Severe winters are the bane of most gardeners who lose costly plants. Climate change has been periodically featured on the US national news the last few decades, with increasing coverage for winter 2013-14. This new book (some might consider controversial) by an Australian scientist contains many climate theories, including people can expect growing seasons shortened (by two weeks in the beginning and two weeks at the end), as well as the need to plan crops for latitudes approximately 300 miles north of their present location. Twilight of Abundance: Why Life in the 21st Century Will Be Nasty, Brutish, and Short
David Archibald
Hardcover: 256 pages
Publisher: Regnery Publishing; First Edition edition (March 24, 2014)
About the Author: David Archibald is a Perth-based scientist working in the fields of oil exploration, medical research, climate science, and energy. His achievements include pioneering the study of how climate change is linked to the solar cycle. Through his work both in oil exploration, and as a stockbroker in Sydney, he has developed an understanding of how climate, energy, and the economy interact.
Book Preface (edited by DCGC editor)
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 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.
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.
...In this book I contend that the path to the broad sunlight 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...This book describes the twilight of abundance...What lies beyond that is of our own choosing.
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