David Archibald has written a new book. In short: Baby boomers enjoyed the most benign period in human history: fifty years of relative peace, cheap energy, plentiful grain supply, and a warming climate due to the highest solar activity for 8,000 years. The party is over—prepare for the twilight of abundance.
Archibald provides this overview.
The book’s preface provides a taste of the contents and gives some background to it.
Preface
This book had its origins back in 2005, when a fellow scientist requested that I attempt to replicate the work a German researcher had done on the Sun’s influence on climate. At the time, the solar physics community had a wide range of predictions of the level of future solar activity.
But strangely, the climate science community was not interested in what the Sun might do. I pressed on and made a few original contributions to science. The Sun cooperated, and solar activity has played out much as I predicted. It has become established—for those who are willing to look at the evidence—that climate will very closely follow our colder Sun. Climate is no longer a mystery to us. We can predict forward up to two solar cycles, that is about twenty-five years into the future. When models of solar activity are further refined, we may be able to predict climate forward beyond a hundred years.
I was a foot soldier in the solar science trench of the global warming battle. But that battle is only a part of the much larger culture wars. The culture wars are about the division of the spoils of civilization, about what Abraham Lincoln termed “that same old serpent that says you work and I eat, you toil and I will enjoy the fruits of it.” This struggle has been going on for at least as long as human beings have been speaking to each other, possibly for more than fifty thousand years. The forces of darkness have already lost the global warming battle—the actual science is “settled” in a way quite different from what they contend, and their pseudo-science and dissimulation have become impossible to hide from the public at large—but they are winning the culture wars, even to the extent of being able to steal from the future.
The scientific battle over global warming was won, and now the only thing that remained to be done was to shoot the wounded. That could give only so much pleasure, and the larger struggle called. So I turned my attention from climate to energy—always an interest of mine, as an Exxon-trained geologist. The Arab Spring brought attention to the fact that Egypt imports half its food, and that fact set me off down another line of inquiry, which in turn became a lecture entitled “The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse”. Those apocalyptic visions demanded a more lasting form—and thus this book.
While it has been an honor to serve on the side of the angels, that service has been tinged with a certain sadness—sadness that so many in the scientific community have been corrupted by a self-loathing for Western Civilization, what the French philosopher Julien Benda in 1927 termed “the treason of the intellectuals.”1 Ten years before Benda’s book, the German philosopher Oswald Spengler wrote The Decline of the West.2 Spengler dispensed with the traditional view of history as a linear progress from ancient to modern. The thesis of his book is that Western civilization is ending and we are witnessing the last season, the winter. Spengler’s contention is that this fate cannot be avoided, that we are facing complete civilizational exhaustion.
In this book I contend that the path to the broad sunlit uplands of permanent prosperity still lies before us—but to get there we have to choose that path. Nature is kind, and we could seamlessly switch from rocks that burn in chemical furnaces to a metal that burns in nuclear furnaces and maintain civilization at a level much like the one we experience now. But for that to happen, civilization has to slough off the treasonous elites, the corrupted and corrupting scribblers. Our civilization is not suffering from exhaustion so much as a sugar high. This book describes the twilight of abundance, the end of our self-indulgence as a civilization. What lies beyond that is of our own choosing.
It has been a wonderful journey of service and I have had many help me on the way. They include Bob Foster, Ray Evans, David Bellamy, Anthony Watts, Vaclav Klaus, Joseph Poprzeczny, Marek Chodakiewcz, Stefan Bjorklund, and the team at Regnery. Thanks to all.
I will give a bit further background to the book. Thanks to an introduction from James Delingpole, I had a meeting with the publisher, Regnery, in Washington in October 2012. At that meeting, the chief editor asked me,”Mr Archibald, what do hope to achieve with this book?”
I replied,”This may sound a bit whacko, but when I started out in climate science in 2005, I thought that if I get to the US Senate, that is as far as I could ever hope to get and I will be happy. I got to the US Senate in 2011 (I gave a lecture on climate in a US Senate hearing room thanks to Myron Ebell of the Competitive Enterprise Institute). With this book, I will write a strategic energy plan for the United States. That is step one. Step two is to implement the plan.”
If I can make it to the US Senate in six years from a cold start and 20,000 km away, anything is possible. So why not aim high?
This is the take-home message of the book: Humanity is in for a rough patch but we can come out the other side in decent shape if we have an eternity of low cost power from thorium molten salt reactors.
Once again, thanks very much to Anthony. I volunteered as his sidekick on his Australian tour a few years ago. I was invited back to Capitol Hill in September last year to give a lecture entitled Our Cooling Climate in a Congressional hearing room. The speaker’s notes are here.
