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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Autonomous driving mature in 2025
Autonomous vehicles are one of the car industry’s most competitive areas of innovation, with some estimates suggesting that the potential to cut road deaths and injuries could be worth more than $5tn in benefits.
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/38651650-a517-11e3-8988-00144feab7de.html#axzz2vFaVXG5Z
David’s book is available on Kobo (in Canada) on Mar 24th and I’ll be interested in what he has to say about energy: Climate not so much.
My view is that all hysteria on climate should be completely ignored, but that we should focus on the much harder science of HC depletion and energy availability.
The Royal Society session also heard warnings that the looming challenge from declining oil and gas production is being obscured because governments in Canada are preoccupied with the Kyoto response to climate change.
“Kyoto is a distraction,” Gilbert said of the multinational agreement for reducing greenhouse-gas emission
http://judithcurry.com/2014/02/12/uk-us-workshop-part-ii-perspectives-from-the-private-sector-on-climate-adaptation/#comment-456576
I’m like the guy from a renaissance fair plunked down into a Tudor Musicology conference. As a layman, I can’t critique the solar science; I have a gut sense that Leif is entirely correct, but I can’t pay the price of entry to actually understand enough of the research enough for my opinion to worth anything.
Spengler and his hypotheses, on the other hand, I understand. As a guy who’s read Spengler for a while and both lauded and chastised him on my little “five whole people read my blog/blog,” I’m really interested in what David has to say here on both energy and climate->geopolitics fronts. So, purchased.
Gail Combs says:
March 6, 2014 at 10:23 am
“Sorry but that is a different animal entirely. You are talking the carbon cycle that happens in season or years.”
———————-
So, I was addressing the statement of, to wit:
“Be a bit careful David.. If we turn solely to thorium, what will there be to replenish the absolutely necessary CO2”
————–
Did I not cite enough CO2 outgassing biomass to replenish the CO2 that won’t be being outgassed by our not burning of fossil fuels?
I think nature was doing fine before we started burning fossil fuels and it should do fine iffen we quit.
I’d probably buy a digital copy if it were reasonably priced at $1.99 or so, but I find Kindle pricing obscenely greedy. So I’ll wait until the book arrives at a public library near me. Is marketing strategy part of your theme for the rosy future, and if so, does it involve eliminating public libraries?
It seems to me that a person who has a message he truly believes might save his civilization, or even the human race, would be more interested in getting it to the maximum number of readers rather than targeting a tiny segment of humanity who buy books for $20+. It doesn’t seem to fit well with the anti-elitist theme of the overview above either.
Gamecock 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.”
This is quite an ignorant statement – ignorant in terms of uninformed.
The thorium is fluidized and sent around the core in a jacket, to get irradiated and converted. Then 30 days later, after changing eventually to U-233, that very same material is – still fluidized – used in the core.
Your comment is like saying that the bread we eat is not fuel for our bodies because it doesn’t enter our blood streams as slices of bread.
@Doug Huffman March 6, 2014 at 6:31 am:
“And why have all the molten solids cooled reactors been decommissioned? Were thorium to fulfil [sic] its extreme expectations, it would not overcome the difficulties of cooling a reactor with a molten solid.”
Please inform yourself before making comments.
There was ONE reactor. It ran successfully, and it was initially only given the go-ahead because they thought they could weaponize it by using it as the reactor for nuclear bombers that could stay in the air for months at a time. Conventional reactors were too heavy, so for a nuclear bomber, LFTRs were the only possibility.
Richard M. Nixon shut down the program because ICBMs and nuclear subs had made the nuclear bomber a no-go. Shutting it down had nothing to do with the reactor itself being a failure.
Its inventor was Eugene Wigner, the same man who invented the light water reactors used all over the world – which have been shown to be real disasters when things go wrong. It was not a fly-by-night operation. It was not a failure. It was 100% successful. But the military and the by-then-well-established light water reactor industry didn’t want it, so they sandbagged it.
Actually, I misspoke there. Alvin Weinberger was the inventor of the LFTR and the light water reactor. Wigner was a major part of it.
As I said above, I bought the book. It was disappointing.
It’s a combination of deluded ravings, sensible suggestions, and complacent parroting of the conservative party line.
On the sensible side, Archibald uses various studies of the relationship between solar activity and the earth’s climate to argue that the sun is currently cooling, and this will lead to less radiation and magnetic flux diverting cosmic rays from outside the solar system away from the earth, thus these rays will be more powerful, which will create more cloud cover, which will lead to a cooler climate. I don’t know if this is true, but it is at least as plausible as the global warming hypothesis, and gets no airtime.
He is too confident in dismissing the global warming hypothesis. More careful skeptics claim that there is little evidence for it, rather than that it’s definitely a hoax. His hypothesis depends on the opposite claim – we are in for a cooling, which is bound to be much more harmful than warming. He sees big importers of grain, like Egypt, starving to death, and America just surviving, if it abandons foreign aid, stands firm against the Islamic menace, and becomes vegetarian.
On the deluded side, the author goes on and on about Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program, before mentioning the inconvenient fact that Israel already has them. Iran’s putative program is defensive, not offensive. Like an American knuckledragger, he claims that China “wishes the United States ill”. He fails to understand that some of the inhabitants of less successful countries harbor resentment toward the more successful, because the latter have a long history of murdering and enslaving the former.
Back to sanity: he writes about different types of nuclear power, various uses of coal and oil, and the relative uselessness of green energy sources, like someone who knows what he’s talking about. I can’t say whether he really does – I don’t know if “thorium salt” nuclear reactors are better than other types.
But on the whole, his book has too many right-wing and Zionist opinions liberally sprinkled over scientific insights. With friends like David Archibald, climate change skepticism doesn’t need enemies.
Rod McLaughlin says:
March 16, 2014 at 9:08 pm
“Iran’s putative program is defensive, not offensive.”
MAD defensive or Mahdi defensive?
Iran’s putative program is defensive, not offensive. So they say, but utterances by former President Ahmadinejad about “wiping Israel from the map” whether poorly translated or not, point to at least some offensive desire, if not actual intent (although the fact they have long range missiles, with I believe, North Korean help, is also another pointer to somewhat “less than defensive” posture).
My argument about Iran’s defensive posture is simply to do with which nation acquires nuclear weapons second. Russia got them after America. America was offensive, Russia defensive. Pakistan got them after India. India was offensive, Pakistan defensive. Iran hasn’t even got nuclear weapons. Israel has. Ahmadinejad’s statement wasn’t ‘poorly translated’, it was deliberately mistranslated. “Rezhim”, transliterated from Farsi, isn’t difficult to translate into English.