's where you get the high quality lumber for furniture and homes. And so let them cut down those old big trees when they're still healthy.

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On the condition they replant them with young trees. The young trees grow two to four times faster, which means they're going to pull two to four times more greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere.

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Those young trees are going to provide ecospace for the wildlife that's there and the plant life that's there.

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The people in the Amazon make more money. They get a healthy ecosystem. They preserve the jungle and we pull more greenhouse gases of the atmosphere.

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Now, I think the same lesson needs to be taught to those of us living in America. We have these huge national parks and national forests and we don't let lumbering companies come in because we're trying to preserve them.

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That's actually a bad strategy. I've been into national forests where a third of the trees are dead because, you know, we're not cutting down the trees.

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The trees get overpopulated. The bark beetles come in and kill them all. We'd be far wiser to say in the wintertime when the tourists are not there, let the lumber companies come in, selectively harvest the big old trees that are going to be valuable.

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Replant them with young trees and make sure you don't plant too many. And now you're going to have a healthy ecosystem.

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You're not going to have dead trees. The wildlife will return. The tourists will love it.

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And the lumber companies make money and you're not going to have the fire risk that we have today.

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The reason we have these huge fires, we've got overpopulated forests with way too much dead wood in the middle of them.

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And we've been preventing the fires from burning. There is a natural burn rate that's optimal for each kind of forest.

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Where I live in Southern California, the healthiest burn rate is once every eight years.

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And if you live in Oregon or Washington, it's about 15 to 20 years.

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And when you prevent fires, you basically now have a really big fire instead of several small fires.

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And we need to realize too, for those forests to be healthy, they need regular depositions of charcoal into the soil to provide the conditioning to allow water to get to the roots and for them to get nutrients.

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So there's an optimal wildfire burning rate. And we need to manage the forest in such a way that we have that optimal rate rather than what we're dealing with right now.

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Boy, this is and these are just two of many practical solutions that you provide in the book.

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So what I'm hearing you say, Dr. Ross, is our listeners and everyone else should go out, buy a copy of Weathering the

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Change, then buy another one and send it to their local congressman, to their state senators, to the governors.

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And to their pastor as well. To their pastor as well. That's good. And you know, if they want to get a snapshot of it, we're offering a free chapter at reasons .org

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slash Ross. So they can get an advanced look on it. And if they like it, they can go out and buy the book.

33:29

And yeah, I like what you suggest. Don't buy one book. Buy several because we're not going to turn things around unless people hear about this information.

33:39

That's right. Amen. Amen. So let's, just in the last few minutes here, let's get into the apologetic side of it.

33:46

So in the intro you talk about climate change and how it points back to the fine -tuning of the universe.

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You called it a supernatural way that God has made the world for humanity to flourish.

34:01

How exactly should people go about, on a practical level, talking about global warming and sort of weaving it into apologetics conversations?

34:12

Well, I would begin, this is how I do it. Are you aware that climate instability is a norm and climate stability is a unique exception?

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And are you interested why? And so just kind of open up a conversation. I've had those conversations with people in airplanes and in airports.

34:32

And when you throw those questions out, they say, hey, I want to hear all about this. And so I just started throwing out tidbits, you know, of why we have to be in an ice age cycle to have billions of us here.

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What it takes to have a stable period in that ice age cycle. How it simultaneously overwraps a similar brief episode in the sun.

34:55

A lot of people don't realize we've been looking at millions of stars in our Milky Way galaxy.

35:01

Our sun is five times more stable than the next most stable star. And our star, the sun, is in the stablest period of its burning cycle.

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And just ask the question, do you think that's an accident? And do you think it's also an accident that it perfectly overlaps our period of climate stability?

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Do you think it's an accident that overlaps a period where a galaxy hasn't had any nearby supernova within 5000 light years?

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And just keep throwing them out. And I say, you know, how many would you like to hear? Five, six, eight, ten?

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Are there really that many? And then I get in three or four and I say, stop, I've heard enough. I believe.

35:44

That's good. So you would advocate people sort of absorbing the information in your book, having it ready to go in their brains, that when they do actually go out and have these conversations, they can drop them sort of piecemeal into their conversations.

35:58

Yeah, I mean, just go to the water cooler. You can get something started. Everybody wants to talk about global warming.

36:06

You're absolutely right. And, you know, it's one of those popular sort of pop science talking points that everybody seems to have an opinion on.