One further thing. If you like the book and think that civilisation would be advanced by other people reading it, please put a review on the book’s Amazon page and that will contribute to how Amazon rates it.
Twilight of Abundance, now shipping on Amazon.
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I know this is the wrong place to print this but i have to draw attention to it. For the last two days
I have been arguing over the ph of the seas and effects,
Finally this paper was thrown at me as proof of the potential damage,
http://www.stanford.edu/~longcao/Caldeira(2007_comment).pdf
in the paper it quotes the EPA after making assumptions that the ph of the seas will decline , that a co2 level of 760 ppm will lower the pH of the surface ocean by 0.28
relative to the natural ‘‘mid 18th century’’ conditions. It then quotes the EPA regulations as a back up.
EPA_
“Quality Criteria for Water state: ‘‘For open ocean waters
where the depth is substantially greater than the euphotic
zone, the pH should not be changed more than 0.2 units
outside the range of naturally occurring variation . . .’’
The paper misquotes the EPA and misses out crucial info,
SO this is what the EPA regulations actually said ,
US EPA 1976 Recommended Marine pH Criteria
“pH range of 6.5 to 8.5 for marine aquatic life (but not varying more than 0.2 units outside of the
normally occurring range).” These marine criteria apply to open-ocean waters within 3 miles of a State
or Territory‟s shoreline where the depth is substantially greater than the euphotic zone (depth of water
that receives sufficient light for photosynthesis and growth of green plants).
thegriss says:@ur momisugly March 6, 2014 at 2:09 am
Be a bit careful David.. If we turn solely to thorium, what will there be to replenish the absolutely necessary CO2. If we have the wherewithal, it must never be allowed to drop to the dangerously low levels of the past 10,000+ years.
In fact, to maintain food supplies in world with an increasing population, we should be aiming to push it up significantly higher. 700ppm would be a decent starting point.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Bears repeating.
However using Thorium as baseload in first world countries leaves coal for the other countries to use to bring their level of civilization up to a reasonable level.
I also agree with
Eric Worrall @ur momisugly March 6, 2014 at 12:39 am – “The “elites” already have a plan to survive the coming cold.”
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Note that the CIA report on the Coming Ice Age and Holdren/Erhlich’s book on De-industrializing the USA and Maurce Strong’s UN First Earth Summit all happened within a couple of years of each other.
The CIA report: “A Study of Climatological Research as it Pertains to Intelligence Problems” certainly doesn’t give me any faith that our political leaders are concerned with the peasants survival either.
Holdren and the other Malthusians from Stanford University were not alone. The US government was behind them since BEFORE their book Human Ecology: Problems and Solutions (1973) was published recommending the USA be de-developed. The book just echoed the real thoughts of the US government of that time. Given Holdren is Obama’s Science Czar and the Malthusian drivel is still coming out of Stanford as a recent WUWT article shows, I do not see that the actual mindset in DC has changed.
OH, and you can add US “Universities in Africa ‘land grab’ (Guardian) the seed banks, DNA testing (and banking) of all babies born in the USA and UK, DNA banks for 4-H livestock. Not to mention the USDA providing the funds for development of Epicyte’s spermicidal corn to the pile of evidence that all is not as it seems with regard to America’s Ruling Class and their thoughts about us peasants.
I just received a book titled “Climate of Hunger – Mankind and the world’s changing weather” by Reid Bryson and Thomas Murray, published in 1977, at the end of the last ~30-year period of global cooling.
It is an interesting read, and describes natural climate changes over the past several thousand years and the impacts on civilizations.
The book particularly focuses on the last ~1000 years of human history, and the increase in human suffering that coincided with periods of natural global cooling.
The book is of particular interest because it was written in an era before the current “blame everything on CO2” mantra became the accepted wisdom of imbeciles worldwide.
From wiki:
Reid Bryson (7 June 1920 – 11 June 2008) was an American atmospheric scientist, geologist and meteorologist. He was a professor emeritus of the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He completed a B.A. in geology at Denison University in 1941 and a Ph.D. in meteorology from University of Chicago in 1948. In 1946 he joined the faculty of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and in 1948 he became the founder and first chairman of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Department of Meteorology and Center for Climatic Research. He was the first director of the Institute for Environmental Studies (now the Nelson Institute) in 1970.
In 1944, during World War II, he was one of the few meteorologists who accurately identified Typhoon Cobra, which savaged Halsey’s Third Fleet.
Bryson was made a Global Laureate by the United Nations Global Environment Program in 1990.
