For Sale: Novel "Hubris Ark" by William Bradford Cushman

[BillyDoc]

Obligatory disclosure: I am the author of Hubris Ark.

Hubris Ark is the story of a small group of people who fear that our current climate change will lead to the extinction of all advanced life on our planet. Their basic assumption is that the mechanisms of this coming extinction may be found in research describing major extinctions of the past. That is, if it happened in the past, it will happen again, given the same initial conditions.

There have been five major extinctions on our planet. Two of those extinctions appear to be from impacts, perhaps from asteroids, but three others appear to have followed a very different path; a climate change path very similar to the one that we are now upon. The title of the book comes from the name of the purpose-built schooner the main characters planned, built, and used to save our species and the planet from this climate change . . . in the story. A rescue that could not have been made without something like s/v Hubris Ark.

Hubris Ark, the book, came about because of an article published by Peter Ward in Scientific American called "Impact from the Deep." This article describes the basic mechanisms of the end-Permian extinction that killed from 80 to 96% of all species on earth, both on land and in the sea. Two other of the five great extinctions our planet has experienced are likely to have followed the same cascade of events. Sadly, the end-Permian extinction appears to be an excellent model for our current climate change. The end-Permian extinction was initiated by unusually widespread volcanism which produced high atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. We have burned fossil fuels to achieve the same effect. We have released our carbon dioxide at a much more rapid pace than the volcanoes of the end-Permian, but the end result appears to be the same.

Recently, we zipped past four hundred parts per million of atmospheric carbon dioxide; and system inertia now seems destined to get us to the mid five hundreds that triggered the end-Permian extinction no matter what we do. It is possible we could affect a technological solution . . . but that would require a government that included a few people with intelligence, which seems unlikely to happen in time. Still, in my dreams I would like for our species to survive, and perhaps even be improved by Big Momma Nature's no-nonsense approach to "culling." Hubris Ark is about how a select group of individuals actually manage to do just that against horrible odds.

Hubris Ark is based on real science, and many references to original scientific papers are in footnotes to the text. The most difficult concept to grasp is the time span of the initial extinction event. One scientific team, led by Dr. Lee Kump, attempted to model the time span of the main factor leading to mass death (atmospheric hydrogen sulfide poisoning). Their primary finding is that the model changes from a livable global atmosphere to a lethal one between two data points just one hundred years apart. Based mostly on these data, my personal guesstimate of our future is that our species has less than ten more years of relative health, and will be entirely gone ten years after that.

Hubris Ark was released on March 11th of this year on Amazon and, so far, has had only three reviews . . . but they are all five star. I wrote the book principally to educate the public about this looming disaster and was both surprised and pleased that readers liked it as a story. The sailing parts of the story are based on years of my own personal experiences offshore in the Atlantic on a Contessa 26.

I will be happy to try and answer any questions you may have. I do not consider pronouncements that “climate change isn't happening” as questions, however, so please confine that argument to another thread. My senile old mind is of the opinion that serious, and probably devastating, climate change is inevitable at this point in time, and I'm mostly interested in the details of how to survive it as long as possible.

Bill Cushman (aka “BillyDoc”)

[Tar34]

Nice. I like fiction.

Originally Posted by BillyDoc

Obligatory disclosure: I am the author of Hubris Ark.

Hubris Ark is the story of a small group of people who fear that our current climate change will lead to the extinction of all advanced life on our planet. Their basic assumption is that the mechanisms of this coming extinction may be found in research describing major extinctions of the past. That is, if it happened in the past, it will happen again, given the same initial conditions.

There have been five major extinctions on our planet. Two of those extinctions appear to be from impacts, perhaps from asteroids, but three others appear to have followed a very different path; a climate change path very similar to the one that we are now upon. The title of the book comes from the name of the purpose-built schooner the main characters planned, built, and used to save our species and the planet from this climate change . . . in the story. A rescue that could not have been made without something like s/v Hubris Ark.

Hubris Ark, the book, came about because of an article published by Peter Ward in Scientific American called "Impact from the Deep." This article describes the basic mechanisms of the end-Permian extinction that killed from 80 to 96% of all species on earth, both on land and in the sea. Two other of the five great extinctions our planet has experienced are likely to have followed the same cascade of events. Sadly, the end-Permian extinction appears to be an excellent model for our current climate change. The end-Permian extinction was initiated by unusually widespread volcanism which produced high atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. We have burned fossil fuels to achieve the same effect. We have released our carbon dioxide at a much more rapid pace than the volcanoes of the end-Permian, but the end result appears to be the same.

Recently, we zipped past four hundred parts per million of atmospheric carbon dioxide; and system inertia now seems destined to get us to the mid five hundreds that triggered the end-Permian extinction no matter what we do. It is possible we could affect a technological solution . . . but that would require a government that included a few people with intelligence, which seems unlikely to happen in time. Still, in my dreams I would like for our species to survive, and perhaps even be improved by Big Momma Nature's no-nonsense approach to "culling." Hubris Ark is about how a select group of individuals actually manage to do just that against horrible odds.

Hubris Ark is based on real science, and many references to original scientific papers are in footnotes to the text. The most difficult concept to grasp is the time span of the initial extinction event. One scientific team, led by Dr. Lee Kump, attempted to model the time span of the main factor leading to mass death (atmospheric hydrogen sulfide poisoning). Their primary finding is that the model changes from a livable global atmosphere to a lethal one between two data points just one hundred years apart. Based mostly on these data, my personal guesstimate of our future is that our species has less than ten more years of relative health, and will be entirely gone ten years after that.

Hubris Ark was released on March 11th of this year on Amazon and, so far, has had only three reviews . . . but they are all five star. I wrote the book principally to educate the public about this looming disaster and was both surprised and pleased that readers liked it as a story. The sailing parts of the story are based on years of my own personal experiences offshore in the Atlantic on a Contessa 26.

I will be happy to try and answer any questions you may have. I do not consider pronouncements that “climate change isn't happening” as questions, however, so please confine that argument to another thread. My senile old mind is of the opinion that serious, and probably devastating, climate change is inevitable at this point in time, and I'm mostly interested in the details of how to survive it as long as possible.

Bill Cushman (aka “BillyDoc”)

[BillyDoc]

The Scientific American article mentioned above, "Impact from the Deep" by Peter Ward can be found at: www.chicagocleanpower.org/ward.pdf

I strongly recommend you read it.