In Perth, Australia I’m staying with one of the country’s most brilliant polymaths David Archibald. This morning, he treated to me to a scary presentation he recently delivered to the Institute of World Policy in Washington DC, where he is a visiting fellow.
The title is Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, representing the four threats which Archibald believes are the ones we should most fear.
The four horsemen, i.e. great challenges the world will soon have to face, are: a decreasing extraction of oil, causing growing prices of energy and, by extension, food; Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program, which threatens proliferation and, perhaps, even a nuclear war in the region; rapid population growth in the Middle East and North Africa coupled with higher food imports in those regions, which spells mass starvation; and a 210-year climate cooling cycle.
I’m not sure I’m quite as pessimistic as Archibald is on peak oil and shale gas – the latter, he estimates, is only good for another twenty years (the real energy solution, he reckons, is thorium reactors). But the area where I really hope he is wrong is on global cooling. If his analysis of declining sunspot activity is correct, then global mean temperatures are going to decline by about 2 degrees C by 2040 – completely undoing all that lovely beneficial (but rather meagre 0.8 degrees C) global warming we have experienced in the last 150 years.
It will mean longer, colder winters and cooler summers. But far worse than the discomfort will be the effect it has on grain production. The shift in latitudes at which corn and wheat can be grown will be the equivalent of losing a belt 300 kilometres wide all around the world, leading to the loss perhaps 400 million tonnes per annum of grain. The result will be rising food prices, grain shortages – and a 50 per cent likelihood of the kind of volcanic-influenced disaster that led to the horrors of the 1816 Year Without A Summer, precipitating crop failures, weird Turner sunsets, and 200,000 deaths in Europe alone.
Still there will be at least one consolation. Phil Jones, Michael Mann, James Hansen and Al Gore will all, most likely, still be around to see their entire religious belief system collapsing around their ears.
The biggest problem is governments and their debts. In particular the debts hidden off the books like Bernie Maddoff, for the same reason.
Most of these debts are pensions. They won’t be able to pay them. However, they have taken the money up front from people for the pensions. That has prevented people from using that money to save for their retirements.
So with no assets for their retirement, and governments unable to pay them, a lot of people are in for a very dire time. Governments will try and tax to get the cash, but that sets up a very unhealthy situation where governments tax the young but offer no services in return. The young will decide they aren’t playing that game.
The Mayans grew corn along the sides of the mountains, where their altitude would suggest cooler temperatures.
Of course, it was nothing like the corn we grow today, but it still was a stable part of their diet.
Perhaps we ought to re-visit many of these ancient food crops and stop being a bunch of ‘sissys’ every time the temperature goes up or down a degree or two.
Do we have so little to do that our brains are constantly swamped by idiotic Armageddon scenarios and minuscule equations?
Heavens, we’re a bunch of podgy-brained nincompoops.
We need another Roman Empire or Renaissance!!!!