Twilight of Abundance: Why Life in the 21st Century Will Be Nasty, Brutish, and Short

By David Archibald

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.

David Archibald reveals the grim future the world faces on its current trajectory: massive fuel shortages, the bloodiest warfare in human history, a global starvation crisis, and a rapidly cooling planet. Archibald combines pioneering science with keen economic knowledge to predict the global disasters that could destroy civilization as we know it—disasters that are waiting just around the corner.

But there’s good news, too: We can have a good future if we prepare for it. Advanced, civilized countries can have a permanently high standard of living if they choose to invest in the technologies that will get them there. Archibald, a climate scientist as well as an inventor and a financial specialist, explains which scientific breakthroughs can save civilization in the coming crisis—if we can cut through the special interest opposition to these innovations and allow free markets to flourish.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Regnery
• Release date: Mar 24, 2014
• ISBN: 9781621572299

David Archibald

David Archibald is Lecturer in Theatre Film and Television Studies at the University of Glasgow

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Copyright © 2014 by David Archibald

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First ebook edition ©2014

eISBN 978-1-62157-229-9

The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:

Archibald, David, 1956- author.

Twilight of abundance : why life in the 21st century will be nasty, brutish, and short / David Archibald.

pages cm

1.Science and civilization. 2.Progress--Forecasting. 3.Twenty-first century--Forecasts.I. Title.

CB158.A735 2014

303.4909'05--dc23

2014001738

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CONTENTS

Foreword by Richard Fernandez of the Belmont Club

Preface

Chapter OneThe Time Is at Hand

Chapter TwoA Less Giving Sun

Chapter ThreePopulations on the Verge of Collapse

Chapter FourCulture Is Destiny

Chapter FivePakistan’s Nuclear Weapons

Chapter SixChina Wants a War

A Picture from a Possible Future

Chapter SevenThe Leaving of Oil

Chapter EightNot Quite the Worst That Could Happen

Postscript

Notes

Index

FOREWORD

BY RICHARD FERNANDEZ OF THE BELMONT CLUB

The hardest thing to sell people on is the obvious. That is because the self-evident is so familiar that many instinctively have contempt for it. Like a prophet in his own country, the obvious is often too mundane to overawe.

David Archibald’s book, Twilight of Abundance, is a collection of ideas that it seems we might have thought up ourselves. Archibald points out that we have been living in an unprecedented time of food and energy abundance in a period of peace unprecedented since the fall of the Roman Empire. And he supplies the evidence to back his point up. Then he argues that our civilization can’t count on winning the lottery every week.

And yet that is what we have effectively done and intend to continue to do, in thrall to agendas that command our full attention, though we have forgotten what they are supposed to achieve. Issues such as global warming or gay marriage—which may have some worth in themselves—are treated as existential problems, even as far more pressing issues are shunted to the side.

Archibald’s major contribution is to put the obvious front and center again. Once having awakened our interest in the undeniably real existential threats, he argues that policymakers ought to take prudent steps to transition into new technologies and arrangements necessary to ensure global security and sufficient food and energy for the world’s population—instead of living in the dream that these goods are givens, or falling into an ideological obsession with returning to some sylvan eco-paradise that never existed.

For his troubles David Archibald will probably be dismissed as an extremist—a climate change denier or some such—although it is hard to see what he is extreme about. Perhaps the strangeness is really just his departure from the talking points that are endlessly prescribed by the media, a kind of disorienting looping around to the place where we began.

That is precisely the value of his book. And while you may not subscribe to his arguments in their entirety, there is no doubt that David Archibald is asking the right questions. What will we use for energy in fifteen years’ time? What will the world eat, given its burgeoning population? Can we really count on the Pax Americana continuing indefinitely into the future? Important questions all.

And if the answer to any of these is I don’t know or Nobody on TV is talking about this, then perhaps politicians should begin to focus on them. Better at least than continuing with their current obsession with trivial but politically correct pursuits.

The one obvious defect in Archibald’s book is the title: Twilight of Abundance. This book is not about unavoidable impending tragedy. Archibald argues that we are not doomed to a new dark age. On the contrary, an even more prosperous and fulfilling future awaits us, but only if we keep our eyes open and use our common sense.

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 50,000 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 pseudoscience 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.

CHAPTER ONE

THE TIME IS AT HAND

Blessed is he that readeth, and they that hear the words of this prophecy, and keep those things which are written therein: for the time is at hand.

—Revelation 1:3

The second half of the twentieth century was the most benign period in human history. The superpower nuclear standoff gave us fifty years of relative peace, we had cheap energy from an inherent oversupply of oil, grain supply increased faster than population growth, and the climate warmed because of the highest level of solar activity for 8,000 years. All those trends are now reversing. We are now in the twilight of that age of abundance.

Consider some facts.

World population was 2 billion in 1930. Now it is 7 billion, up 250 percent. World grain production was 481 million metric tons in 1930. Now it is 2.4 billion metric tons, up 392 percent thanks to the green revolution pioneered by Norman Borlaug and others. Grain prices fell all through that period—up until the last few years. Developing-country wheat yields peaked at 2.7 metric tons per hectare in 1996 and have plateaued thereafter. Developed-country grain yields have plateaued from 2000. In the last decade, the supply overhang has been absorbed, and now grain prices are running up. Meanwhile, each day sees another 200,000 people added to the world’s population. As adults, each day’s cohort will need 66,000 metric tons of wheat per annum to keep body and soul together. That means that an additional 25 million metric tons of wheat production will be required to feed the world’s population each and every year. Most of the world’s population already spends a quarter to a half of their income on food. Thus rising food prices will have a severe impact on their discretionary spending, shrinking the market for goods and services.

