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.
Col Mosby says:
March 6, 2014 at 2:22 am
Fast reactors can burn our nuclear wastes and provide 1000 years of energy for our country
just using what nuclear wastes we now have.
===========
With the election of President Bill Clinton in 1992, and the appointment of Hazel O’Leary as the Secretary of Energy, there was pressure from the top to cancel the IFR.[28] Sen. John Kerry (D, MA) and O’Leary led the opposition to the reactor…
In 2001, as part of the Generation IV roadmap, the DOE tasked a 242 person team of scientists from DOE, UC Berkeley, MIT, Stanford, ANL, LLNL, Toshiba, Westinghouse, Duke, EPRI, and other institutions to evaluate 19 of the best reactor designs on 27 different criteria. The IFR ranked #1 in their study which was released April 9, 2002.[34]
At present there are no Integral Fast Reactors in commercial operation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_fast_reactor
http://www.skirsch.com/politics/ifr/DOEnuclearstudy.pdf
I won’t live long enough to see any of David A’s visions. Still, I don’t see an explanation of the workings between Sun and Climate. Thus, I don’t anticipate much traction for “ the path to the broad sunlit uplands of permanent prosperity.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Gail Combs says:
March 6, 2014 at 4:27 am
Thanks for the links. I’ll have a look later.
If you haven’t seen E. M. Smith’s comments on this topic, here is a link:
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2014/02/09/co2-makes-the-ocean-more-alkaline/
Doing follow-up, it seems people with pools and aquariums know more about water chemistry than most folks but it is still difficult when transferring that knowledge to the oceans.
“…so many in the scientific community have been corrupted by a self-loathing for Western Civilization…” That explains a lot. I’ll buy this book.
It’s actually worse than this assessment when you read up on the look-back and look-forward issues raised by the economist Robert Gordon. You will find that wealth creation, average growth rates, and the tax base were unsustainably large during the baby boomer generation. This was further extended by female entry into the workplace. The underlying growth potential of these demographic and participation effects peaked in about 2000 and only a finance bubble kept it propped up for another business cycle. Looking ahead, we will have the combined negative effects on society of low economic growth potential, cold climate, Detroit-style financing gimmicks, and public investments directed in precisely the opposite direction, as if nothing ever changed. It is the last item that is most distressing, a concerted policy effort to be wrong in the face of diminished capacity to get it right and in the presence of warning signs in both science and public finance. We are entering the age of extreme excuses in both science, policy, and social condition. The politics of a zero-sum game are most likely in this scenario.
hunter says:
March 6, 2014 at 5:50 am
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.
It was predicted, e.g. http://www.leif.org/research/Cycle%2024%20Smallest%20100%20years.pdf or http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2003SPD….34.0603S
ferdberple says:
March 6, 2014 at 5:58 am
If the sun is constant, why does the solar (magnetic) cycle length vary?
The Sun is not constant. Why do people keep repeating this nonsense? The Sun has cyclic solar activity on top of a constant basal level.
“We can predict forward up to two solar cycles, that is about twenty-five years into the future”
Predictions, especially those about the future, are extremely difficult. Take them with a grain of salt and a healthy dose of skepticism.
This layman’s understanding is we are just at beginning edge of learning about the sun, climate, etc. Our present knowledge base hasn’t been around long enough to prove out climate scale forecasts.
Just ask climate modelers. Well, perhaps not them as they are right and the data is wrong, but you know what I mean. 🙂
David Archibald gives the best insight into long term fuel and food trends that I have seen. He clearly lays out the challenges that we must solve. I very strongly recommend his presentation and book.
I gotta get this book. Hope it is available for Kindle. Coincidentally, I blogged about the Goldilocks Generation last month, but I don’t think I was as positive about the future as Archibald.
http://gonnasayit.com/2014/02/09/the-goldilocks-generation/
Another prediction of low cycle 24:
Schatten, K. H.: Fair space weather for solar cycle 24, Geophys. Res. Lett., 32, L21106,
doi:10.1029/2005GL024363, 2005.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2005GL024363/abstract :
“[1] We discuss the polar field precursor method of solar activity forecasting, first developed 3 decades ago. Using this method the peak amplitude of the next solar cycle (24) is estimated at 124 ± 30 in terms of smoothed F10.7 Radio Flux and 80 ± 30 in terms of smoothed international or Zurich Sunspot number (Ri or Rz). This may be regarded as a “fair space weather” long term forecast. To support this prediction, direct measurements are obtained from the Wilcox and Mount Wilson Solar Observatories. Additionally, coronal features do not show the characteristics of well-formed polar coronal holes associated with typical solar minima, but rather resemble stunted polar field levels. The question is raised: why have the Sun’s polar fields not strengthened comparably in the 2000–2005 time period, as in the previous few decades? The dramatic field changes seen suggest the importance of field motions associated with photospheric (e.g. meridional) flows for the Sun’s dynamo. Flows may also play a role in active region development, e.g., it is possible that field magnification occurs through surface processes, namely active region field strengthening (sunspot growth) through the influx of like photospheric magnetic regions, and even the influx of ERs (ephemeral regions), wherein the same sign (like) flux could be differentially drawn into spots of that sign, leading to field growth.”
