3 Cats Stalking

Free Kindle Book of "Was a Time When"

May 1, next Tuesday, check out my new e-book "Was a Time When" on Kindle. For one day you or a friend can download a copy for free, $0.00. I am participating in a marketing plan with Amazon where I occasionally offer my books for free, and this is my first try.

I ask that those of you who download a free copy read the book and send me an email (sam@wasatimewhen.com) telling me what you think of the book and the idea. If you want to post your comment on Amazon you can do that. I also ask that you tell others about the book, and if you think it is worthwhile, recommend that they go to Amazon and get a copy for themselves.

Learn more about the book at www.WasATimeWhen.com.

Sam Penny

My Conundrum About How Collapse Could Happen

When I built the scenario that formed the basis for my book Was a Time When, I found there were a number of trends that would force the human society to collapse much faster than most other researchers expected, with or without the physical events I included in my story.

The biggest driver seemed to be the loss of cheap fuel and the inability of our civilization to produce enough food to feed the 7 billion plus inhabitants of the globe. My analysis indicated this trend would accelerate as the feedback loop of failing systems of farming and transport further reduced the supplies.

I postulated that the structure of society would crumble under the load, further adding to the misery. I calculated that wars, pestulance, pandemics, and starvation would wipe out most of the people on earth within the lifetime of the main character of my book. This conclusion matched with those of some of the other doomers of this age.

But I still had a conundrum: why could I not find a way for our civilization to realize the dangers soon enough to do something about the dangers of the future? Surely, something could be done to minimize the effects and save more of our culture. In the end, I decided it would take a thousand years for civilization to recover enough to regain some of the culture and knowledge we take for granted.

The recent post at ClubOrlov, Trained for Success, Bred to be Eaten, is an excellent discussion of why the human race as it is now trained stands little chance to preserve its society and culture. Dimtri Orlov quotes other authors who indicate the futility of expecting humans to be anything but what they are. He has introduced another way the earth's population will be reduced, cannabilism, and he points out that humans will not plan well when they feel they are in the immediate danger of being eaten. Keep track of his blogs, he says some more ideas along these lines.

So my conundrum about how the collapse could happen is still on my mind, but it seems to me to be more definite than ever. There are more who are warning of the dangers, but I am coming to the mind that not only is it too late, but given human nature, it may not be possible to prevent it. Yes, there will be some who survive, but it will be hard to determine in advance who those might be.

 

 

 

 

 

Tom Murphy Interview

James Stafford at OilPrice.com has an extensive interview with Tom Murphys (of the Do the Math blog) about Tom's comparison of various energy options available to the human race at this time. You can find this at http://oilprice.com/Interviews/Tom-Murphy-Interview-Resource-Depletion-is-a-Bigger-Threat-than-Climate-Change.html.

I recommend reading the interview and resulting comments that follow. Tom Murphy was one of my resources in my research for my novel Was a Time When, and he has been consistent in all his research.

Sam Penny

New Good Things to Read

Not only did I recently publish my new novel, Was a Time When, but there have been several exceptional blog posts on the Internet you should all check out.

Crash_Watcher has a link to a really great YouTube video (34 minutes but it is worth it) in his blog entry titled Peak Fossil Fuels and Limits to Growth in 34 Minutes. As he warns, even the knowledgable set might need to watch it several times to get the whole idea.

Alice Friedemann writes in the CounterCurrents.org blog about Why Do Political And Economic Leaders Deny Peak Oil And Climate Change? This is one of the more complete reviews I have seen about why our society wants to keep denying there is a problem, and how this reflects back into our political system. Unfortunately, the wall that keeps us from taking rational action on the problems we face is pretty high.

Tom Murphy's article The Way is Shut in his Do The Math blog is a great summary of his search for some way to solve the energy problem of the future and talks about his plans for taking action in the future. You might also look at his past posts that study the various possibilities for alternate energy. On thing is for sure, liquid fuels are going to become a real problem since there is nothing that comes close to what we can get from petroleum.

