Archaeotrek—Alternate Perceptions Magazine, January 2015
Planning Your Future with A ROADMAP OF TIME
by: Brad Steiger
Although the book had been written long before the topic of global warming had become politically charged, the reviewer emphasized that the massive amount of research in the book concerning weather cycles, the economy, and social and political changes was still accurate and completely relevant to the contemporary situation.
He concluded his review by stating that the best reason to read A Roadmap of Time is “…to understand the current weather debate, free of the political baggage.”
Intrigued by such tribute being paid to a book that I had written so long ago, I Googled the title once again and found another recent posting in which a reviewer proclaimed, “The best book I have seen on weather cycles is Brad Steiger’s A Roadmap of Time.”
The reviewer went on to write that what he found most intriguing about the book was that the cycles of history overlapped with the weather cycles. “Steiger predicted the start of world conflict in 2000. He claims the cycles are plus or minus seven years, so 9/11, 2001 and the ensuing events are well within the bracket.”
As had the previous critic, this reviewer also chided Al Gore for not having read A Roadmap of Time before he began promoting his An Inconvenient Truth, a presentation that warns that by the middle of the present century, global temperature is likely to move up to 2 degrees Centigrade above the industrial level.
Gore includes the speculations that there will be substantial losses of Arctic sea ice and species such as polar bears and walruses will be threatened. In tropical regions, marine animals that live in the coral will be forced out by high temperatures and the reefs may die. Mediterranean regions will be hit by forest fires and insect pests, while in parts of North America, such as the Rockies, rivers may become too warm for trout and salmon. In South Africa, the world’s most remarkable floral kingdom will start to lose its species. Alpine regions from Europe to Australia will dry up. The numbers at risk from hunger will increase and another billion and a half people will face water shortages.
In the eyes of many researchers, human activities are largely to blame for most of these temperature increases--or at the very least for the acceleration of normal weather cycles.
Others, however, argue that the present global trend toward warming is but a cyclical phenomenon and point out that there have been many such trends in the past. What we must do now is to prepare for some very dramatic adjustments in our lives--and in our geography.
A Roadmap of Time is my attempt to summarize the extensive research of two brilliant men, astronomer Selby Maxwell and psychologist Dr. Raymond Wheeler, who, in the 1930s and 1940s, sought to warn the world of weather cycles that would, after a period of global warming, begin in the middle of this century to bring about a chilling spell that would bring about the next Ice Age. In order to survive this period of extreme cold--which could last up to 500 years--humankind needed to plan and to prepare. In the early 1970s, I was given access to the enormous amount of scientific research on the historical cycles of weather and energy that had been assembled by Maxwell and Wheeler. The late John Cejka, president of Cyclomatic Engineering of Glenview, Illinois, helped me to better understand the thousands of documents that had been delivered to me, and we discovered that Maxwell and Wheeler had literally become cartographers of Time and had fashioned a map of the future.
Astronomer Selby Maxwell, former science editor of the Chicago Tribune, discovered a weather-energy cycle that proved to be the basic cycle which governs all weather--past, present, and future. Maxwell determined the correct time lags that cause the turbulent upper air masses to act in a predetermined manner.
Crucial to Maxwell's method for predicting the weather was his revelation that all cycles of the same length turn at the same time, and that all cycles are related in one way or another to this basic energy cycle.
Professor Raymond Wheeler, who was head of the psychology department at the University of Kansas, invested over twenty years' time and the efforts of a staff of over 200 researchers to compile detailed records of 3000 years of weather and the cycles that run through them. Nearly two million separate pieces of information about weather in history were entered on cards and supplemented with maps and charts
Wheeler discovered a one-hundred-year cycle, divided into four almost equal parts, which demonstrates that people behave differently, but predictably, during periods of warm-wet, warm-dry, cold-wet, and cold-dry weather. Wars, depressions, revolutions, cataclysmic events -together with tastes in architecture, musical expression, poetic meter and the length of hemlines have occurred at evenly spaced intervals. Wheeler's monumental research provides demonstrable bases for predicting what will happen in years ahead.
If you were to place the Wheeler curve over the Maxwell weather-energy cycle, you would see that they match. If you then placed the weather curve established by Dr. A. E. Douglass, who studied one million rings from 1500-hundred-year-old Arizona yellow pines in order to derive a weather "diary" from the natural records of plant growth, you would find that this pattern matches the other two.