Apparently you haven’t seen Mad Max
😉
ferdberple says:@ur momisugly March 6, 2014 at 5:58 am
Gail Combs says: @ur momisugly March 6, 2014 at 4:35 am
the sun is constant and has very little to do with the earth’s climate….
>>>>>>>>>>>>>
No that is what I said was Dr Svalgaard’s position was (minor variations of ~ 0.1% if I remember correctly)
That is not my position however. (Swivels. ducks and runs before Dr Svalgaard descends breathing fire.)
Gail Combs says:
March 6, 2014 at 7:26 am
That is not my position however.
‘Positions’ are not facts.
jdseanjd says: @ur momisugly March 6, 2014 at 6:13 am
Thanks for the info.
I pinpoint 1913 as the year ‘they’ won.
There is also 1915 when J.P. Morgan bought out the important newspapers so the US public could be fed propaganda instead of news or 1894 where “Progressive
BrainwashingEducation” was born.The travesty is how these same academics joined with a bank known as the government to hike tuition and board for college up so high that a permanent recession is triggered, stopping the momentum of whole generations as they enter their peak years. Thanks to fracking, at least the US and a few other countries can pull free molecular money right out of the ground, as inflation renders fixed value student loans into relatively smaller ones.
lsvalgaard says:
March 6, 2014 at 7:31 am
‘Positions’ are not facts.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
And all the facts are not in so we are left with the best guess based on the available facts/evidence hence ‘Position’ which is an interpretation of the facts/evidence available at this time.
I am a chemist and I have followed biology just for the fun of it and the “Facts” and information changes so fast (especially in Bio) it makes your head spin.
The Arab Spring brought attention to the fact that Egypt imports half its food,
_______________________________
This, from the nation that once fed ancient Rome with its huge grain surplus.
And the reason for this dire food shortage is obvious when you fly over the Delta – rampant overpopulation. You do not see open fields in the Delta any more, you just see village after village almost touching each other, with barely a field in between.
The perils and evils of the anti-Malthusian brigade are clear to see in Egypt – a nation that is living on the edge, with precious little exports to pay for all that food it needs, because it has built over its prime farm land and can no longer feed itself. The anti-Malthusians are a grave threat not only to Egypt, but the world.
Incidentally, Egypt still flares off all its gas too. So when you fly over Egypt at night, all you can see is hundreds of gas flares, burning away 24/7. I hope they are not paying for gas imports at the same time…..
Silver Ralph
“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.”
I think we are at dawn of abundance.
I think nuclear energy is fine, just as I think hydro power is fine. But main thing is we are in the information age and the space age. So we are having changes in education due to information
age and we are getting lower costs to get into space. This should not confused with idea that our governments are lowering the cost of getting into space, or the government is in driver seat in regards to changing education as related to information age. No, it has little to do with how responsive the government has been- but rather government is mostly a force which is inhibiting. Though government could given some credit for not inhibiting it as much a governments could be capable of inhibiting it. Or you say government has been balanced rather some fantasy of government doing anything heroic.
Imagining we going to be transformed by nuclear energy, requires a heroic government, and that’s a poor bet at best. It’s like thinking government could improve education. Or that government could lower the cost of getting into space. Or government is currently improving American healthcare.
So, a better future would be a government which was less totalitarian- a government less like Russia or China [or current apparent trajectory of America]. Or any government in which citizens are dependent on political leadership making good decisions- because they never or rarely actually do this. Their decisions generally end up being related to increasing taxes and starting wars. Rather what they should do, which is lowering taxes and causing less wars in the future.
Or in other words politicians always want more power- that is defining characteristic of politicians.
They love sugar, and we permit them gain a lifetime supply of sugar which they gouge upon until they drop dead.
Say “globally” increase access to space. And/or access to education. And/or access to making electrical power from nuclear power plants
Now if one could somehow characterize governmental control- how much governmental control is need for access to Space, Education, and nuclear power plants?
What are consequence of having cost of getting into space becoming lower.
If low enough it means people could live in space- in orbit, or other planets. And millions of people want to do this. And if thousands of people actually did this, it would radically change our future. Just as thousands of people starting to have electrical power to light their homes and thousand people flying on airplanes radically changed the world. There lot a ramification or opportunities associated the lower the cost of getting into space.
Galactically, Earth begins to not be some “third world planet”, so universally we are going somewhere. Rather than remaining cavemen. So if concerned about universe status, that could one consideration.
But in terms of globally energy. The only reason we don’t put solar panels in space is because it
cost too much to put them in space. So if costs to get into space was low enough, we would harvest solar energy from space.
And technically it possible to get it low enough cost to do this. So it’s unlike fusion energy.
We can get into space, we can not make a fusion reactor which works. The problem of space
is not that it can’t be done, the problem is it is currently too expensive. And more matter how much money you spend, you can’t make a workable fusion reactor yet. Once that is possible
one consider the cost of making fusion reactor for making electrical power.