In my novel I approach our situation as a given and build a scenario on what the world will be like if we essentially do nothing to solve our problems. Tom apologizes for using fear as a tool to get people to pay attention, but I conclude that unless people have some real idea about what life could become, they will simply say it cannot happen.

Read all these articles and my book. Then you decide where we are and where we can go. We really have few options, and they are fast disappearing.

And Tom's points about asymetric risk should be carefully considered. If you think we "doomers" are all wrong, and it turns out we are, you have not lost too much -- you will have spent less money and will be living a more conservative life. But if we are right and you are in danger, doing something about it now might make a big difference and you could lose a lot.

Think about the future and have a good day.

Sam Penny, the Prudent RVer

 

Five Year Status Report on 2-10-2012

Time flies as you get older. I checked and it was just over five years ago that I started this blog. My intent at the time was stated as:

Recently I became most concerned with the risks associated with resource depletion, climate change, and over-population. Scientific research is showing that unless we quickly respond to the challenges that each of these pose and begin to mitigate those risks, our life-style could suffer catastrophically.

To make matters worse, we live in a time when all three risk areas are converging in a complex fashion. Scenarios that I have done and studied support the conclusion that the combined effects of these risks could even threaten the existence of the world's civilizations.

Often the discussions of these problems are too single-minded, they do not address the interactions between them. That is where I will try to fill in the gaps.

I asked myself, has anything changed?

Resource depletion is still a big cat stalking our civilization, though there are still those who refuse to consider the problem. Not only is depletion showing up in fossil fuels, but also in rare earths, water, land, and a wealth of other resources that are fast disappearing. Here in the USA many think we are becoming more efficient and dropping demand, and the recent boom in natural gas drilling and production will solve the our energy problems. They ignore the fact that the boom is about to bust itself with the low prices and that the problem is the rising fuel consumption worldwide.

The "Export Land Model" proposed by TOD's westexas and detailed by Crash_Watcher is still alive and bringing the time of greatly limited exports closer in time than anyone wants to admit.

Nope, the only change I see in the trends for resource depletion are the acceleration of effects of depletion.

Climate change is the second cat that just keeps growing. I see no way the countries of the world can ever agree to limit their impact on the climate, so the PPM of the greenhouse gases will keep rising until the supply of fossil fuels gives out and we have no good way to produce the gases. Now we are beginning to see that methane escaping from the thawing tundra and sea-beds could take up the climate-forcing and it could be even worse.

One of the effects of climate change is to expand the range of extreme weather possibilities, and we are seeing more and more severe weather events around the world.

Nope, the trends in climate change appear to be on a straight line with temperatures rising around the world. Kiss the lowlands along our coasts goodbye and get out while you still can.

Population Overshoot is still the biggest cat, and it will fall the hardest. It is a personal problem for all of us, or at least for all our off-spring and future progeny. Wars may cut down some populations, but they are far too inefficient. Even nuclear wars are not very effective. Pandemics with new and unforeseen viruses will be effective at some population reduction, but again pandemics become harder to spread as people quite traveling around and meeting other people.

Nope, the trend to solving the over-population problem will be starvation. Resource depletion will take out industrial farming (no fuels, no fertilizers) and eliminate the means for getting the food to large populations in the cities. Water depletion will eliminate much of the land we now farm, like in the southern California desert. Climate change will change the places where crops can grow faster than the farmers can adjust. The infrastructure to grow a crop like wheat or corn is huge and complex -- it will not be replicated to adjust.

And there is this fourth cat I did not think about in January, 2007: the world's screwed-up economy and debt-based financing practices. When I started this blog the housing bubble had not burst, the 2008 depression looked to be avoidable, the banks looked solid. Now what I see is a bunch of banker-types running around trying to patch things up and hold the system together.They all base their plans on returning to economic growth like it was before 2007, ignoring the fact that resource depletion, climate change, and population pressures are about to change the entire world around them.