Together, the Maxwell-Wheeler discoveries of weather-energy cycles and human ecology inform us not merely about when it will rain or snow--although in a time of impending famine, that in itself is vital information. Rather, they demonstrate that weather, the migratory patterns of birds, the breeding habits of mollusks, the waging of war, the price of commodities, the length of hair over the ears, virtually every single enterprise and endeavor has its own cycle. Each of these cycles, in turn, is interrelated and affected by the basic energy cycle. By recognizing that patterns of time do recur at rhythmic intervals, we can chart danger periods for our government. We can organize business, labor and governmental agencies to produce and to distribute goods according to the best periods for growth.
We can plan ahead for droughts and famines and store foodstuffs for the lean years. We can attempt to stockpile goods for periods of depression and inflation.
And for the materialistically minded, the Maxwell-Wheeler curves also predict stock-market fluctuations. Business cycles are integrated with the entire cultural pattern and cannot fully be explained without reference to that pattern. Whatever factors set in motion the fluctuations of the culture pattern are also the factors that trigger the general prosperity-depression pattern. Busi¬ness cycles have been integrated with weather trends throughout history; they still are. The Maxwell weather-energy cycle and the Wheeler culture curve combine to provide a remarkable predictor of the business cycles of all nations.
The Maxwell-Wheeler studies indicated that around 2040, perhaps a bit earlier, a heat climax will occur that will probably exceed the temperatures of the 1930s. This might well be the apex of the current one-thousand-year cycle of warming. In 1991, the Danish Meteorological Institute released their study that global temperatures closely tracked solar cycles. Canadian scientists, impressed by the data, are keeping a closer eye on the Sun, which many believe to have a much great impact on Earth’s climate than all the exhaust pipes and factory smokestacks on the entire planet.
R. Timothy Patterson, professor of geology and director of the Ottawa-Carleton Geoscience Center of Carlton University, maintains that CO2 variations show little correlation between Earth’s climate on long, medium or short time scales. Solar scientists, such as Patterson, have predicted that by 2020 weakened sun cycles will lead to unusually cool conditions on Earth.
In statements issued in February 2008, Oleg Sorokin, a fellow of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, dismissed manmade climate changes as inconsequential. In his opinion, because of solar activity entering an inactive phase, people should begin getting used to cold weather and stocking up on fur coats.
In their studies of the 500-year cycles, Maxwell and Wheeler predict that after the heat climax around 2040, glaciers will begin to advance again, and the world's temperatures will fall until a cold climax is reached around 2500. At that time, the world will experience another upheaval as complete as that which terminated the Middle Ages and inaugurated our modern world. Dr. Wheeler always insisted that his view of the future of humankind was not fatalistic, integrated though man is with his environment and subject profoundly to climatic influences. “There is no excuse whatsoever for becoming an environmental determinist-- at least of the kind known to the history of science," he proclaimed.
In his philosophy, Dr. Wheeler declared, "It is neither elevating the atom nor degrading man to assume that every object in the universe obeys the same laws, for the status of each object is defined, not by the laws it obeys, but by its function, or purpose, in a system where every part obeys the same laws of the whole. The functions or purposes of the two may be vastly different under the same laws.
"The human being has intelligence, which the atom or the rain or the heat or the cold does not have. Intelligence has a place, a purpose, in the world. Knowing that in the past the excess energy that the human race has possessed under certain climatic conditions has led to destructive aggressiveness, man can determine that that aggressiveness be expressed in a constructive manner, which will result in happiness rather than in suffering; in life rather than in death."
Dr. Wheeler believed that human intelligence would one day properly employ its science and discover the means by which we can create an artificial climate in which to live to keep us from going to extremes under the influence of natural climate. An understanding of the effect of the weather cycles gives us the map of our cultural shifts. Such climatic control may allow us to minimize the effects of the various cycles. It may allow us to reduce the lethargy and fanaticism associated with the hot and dry epochs and eliminate the civil wars associated with the colder times.
Why should we not control our destiny in much greater ways ¬in part by a regulation of the climate in which we live--and rid the world of over-ambition and decadence, of tyranny and anarchy, of slavery and war?
In 1984, Schiffer Publishers published a version of Roadmap of Time under the somewhat misleading title, Brad Steiger Predicts the Future, which is still available.