36:15

So you can't go wrong there. Well, it's a principle you see the Apostle Paul using.

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When he went into Athens, what did he do? He engaged the philosophers about the latest ideas.

36:27

I think that principle applies to us today. What are the latest ideas that people are talking about?

36:34

Start there and use that as a bridge to the gospel. No. Amen. I absolutely agree.

36:42

And I mean, this kind of sparks. This is probably another episode. But, you know, what would some of those other areas of interest be that you've noticed people?

36:51

Well, we can also sort of use those as springboards into deeper apologetics conversations.

36:57

But I think you're absolutely right. And, you know, climate change is certainly one of those things that would hold attention, you know, to bring that back.

37:07

Because everything has a kind of a thread that points back to God and his handiwork in the world.

37:14

Well, that's the principle of our organization, Reasons to Believe. We write articles.

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We speak on the latest new reasons to believe. And so like today, yesterday,

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I put up a post on the discovery of phosphine in the upper clouds of Venus. You know, that was the number one trending thing on social media.

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So we jumped on it, got some articles on it. And we're engaging people with that. And what was incredible,

37:42

I anticipated a month ago, not even knowing this is going to be announced. I wrote an article on the possibility of life in the upper clouds of Venus.

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And lo and behold, this phosphine discovery comes out. And it gave us an immediate link. And people are bombarding our website.

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And so I look at that again as a principle. Just do what the Apostle Paul did. Take advantage of the latest things that are happening and build a bridge to the gospel.

38:09

Amen. Amen. So in closing, Dr. Ross, we have your great book here.

38:15

But I'm sure that there are those out there. Not only has their interest been piqued, now they're hungry.

38:21

So beyond this particular book, they want to go deeper into more along these lines. What other resources can

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Christians who are interested in this sort of interact with to stay up on this issue? I'm sure your website is one of them.

38:34

It is. And this book is actually a sequel to a book I wrote a couple of years ago, Improbable Planet.

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And the book Improbable Planet basically looks at the whole history of the Earth. Because if you look at the entire 4 .5

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billion year history of the Earth, it's filled with apologetic arguments for God in every little narrow segment of Earth's history.

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And so I talk about the miracle that we have dirt on planet Earth. And how we need to be thanking

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God for 2 billion years of cryptogamic crust. Most people never heard of that.

39:08

But if it wasn't for those 2 billion years of cryptogamic crust, we wouldn't be here today. And so we actually see

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God at work every step of the way. And a principle we're building into our latest books, is that every event in the history of the universe,

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Earth and Earth's life, and every component, no matter how small, in the universe,

39:30

Earth and Earth's life, plays some significant role in making possible the redemption of billions of human beings.

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If you look, you'll find it. I've been challenging my secular scientist friends saying, look,

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I know you're not a Christian, but if you'll simply do your scientific research, from a biblical redemptive perspective,

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I guarantee it'll make you a better scientist. And of course my goal is, once they experience success, they're going to say, you know what, maybe

40:00

I need to look at this Christianity thing. Yeah. No, I love that. I love putting on the gospel glasses and seeing everything in that redemptive aspect, and I think that is something that we all should get better at doing, particularly walking through this kind of a culture in the 21st century.

40:19

Well, Dr. Ross, it's been such a pleasure to chat with you. Again, the book that we've been discussing is

40:26

Weathering Climate Change, and we certainly wish you the best and Godspeed on the next several books.

40:33

Do you have an idea about what the next book might be? Well, I'm actually finishing up my next book right now.

40:40

I've got two more chapters to go, actually three, and it's got the tentative title

40:45

Interior Designs. Nothing to do about furniture or about decorating your home.

40:52

It's all about the interior designs of our super cluster of galaxies, our galaxy cluster, our galaxy, the local group, our star, the sun.

41:02

I'm right now writing chapters on the mantle of the Earth, the crust of the Earth, the inner core, the outer core, and how all of this interior design plays a role in making possible our redemption.

41:15

Everywhere you look, you see interior design. Yeah. The heavens declare the glory of God.

41:21

That's right. Well, tonight's guest was Dr. Hugh Ross, founder and president of Reasons to Believe and the author of Weathering Climate Change.

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For more from Dr. Ross' ministry, check out reasons .org. Dr. Ross, thanks so much for joining me.

41:35

Yeah, my pleasure. Thanks. Well, and that's all the time that we have for tonight. We will return with more theology, apologetics, and engaging the culture for Christ.