Nope, I do not see a significant group trying to develop a better alternative for our economy, so our society is faced with going further and further down a dead-end road to ruin.

Over the past five years I completed a scenario of how I thought all these catastrophes would interact and what the world would be like at the end of this century. I wrote a novel entitled Was a Time When to tell of that scenario, and that book is now available on the internet at Amazon.com.

My conclusion at this time is that the trends I began to discuss on this blog in 2007 continue, and in some cases are accelerating. So I say the status as of this date is ON SCHEDULE.

sam

"Was a Time When" Available as Printed Book

My new book is now available as a printed book at CreateSpace.com or Amazon.com. It also got a great review by Crash_Watcher.

Now it is on to the book launch business.

sam

"Was a Time When" Published on Kindle, Dec 27, 2011

It's done, or at least the Kindle part is done. I published my new book last night as a Kindle book. It is available at Amazon for $3.98 and ready for immediate download.

The paper copy book will be available around mid-January.

I am very interested in getting some professional reviews of the book. If you have a blog where you discuss books or the fate of the world in the next 75 years, let me know your background and how to reach you and I will send you a review copy, either a .pdf or a paper copy (when available), free of charge.

For your information, here is my product description.

This tale began in 2006 as the autobiography of my fictional great-grandson, Sam, yet-to-be-born in 2015.

Sam would live through the greatest cultural transition ever experienced by the human race. I encased his memoirs in a short story telling of an expedition of Neu-human archeologists from a thousand years in the future, 3100 A.D., who return to the Pacific Coast searching for their roots. They find Sam's recorded life story and hear a first-hand account of the “Great Collapse” of human society as they had come to call it.

Sam Hardy's life begins at the peak of the tremendous spurt of technology and social advance in the second decade of the 21st century, powered by what many still thought at the time would be an infinite supply of energy and a stable world of commerce and trade. Sam writes the history of humanity's course through the transitions that result from expected natural disasters, resource depletion, climate change, over-population, and economic and cultural failure as his family and tribe struggle to learn to live in a new world of limited resources and crashing dreams.

There are many possible worlds our progeny could face, but in my mind the world described here unfortunately seems to be one of the more probable. My goal is to tell of some of the changes that can be expected as our society searches for its future, and as those technologies and resources on which our civilization depend fall away.

This is a tale of retrospection, as seen through the eyes of someone who lives through it and remembers that there Was a Time When things were so different. And yet, in Sam's final words, there is still hope:

“So this is goodbye. Maybe I have been wrong in my pessimism and damnation of humanity, and there really is a future for mankind on this planet. At least I have joined a group that is beginning the steps to future recovery. God willing, I will have the chance to watch that future blossom. I pray this band I join will build the roots of a better civilization than what my peers built for the last one.”

I will be discussing the book and offering ideas on other options and how to cope with the future at www.WasATimeWhen.com. Come by for a visit.

"Was A Time When" starting final edits. The

I have begun the final editing of my new book. It should go to the printer by next month. I have taken the advice of a couple of early reviews and put the story into a normal time sense, so the Sam Hardy tells his tale from his birth to the end of the century.

As soon as the book becomes available, I will let everyone know. If you want a review copy, send an email to sam@prudentrver.com and tell me of how your review will be published. BTW, it will first be available as an ebook/Kindle and I expect to have hardcopy sometime later.

sam

NYC - Predictions

Back to one of the three cats - the climate. We are watching Hurricane Irene barrell toward New England, and some are saying it could be bad. There seem to be an amazing number of people out there who are surprised that a hurricane could threaten New York and its surroundings. There are a few that are saying they have been trying to tell people for years that there is a risk from weather such as this, but not one really wanted to listen. And definitely too many are concerned about the profits next quarter to do any mitigation for the possibility.

