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.
This sounds a bit like Paul Ehrlich/John Holdren lite. The Club of Rome report from the early 1970s, lite.
Yes, baby boomers in the US were at a great time in history, for them. The US was pretty much the only industrial power left standing, so the US had little competition for quite a while.
But are things really so dire? Haven’t we just been through a decade and a half when about half a billion people left $1 per day poverty to get into working or middle classes? It didn’t happen in the US — it happened in China, India, in other parts of the developing world — because we were already near the top of the heap and are facing competition like we’ve never faced before, but if we look at the world as a whole, things are getting much brighter.
Those interested in Archibald’s book might also be interested in Jacques Barzun’s “From Dawn to Decadence.”
http://books.google.com/books/about/From_dawn_to_decadence.html?id=UfdSZQf8UjkC
Seconded.
.
lsvalgaard says:
“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.”
Opinion vs guess seems to be very much in the eye of the beholder in many areas of science. For example, MOND is gaining followers as the great search for Dark Matter continues to come up empty handed. A good test of some of the unproven hypotheses in many areas is to determine how “convenient” the opinion is for the scientist to be within the consensus ring. It is always inconvenient to be burned at the stake, literally, or figuratively for that matter.
JP says:
March 6, 2014 at 7:57 am
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…..
>>>>>>>>>>>>>
I am in mid North Carolina (Piedmont) I just checked and the ground temperature here and it is 38 °F (six inch metal thermometer) Our planting season is ~ April 15 for beans (Garden types) and April 20th for tomatoes. Spinach is Feb. 15-Mar. 15.
Do slight changes in solar output change the climate here on earth? I don’t think anyone knows yet but we are getting a front row seat to the experiment. Either we are about to get cold as hell or we are not, but at least we get an opportunity to study this interesting time with modern equipment. Hopefully we can get an honest evaluation of the data and not adjusted nonsense like the so called climate scientists put out.
Not Man Apart
Then what is the answer?- Not to be deluded by dreams.
To know that great civilizations have broken down into violence,
and their tyrants come, many times before.
When open violence appears, to avoid it with honor or choose
the least ugly faction; these evils are essential.
To keep one’s own integrity, be merciful and uncorrupted
and not wish for evil; and not be duped
By dreams of universal justice or happiness. These dreams will
not be fulfilled.
To know this, and know that however ugly the parts appear
the whole remains beautiful. A severed hand
Is an ugly thing and man dissevered from the earth and stars
and his history… for contemplation or in fact…
Often appears atrociously ugly. Integrity is wholeness,
the greatest beauty is
Organic wholeness, the wholeness of life and things, the divine beauty
of the universe. Love that, not man
Apart from that, or else you will share man’s pitiful confusions,
or drown in despair when his days darken.
— Robinson Jeffers
I think i will get the book and read it. But! I think he may be leaving out the energy side of the equation. Prosperity and life expectancy are functions of cheep energy. Laurenceville Plasma physics may be months away from pre-commercial fusion power with their dense plasma focus machine. The U. S. Navy seems to be getting results with their pollywell fusion device. Finally, Liquid Thorium Salt fission reactors that are almost 100% efficient and walk away safe are in development. In addition, resources throughout the solar system will be available with fission fragment rockets with specific impulse values of over 1,000,000 seconds.
Here is a compilation of predictions for SC24.
As you can see, there are 45 of them, more than enough to fill a roulette wheel, and they are “all over the map”.
http://users.telenet.be/j.janssens/SC24.html
SC25 is just around the corner.
Ladies and Gentlemen, faites vos jeux!
People do not always progress. The Middle Ages happened. Egypt can’t feed itself any longer. Detroit is half of what it once was. Even California is becoming a mess economically and fiscally. And South America’s countries, one by one, are entering a period of despotism, while the Middle East threatens to revert to Islamic fundamentalism, a pox on progress if ever there was one.
Yet, given proper circumstances, progress seems inevitable due primarily to technological change. Fracking, genetically-modified seeds, ubiquitous information availability, near-instant communication across the globe; all of these promise massive progress in the future. Education alone is likely to undergo massive change in the near future, for the good, as 5 year olds eventually refuse to put down their iPads to listen to a droning teacher when they have been learning at light speed for the previous five years. In time, the current high school curriculum will be completely absorbed by 14-year-olds whose learning pace was never slowed by the present assembly line method of instruction.