…
In later years, when it was clear that the climate was indeed warming, Bryson argued that while climate change and a global increase in temperature are real, he did not believe that they are caused by human activity. Rather, he argued that they are part of natural global climate cycles, particularly the end of the Little Ice Age: “All this argument is the temperature going up or not, it’s absurd,” Bryson continues. “Of course it’s going up. It has gone up since the early 1800s, before the Industrial Revolution, because we’re coming out of the Little Ice Age, not because we’re putting more carbon dioxide into the air.”
Video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzYfJP-HWcQ
richard says: @ur momisugly March 6, 2014 at 3:48 am
I know this is the wrong place to print this but i have to draw attention to it. For the last two days
I have been arguing over the ph of the seas and effects….
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
You are in luck I just finished reading this page (PAGE 60) in evidence given before Congress:
Chemical reactions — The dissolution of carbon dioxide in the ocean water is defined by the following chemical reactions:
The oceans are BUFFERED (The equations given)
Also see Dr. Segalstad’s web page his experiment (video)
and DOWNLOAD my ESEF Vol. 1 Chapter (PDF approx. 200 kbytes) from that web page.
That also has the chemistry starting on page 3
4. Chemical laws for distribution of CO2 in nature
Hope that helps.
John Peter says: @ur momisugly March 6, 2014 at 2:38 am
I am awaiting Leif Svalgaard’s opinion on this book.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
You do not have to wait. I can tell you that Svalgaard’s opinion of David is very low and Svalgaard’s opinion is the sun is constant and has very little to do with the earth’s climate. He does credit the Milancovitch cycles for ice ages because they are based on the earth’s orbital changes and not changes in the sun.
All that is necessary for prosperity is free trade and property rights. The government of the United States has been attacking these for 50 years. This war will decide the future of abundance.
Thorium ?
http://www.thoriumenergyalliance.com
Sidelined because no weapons potential?
Civilisation & the economy strangled by the Bankster 1%s?
http://www.themoneymasters.com
In particular
http://www.themoneymasters.com/mm/the-wonderful-wizard-of-oz/
The monetary reform symbolism within the popular film.
Gamecock says: @ur momisugly March 6, 2014 at 5:03 am
All that is necessary for prosperity is free trade and property rights. The government of the United States has been attacking these for 50 years.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
More like a hundred.
1. The Federal Reserve Act of 1913
2. The Sixteenth Amendment adopted on February 3, 1913, allows the Congress to levy an income tax without apportionment.
3. The Seventh Amendment adopted on May 31, 1913, changed senators from election by state legislatures to election by popular vote.
These three moves shifted the power base from the states where the people had more control to the federal government. It has been down hill ever since especially after FDR took our gold and gave the Federal Government unlimited power thanks to a re-interpretation of the Commerce Clause allowing the Federal government to regulate food for home use (Wickard v. Filburn) and just about everything else.
It’s understandable that the Northern parts of the Northern Hemisphere will see a decline in production. Why wouldn’t that same problem hold for the Southern parts of the Southern Hemisphere? It seems that it didn’t; I just don’t understand why.
“Unless they were locked into a peasant, hunter-gatherer or similar society, it’s generally the case that over the last couple of thousand years each generation was better off than the previous one.”
Romulus Augustulus might disagree with you about that.
Gail Combs says:
March 6, 2014 at 4:35 am
You do not have to wait. I can tell you that Svalgaard’s opinion of David is very low and Svalgaard’s opinion is the sun is constant and has very little to do with the earth’s climate.
Almost correct, except the ‘constant’ bit. The Sun undergoes cycles of activity, returning to an almost constant ‘base level’ between each cycle which in turn varies in size.
On the book: I have not read it, but its tone [judging from this post] seems much too alarmist for my taste and its claim that we can predict solar activity two cycles in advance is unfounded. IMHO, we can predict with confidence less than one cycle ahead. We can guess solar activity in the future, but that is not an actionable prediction.
We have much less ability to predict solar cycles accurately than we do the weather or climate.
The solar cycle we are in was not predicted and we have no idea how this one will end or how they next will begin.
Additionally, I find predictions of the various apocalypses to be accurate only in the negative: What the apocalyptic predictions claim the future holds are almost never correct.
Apocalyptic claptrap is one of the reasons I started questioning the AGW community.
But humans seem to have a need for apocalyptic stories at a very deep level and have apparently done so for millenia.
Drop a zero.
Gail Combs says:
March 6, 2014 at 4:35 am
the sun is constant and has very little to do with the earth’s climate.
================
It is strange however that the Milancovitch cycles provide no explanation for the Little Ice Age, and the Sun has shown itself to be quite variable when it comes to its magnetic cycle.
If the sun is constant, why does the solar (magnetic) cycle length vary? Why does the sunspot count vary? Why does the solar wind strength vary? This does not provide assurance that the Sun is constant, only that certain measures of the Sun are relatively constant.