Count me as one of the cassandras. My daughter is reviewing my latest book (Was A Time When) and she might have noticed on page 6 of Chapter 15 entitled June, 2024 A.D., Adolescence the following bite of Sam telling of what he remembers from when he was eleven years old:

An amazing number of people in 2026 still denied that our society had a problem with energy or weather or the economy. The world kept changing around them, and they just didn't know how to handle it. It took little effort on my part to make a fortune on their stupidity. I started small with my gaming profits, and before long built that stash into a pretty good bankroll, in the millions. I moved most of the money to off-shore accounts just to be safe.

At the end of August in 2026, Hurricane Gracie hit New York City. She came toward land as a Category 4 hurricane with winds of just under 150 miles per hour, but she hit Manhattan as a Category 5. I remember how Mom, Dad, and I sat glued to the TV throughout the night watching the satellite images as the hurricane’s eye wound its way up the coast of New Jersey across Long Beach, then veered into the Lower Bay just south of New York City. Early in the morning it punched north into the Upper Bay and continued up the west side of the Hudson River. I can still remember TV pictures of the Statue of Liberty inside the eye standing so peaceful in the sunrise.

The storm surge up the East River measured thirty-five feet. Water poured from the river onto the surrounding countryside. Long Island disappeared under water, and over half of New Jersey flooded. When the storm ended over they reported fifty-three thousand people dead or missing, and authorities estimated over two trillion dollars in damage. I heard that the storm left more than eight million homeless, and the damage reached far north past Albany.

The hurricane destroyed the island of Manhattan. They never found the money to pump out the subways.

Losing the financial center of the country – and maybe of the world – broke the back of the US financial structure. China and Saudi Arabia moved out of dollars, and the world stopped denominating oil in dollars. They required gold or grain or some other solid commodity to complete any transaction..

Financially, being one of the lucky ones, I moved all my funds out of New York to Lisbon and Sydney the year before. I put most of my cash into gold equivalents. With things so unstable I started another gold fund in Johannesburg, managed it over the Internet, and learned basic commodities trading first hand.

My International funds continued to do well by any measure, and I possessed a good supply of Chinese Yuan and gold stashed away in a Singapore bank built high above the bay. Rising sea-levels would not catch me.

Just wanted you to know I wrote this excerpt over five years ago, only a year after Katrina visited New Orleans. So the current story in the news is not all that new. It will be interesting to see how close I come in my prediction -- okay, I am off by 15 years and the intensity is down, but that is because of the limitation placed on the timing of my story. What will be the impact on New York City? We will know in a few days.

Oh yes, Irene is only a Cat 2 at this time and will probably fall to Cat 1 before land-fall. But things like this do happen, even though the full effects of climate change are not yet upon us.

sam

Archdruid comments on The Downside of Dependence

I have always enjoyed reading the words of John Michael Greer, aka the Archdruid. He writes about his views on the coming world, and for the most part, I find his views are close to mine.

His latest thoughts are found in his piece called The Downside of Dependence. He discusses the musings of Roger Kay in Forbes about the life of an intelligent beer yeast, and the writings of George Monbiot, often associated with The Guardian, about the choice between getting in a lifeboat of a sinking ship or going to the bar for a martini.

Greer uses the analogies presented by Kay and Monbiot to present his case for living a life that is less dependent upon the things around us. He talks about

"...the kinds of steps that leave people in possession of a home, a garden, a career doing something people need or want badly enough to pay for even in a depression, and other desiderata of hard economic times. These are also the kinds of steps that make it easier for people to offer help to their families, friends, and neighbors, to teach vital skills to those who are willing to learn them, and preserve precious cultural legacies through the crises of the present to they can be handed on to the future. That’s the payoff for living with less; it’s a lot easier to avoid getting trapped by the downside of dependence on a society moving steadily deeper into systems failure."

This is one of the calmer discussions of the whys for learning to live sustainably. It is worth your read.

Sam Penny