The eventual outcome: uncertain, but totally dependent upon the governments we end up with. Not the governments we choose, but the ones we actually get. Archibald’s book sounds to me like an effort to influence the result, and I agree with the commenter who suggested that the effort has to include addressing what our children are taught. When is the last time, for example, anyone has seen a business organization (other than a mom-and-pop one being picked on by big business) portrayed in a favorable light in a movie or television series? You might recall one, but that one (unlikely) instance has been offset by hundreds of unfavorable references during the same time frame.
Think of that. A business model that simply allows people to organize their economic affairs in a way that avoids personal liability while taking huge risks to offer products people want is not lionized, but constantly and overtly criticized in nearly every movie and television program produced today. We have a long way to go if we are to avoid the fate of today’s Venezuela eventually.
lsvalgaard says:March 6, 2014 at 7:11 am
” The Sun has cyclic solar activity on top of a constant basal level.”
Could this be rephrased to say:’The Sun has cyclic solar activity within a narrow range of variability.’?
Gail Combs says:
March 6, 2014 at 4:07 am
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”.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
“ Bears repeating”.
——————————-
Don’t ya’ll be fretting about something that isn’t worth fretting about.
Mother Nature emits like 30X more CO2 into the atmosphere via the rotting and/or decaying of biomass …. than us humans do via all of our activities.
As a matter of fact, if you cut human emissions of CO2 by 50% this very day …… you could not detect that “decrease” via the Mona Loa “Keeling Curve” Graph of atmospheric CO2 ppm quantities.
In actuality, humans are little more than a “bit” player in the Carbon Cycle, …. to wit:
CO2 emitters —– est. global (wet) biomass in millions of tons
humans ————— 350
cattle —————– 520
ants —————- 900 – 9,000
Carbon re-cyclers —- est. global (dry) biomass in millions of tons
“Humans comprise about 100 million tonnes of the Earth’s dry biomass, domesticated animals about 700 million tonnes, and crops about 2 billion tonnes. The most successful animal species, in terms of biomass, may well be Antarctic krill, Euphausia superba, with a fresh biomass approaching 500 million tones, although domestic cattle may also reach these immense figures. However, as a group, the small aquatic crustaceans called copepods may form the largest animal biomass on earth.
A 2009 paper in Science estimates, for the first time, the total world fish biomass as somewhere between 0.8 and 2.0 billion tonnes. It has been estimated that about 1% of the global biomass is due to phytoplankton, and a staggering 25% is due to fungi.” Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biomass_(ecology)
Allan M.R. MacRae says:
March 6, 2014 at 9:06 am
As you can see, there are 45 of them, more than enough to fill a roulette wheel, and they are “all over the map”.
Paraphrasing the Pig: “some predictions are more equal than others”
dccowboy says: March 6, 2014 at 2:20 am
The high priests must be fed…and fed well…
As I see it, you have (broadly) 4 categories of humans right now:
1. Those who have been dumbed down, and will follow anything the “experts” tell them.
2. Those who have been dumbed down, but still have a rugged individualism and desire to be free and self-sufficient.
3. Those who are intelligent, but only crave wealth and power.
4. Those who are intelligent, and crave reason, critical thinking, freedom and liberty.
In my opinion, when this country was founded, we also had all of the above, but #4 slightly outnumbered #3, and #2 vastly outnumbered #1, so the #4 type people could lead the #2 type people and win the day.
Now, I fear that the balance of power has shifted, and the #3 type people and #1 type people are dominant. There is still hope, but we are going to have to rely on the critical thinkers and rugged individualists to somehow get us out of the current mess, in spite of the 1%’ers and the blind followers.
“The new Age will begin when a net covers the world”
Welcome to the new age. All over the world the World Wide Web is breaking the Elites control on information. The Warmistras Religion of doom has lost its’ hold on the discussion of climate changes. Time to break their hold on the discussion on energy production. We don’t need them. pg
Samuel C Cogar says: @ur momisugly March 6, 2014 at 9:35 am
….Don’t ya’ll be fretting about something that isn’t worth fretting about.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Sorry but that is a different animal entirely. You are talking the carbon cycle that happens in season or years.
The CO2 (carbon) sequestered in coal and limestone has been taken out of that (short) cycle permanently until it is released again by recycling via subduction and volcanoes and that will take eons. Burning coal/oil short cuts the long cycle.
This sequestering of CO2 as coal or limestone is why C4 photosynthesis evolved. C3 is the better path but only with abundant CO2 (and rain) All but 1% of plant species are C3 but C4 is 30% of the biomass.