Climate Science assumes that Climate is drive by watts/meter squared. Since this varies only slightly based on a very limited period of space-based observation of the Sun, it is assumed that the Sun has limited effect on climate.
However, assumptions in science have a very long track record of being proven wrong in the long run. Nature almost always surprises us in ways we never imagined.
For example, there are many observations that suggest there is a 1000-2000 year cycle in climate. Even under the assumption that climate is driven by w/m2, would we be able with modern technology to detect such a long cycle variation in the Sun against the background noise of the solar cycle? I expect not. The sampling period is much too short.
It just isn’t choosing a path. The path to prosperity is a well worn one in which we allow it to be followed. I see many woeing and despairing things like peak oil with what are we going to do. I always answer: “Do nothing, it will be done for you.” Their are too many people employed at answering “what are we going to do” when there is no problem. We have to find a way to overcome humanity-hating ideologues from having so much influence – they are recruiting at 5 years old, they have no qualms about employing lies and deceits and history tells us that their limits can’t be plumbed (don’t take lightly talk of trials for skeptics, hit squads and the like).
I hope the book has a paragraph or two on the importance of being proactive in educating our children, speaking out, etc. (the anti-civilization zealots rely on the silence of the majority).
Nicely done, Gail, very neat. The nail rapped smartly on the head 3 times. 🙂
I’ll raise you 137 years. 🙂
!st May, 1776, Rothschild commissioned a report on how to secure world domination:
Go to youtube & put in their search box : Whistleblower Head of FBI tells all from NWO 1 hr 4 mins.
Or try the ref, it might work :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=do_swOstGaI
Ted L. Gunderson, ex head of FBI in LA, would not shut up about what he’d learned.
He wound up poisoned with arsenic.
Is the plan coming apart?
http://www.usawatchdog.com
& scroll down to the article:
US Currency Weak and About to Crash.
02/12/2014 371 comments. ( which I haven’t had time to read.
Karen is ex Chief Legal Counsel for the World Bank.
Is this lady the real deal, or is she full of it?
Anyone?
Cheers,
JD.
If the Sun was a long period pulsating star, with a period of say 1-2 hundred solar cycles, showing similar variability as the solar cycle, and say 1-2% change in intensity over the cycle, could we detect this?
Yep. Note typo: no. 3 was the Seventeenth.
You all should read Mark Levin’s The Liberty Amendments for a plan of action to rescue the States and the Citizens from the overreaching, overburdening Federal Leviathan.
/Mr Lynn
jdseanjd says:
March 6, 2014 at 5:24 am
Thorium ?
http://www.thoriumenergyalliance.com
Sidelined because no weapons potential?
=============================================================
From the link:
“Almost 20,000 hours of operation and the true value of thorium was proven as a superlative energy source in the molten-salt reactor experiment (MSRE) between 1964-1975.”
There was no thorium in the reactor. Really. Thorium is the 100 mpg carburetor of the 21st century.
Gamecock says: March 6, 2014 at 6:23 am “There was no thorium in the reactor. Really. Thorium is the 100 mpg carburetor of the 21st century.”
LOL, well said. And cold fusion is the dehydrated fuel pill.
And why have all the molten solids cooled reactors been decommissioned? Were thorium to fulfil its extreme expectations, it would not overcome the difficulties of cooling a reactor with a molten solid.
Quote by Paul Ehrlich, professor, Stanford University: “Giving society cheap, abundant energy would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun.”
Quote by Club of Rome: “The Earth has cancer and the cancer is Man.”
Many more here: http://www.c3headlines.com/global-warming-quotes-climate-change-quotes.html
That is what we are up against. Humanity haters, or more specifically, haters of western civilization, and all of modern society. Though, of course, it doesn’t stop them from taking every advantage from what they purport to despise.
Is David Archibald the anti- Ehrlich? If past is prologue, how widely will any futurist’s dart miss the mark? Whatever lies in store for our planet, I haven’t seen any evidence which holds under scrutiny, which indicates the Sun has much to do with climate variance, unless (still highly speculative) interactions with GCRs is a driving force.
ferdberple says:
March 6, 2014 at 5:58 am
If the sun is constant, why does the solar (magnetic) cycle length vary? Why does the sunspot count vary? Why does the solar wind strength vary? This does not provide assurance that the Sun is constant, only that certain measures of the Sun are relatively constant.
Climate Science assumes that Climate is drive by watts/meter squared. Since this varies only slightly based on a very limited period of space-based observation of the Sun, it is assumed that the Sun has limited effect on climate.
============
An answer with regards to the sun may be within your comment.