If the climate were actually warming, vast areas of Canada and Russia could be put under the plough and could contribute to the world’s grain supply. But we know that the temperature of the planet has not risen for the last seventeen years. (Climate is one subject that is studied intensely these days.) We can be almost as certain that a severe solar-driven cooling event is in train. Instead of the Northern Hemisphere grain belts moving north, they will be moving south. The U.S. Corn Belt will move toward the Sun Belt, just as the northern limit of American Indian corn growing moved three hundred kilometers south between the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age. Grain production in Canada will become difficult. Norway’s wheat production is already down 48 percent from its peak in 2007 because of cold, wet summers. Total world grain stocks were about 330 million metric tons at year-end 2013, only 14 percent of annual demand. As the cooling continues and worsens, nations dependent on imported grain are facing mass starvation.

As for world peace, the artificial nations created by the British and the French in the Middle East after World War I will devolve to their tribal components. That part of the world at least may go back to the Stone Age–condition of 30 percent of adult males dying violent deaths. Very few Middle Eastern countries produce all of their food requirements. Who will pay to keep them fed when grain becomes scarce and expensive? Added into that mix are the nuclear weapons of Pakistan (a future failed state) and the ones that Iran is intent on making.

China is a more formidable threat. A recent Pentagon report described China’s claim to the South China Sea as enigmatic. It is nothing of the sort. The claim is China’s way of grabbing its neighbors’ traditional fishing grounds and asserting hegemony in the region. China has become nasty and aggressive. It is the schoolyard bully who wants to pick a fight in order to get respect. Now the Chinese, having warned that they will seize any ships that cross the South China Sea without prior permission, can’t back down without losing face. Blood will be shed before the situation is resolved.

The world’s problems will only be exacerbated by the dwindling supply of fossil fuels. Oil was in inherent oversupply from the discovery of the giant East Texas Oilfield in 1930 until 2004. Since 2004 the price has risen threefold. What has supply done in response to this big price signal? Nothing. World oil production has gone sideways. Everyone who has an oilfield is producing flat out. They are not producing any more than they did when oil was a third of the price it is now—because they physically cannot. Production of conventional oil will soon tip over into decline. Over the last decade, the oil price has been rising at 15 percent compound. There is no reason for that rate of rise to slow down. Just as doubling food prices will significantly suppress discretionary expenditure, higher fuel costs will also reduce what can be spent on other goods. And in fact, the rising cost of fuel will further increase food prices. Energy costs are currently 60 percent of the cost of food production. A doubling of the oil price will increase food costs by a further 50 percent more than what scarcity alone will do.

And then comes the coup de grace. A major volcanic eruption could cool the planet by a further one degree Celsius. The drop in temperature would have profound effects across the grain belts of North America, Europe, and China. American grain output would more than halve as a consequence. Mass starvation would follow in countries that currently import grain.

The UN-EU establishment that gave us the global warming scare in order to establish a new world order (after the failure of Communism) is well aware of the problem of food supply. The increasingly untenable global warming dogma is scheduled to be replaced by propaganda about sustainability by 2015; in fact, the switch is already underway. The campaign to control the world’s food supply had its first official airing at a meeting of G20 agriculture ministers in Paris in 2011. It is telling that one of the bodies that suddenly decided to mount a campaign against food waste in late 2012 was the Environmental Protection Authority of the State of New South Wales in Australia.¹ The staff of this authority are people who are counting on spending the rest of their lives as social parasites in the field of environmentalism. They are evidently taking instruction to move on to this new field of agitprop from higher authorities in the UN-EU establishment, in a chain of influence (if not of command) outside their own government.

Global warming itself, as many others have noted, is the greatest swindle perpetrated in history. There was a pleasant warming that started in the mid-nineteenth century, but that warming is easily and completely explained by the highest rate of solar activity for 8,000 years. If you want to split hairs, the higher atmospheric carbon dioxide level of the last hundred years most likely contributed one-tenth of one degree to that warming. The effect is lost in the noise of the climate system. But the invention of the global warming scare was necessary for the UN-EU establishment to negate the triumph of liberal democracy that Francis Fukuyama predicted in 1992.² As a belief system, global warming gave its adherents some of the basics in spiritual nourishment—original sin, the fall from grace, absolution, redemption, and sacrifice, to name a few. It is hard to see the notion of sustainability providing the same quality of experience.

It is one thing for UN-EU bureaucrats to conspire against the productive elements of society. Nothing less is expected of them. Similarly, individual scientists selling their miserable souls for thirty pieces of silver is also completely understandable, and nothing new. What has been extremely disappointing is the learned societies, professional societies, and other scientific institutions accepting the global warming hoax without question, even though a moment’s consideration would have shown that the premise is laughable. Evidently global warming filled a sort of emptiness, a hollowness in many men’s souls. Perhaps if people come to see through this con job and understand the psychology behind their irrational belief, they will not be so gullible when the next one comes along.

Global warming did serve a couple of useful purposes. The issue has been a litmus test for our political class. Any politician who has stated a belief in global warming is either a cynical opportunist or an easily deluded fool. In neither case should that politician ever be taken seriously again. No excuses can be accepted. The other benefit of the global warming scare is that the science of climate got sorted out in short order. Thousands of minds around the planet, linked by the internet, sifted through the data to determine the truth of the matter. The pace of the investigation was frenetic. Decades of discovery were shortened into a few years.

The major discovery of this period, by the Danish researchers Eigil Friis-Christensen and Knud Lassen, was that although there are many correlations between solar activity and the Earth’s climate, the strongest correlation is between solar cycle length and temperature over the following solar cycle.³ A long solar cycle is followed by a cold climate during