So cost of getting into space has lower, and probably will continue to lower in the future, but at current rate it lowering in cost doesn’t indicate we will close to harvesting electrical energy from Space. So, we launching things into space for 50 years, and if extend into future another 50 year, the rate of reduction in cost that has occurred if extended into future does not make it low enough. So don’t want anyone assuming I mean it is lowering this fast, but there “things” would could happen we could affect it so it lowers faster.
So access to space at moment is like 1960 computers, and without knowing variable involving the market, hard to predict computer would become the cost they were in 2010.
And rocket technology has not changed over last 50 years by much and I don’t expect it
to change much over next 50 fifty year. But would changed rapidly changed computer was more people wanted them- they reached a cost and capability that allowed more people to get them.
So cost of cost rocket could right now, lower by a half- and that has to do how many are made, rather than how they are made. And lower by half is not enough, but it can trigger other factors
which lower the cost further.
In terms fission reactors- or current nuclear reactors used for electrical power, Bill Gates is looking mass producing portable reactor. And that could work in terms of getting cheap source
of nuclear energy. So that could good, but getting cheap access to space, would be more significant in terms of the future.
Speaking of food, where I live (Corn and Soybean belt) there is still a foot of snow and ice on the ground. The high temps this week end are for above freezing temperatures (37-40F). If we do not see consistently above freezing temps both day and night there could still be snow on the ground come April. Planting season is approaching and what will happen if the ground is still frozen 2-3 feet deep. In many locations, civil authorities still advise rural people to keep their faucets on drip becuase of the deepening freeze levels.
How long will this cold pattern persist before real problems like crop yields and choice of crops planted become a big deal?
lsvalgaard says:
March 6, 2014 at 7:31 am
Gail Combs says:
March 6, 2014 at 7:26 am
That is not my position however.
‘Positions’ are not facts.
<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
ain’t it great?
You can swivel and duck, but you can’t hide, Gail. You need a suit of armor against Leif.
What is this about a “cold sun”?
David Archibald has written enough about peak oil to convince me he really believes in it. But my father told me 50 years ago there was more oil under SW Wyoming in the shale than there was in all the Middle East. He also assumed we would figure out how to get it out, someday, when prices and technology converged. My father didn’t believe in peak oil. “Peak Oil” is a matter of belief and not observable fact; The believers just keep getting disappointed. Archibald’s prognostications will be flawed (false prophecy) if he doesn’t construct a null hypothesis that peak oil could be true or false. Based on observations over the last fifty years “peak oil” is not a certainty. That is charitably put too.
A relatively small part of the population is farm kids.
My wife was one. She lived on a real working farm.
My background has a hobby farm with circus animals, and
a hobby ranch, but neither were lawns that need to be mown.
My wife has horticultural degrees, and enjoys growing tropicals.
We live in a sub-tropical zone, thus this is a challenge.
200 miles to our north, it snows and freezes every winter, and our plants could not grow.
200 miles south, they don’t need to perform the exercise every winter of wrapping the trunks and misting the leaves on cold nights, while moving a dozen of the more tender specimens into the shop. Seasonal “climate change” is a reality…but our stuff is a hobby,
As a private pilot, I’ve flown across the vast plains of the US and southern Canada.
@130 mph, taking more than a days to cross something qualifies “vast”.
A couple of degrees of warming, and the 200X1500 miles north of the grain belt would become productive (as would vast swaths of Russia).
A couple of degrees cooler, and a 200X1500 swath here, and more in Russia, might have to return to marginal pasture.
We are watching the Russians on the world stage now.
With warming, they will have more resources. How will they react?
With cooling, they will have hunger. How will they react?
Fire or ice…both will have consequences.
Where should we be putting our “climate change” concerns? Hint: “the EPA” is the wrong answer.
Miking sure we have manageable food and shelter whether the change is colder, warmer, or more variability might not be a bad strategy.
Gail Combs says:
March 6, 2014 at 7:49 am
“‘Positions’ are not facts.”
And all the facts are not in so we are left with the best guess based on the available facts/evidence hence ‘Position’ which is an interpretation of the facts/evidence available at this time.
All the facts are never in, and as you say ‘position’ is your opinion based on what you know and what you accept as ‘evidence’. I would consider the scientific basis for the current state of affairs as more than a mere ‘guess’, but will accept that your opinion is just your guess.
“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 ruse of claiming to use other people’s money to give out favors to one’s constituency seems to work well even with some of the more conservative political bases. After all, the argument goes, if we don’t get the money some other state, county or city will get that government grant. And politically, it is very difficult to run against Santa Claus. What they forget is that it is actually their money with which they are being bribed.
And yet, no prescription ever issued/mentioned to correct this. Not even a peep about invoking an Article V solution as outlined in the Constitution (vis-a-vis a convention of the states). Do you/have you ever read that document (the Constitution)?
Convention of the States:
http://conventionofstates.com/?gclid=CNPj85ym_rwCFUpk7Aod7HUA-w
.