If/when the earth returns to glaciation the CO2 levels will drop again. Without releasing the CO2 from coal/limestone into the atmosphere you are going to starve all the C3 plants many of which are food plants for humans and animals. Adaptation to eating C4 plants is rather recent. C4 plants are fibrous and have more silica content in their tissues when compared to C3 plants and tolerate grazing better while C3 grasses are more cold tolerant.
Allan M.R. MacRae says: March 6, 2014 at 9:06 am
As you can see, there are 45 of them, more than enough to fill a roulette wheel, and they are “all over the map”.
lsvalgaard says: March 6, 2014 at 9:42 am
Paraphrasing the Pig: “some predictions are more equal than others”
Allan again:
You did well Leif.
NASA not so much – as recently as 2006? NASA said SC 24 would be robust.
Allan M.R. MacRae says:
March 6, 2014 at 10:36 am
You did well Leif.
NASA not so much – as recently as 2006? NASA said SC 24 would be robust.
A mark of good and honest scientists is that they admit and correct their mistakes. Hathaway [not NASA’s official prediction – they don’t do any] has seen the light years ago and should not be faulted for that old prediction. It is a mark of science to be falsifiable and Hathaway certainly deserves that mark.
The problem:
In olden days (as seen by proxy, take that for what it’s worth), times of lower solar activity often did not produce times of cooling (the little ice age was a looooong time of lower solar activity comparatively, note that).
In the 70’s, cooling appeared to coincide with the PDO in cold phase, papers screamed of the coming ice age.
The PDO is in cold phase (the AMO is also going into cold phase).
There is low solar activity (for now…).
So, if it gets cooler, is it the sun, or the PDO/AMO?
If it was low solar activity for the LIA, note that it took about 100 years (off and on) of very low solar activity (of a sort) before the cold hit. Is the current solar activity that low? How long has the current low solar activity lasted? So how does today’s lower solar activity compare to the LIA?
My conclusion:
Just as in the 70’s, it will get cooler, just as it has before when the PDO/AMO did what they are doing now for that amount of time.
The sun will be blamed.
Bad sun, bad!
Final conclusion:
Ocean currents determine solar activity.
Tails wag dogs.
Electric universe.
sorry, that just slipped out
(ducks)
“climate due to the highest solar activity for 8,000 years.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sunspots_11000_years.svg
Not totally sure about that
David,
Thank you for writing this book which I will read once it is available for Kindle. In your preface above I note you reference to Julien Benda’s work, ‘The Treason of the Intellectuals’, which speaks today to the politicization of Science, a particular treason of reason.
I reject any malthusian predictions, especially about our energy resources.
We will find new ways to cope with problems
Just watch “When idea’s have sex” and realize that thanks to the web idea’s will have sex much frequently and also realize that the concept of earning money is undermined by the web as well
The elites e have today are not the elites we have tomorrow.
@Legatus
If it was low solar activity for the LIA, note that it took about 100 years (off and on) of very low solar activity (of a sort) before the cold hit. Is the current solar activity that low? How long has the current low solar activity lasted? So how does today’s lower solar activity compare to the LIA?”
The LIA began circa 1315 (historians use the beginning of the infamous Famine of 1315-1318 as the starting point). Generally, global temps began falling around the beginning of the 14th Century and continued to fall into the 17th Century. That is, global temps were falling for nearly 300 years before the Maunder Minimum occurred. There speculation that perhaps vulcanism had something to do with this -but, we’re talking 300 years. That’s a lot of volcanoes. The Sporer Minimum also occurred before the Maunder Minimum; but, would it cause the 300 year drop in global temps? The coldest decades of the LIA occurred between 1620-1690 during the Maunder Minimum. Not solar activity nor ENSO can explain the 900 year variances of global temps that make up the periods of both the LIA and MWP.
Some above are equating David Archibald as just another doom-and-gloomer, like Malthus, or his latter-day protege, Paul Erhlich. There is a major difference. Malthusians believe in a scarcity of natural resources and a profound ignorance in all humanity with the exception of themselves and their ‘elite’ intellectual brethren. David may believe in a limit to fossil fuels, but acknowledges the creative wisdom and ingenuity of humanity, with the exception of those ‘elite’ thinkers.
I believe that we have a growing abundance of fossil fuels AND human ingenuity, but I am still worried about Western Civilization. That is because we are largely influenced by the intellectual ‘elite’, who ironically, have proven themselves to be wrong about nearly everything for several generations! They have taken over the halls of education, spreading their viral pessimism at a time when humanity is doing better than ever, and has the least to worry about. This latest generation is possibly the most anxiety ridden in history, and people who live in fear almost always make bad decisions.