Let's quickly hit the three points they covered, and one they didn't.
1) Hot. Current models predict that 2050 will be warmer, but not much warmer. I believe the current best guess is around 2 degrees C by 2050, which it certainly noticeable, but perhaps not best summed up as "hot". (For people not following this subject, physical observations have produced lower amounts of warming than the models expected; as a result the estimate of the climates sensitivity to CO2 has been revised downward.) Don't get me wrong, this doesn't mean that global warming is not real, and a big problem. But according to the IPCC models, it's also a very very slooooow problem. We shouldn't be complacent, but it's probably counter-productive to panic.
2) Crowded. Well, not really. We're talking about an overall increase of 1/3, which sounds a lot but keep in mind that this is just about as crowded as the world is ever projected to get. Further, the linked report says this will happen mostly via the less-crowded places getting more crowded, not increased crowding in the megacities. That's not so bad, really. I LIKE big cities, personally.
3) Running out of fuel. Again, this comes with a big caveat. We're suddenly finding huge amounts of fossil fuels - mostly gas, but also oil. (Or rather, we're figuring out ways of accessing the ones we already knew about. Remember that "reserves" are fossil fuels which are known, proven, economical to extract, and - in the US - legal to get to. A small rise in oil prices or - in the US - a change in law can lead to "reserves" multiplying without a single new survey.) We're really not going to "run out of fuel" by 2050, or even get close. Fuel may be significantly more expensive because what's left is hard to dig up, or we might decide to simply not dig some of it up (in order to fight global warming), but there's more than enough for the next few decades. And yes, that includes projections of increased Chinese consumption.
4) Richer. One of the reasons 2050 looks so hot, crowded, and out of fuel is because we have 38 years for small growth rates to compound. Small temperature changes can add up - but so does growth. We generally expect productivity to increase by at least 2% per year. If that continues then by 2050 we'll all be a little over twice as rich as we are now. True, it's not certain those trends will continue until 2050, but the same could be said of the first three trends too, and productivity growth looks like at least as good a bet to me.
In short, the world of 2050 looks like it'll be almost unnoticeable warmer, small cities will be more like the Bay Area or New York, fuel will be more expensive but plentiful, and we'll all be twice as rich (and with MUCH more awesome tech).
I'll take that deal. Got a time machine? :)
Edit: Water is a much more major problem, and deserves a lot more attention than it's getting. However as other commentators have pointed out, thorium reactors should allow us to just brute force it via desalination plants. Fingers crossed...
1) 2°C is quite a big deal, because the increase will not be equal. Much ice will melt, and many regions will lack water because of this.
4) Productivity growth is wonderful, but right now is not used the way it should be. It makes us richer, and make us work less, but those gains are not reasonably distributed, hence poverty and unemployment. (I don't subscribe to the theory which says people mostly deserve their situation —good or bad. The laws of physics are neutral, and the world they spawn is currently unfair.)
Currently, I see only 2 ways out of a global collapse or a third world war: (i) start being reasonable, investigate what actually works and do that, simplify and localize the means of production, work less, and produce less (but more durable) stuff. (ii) make tremendous technological progress, up to and including a technological singularity.
1) Most people in Switzerland will like it 2C warmer. Someplace will benefit (or not suffer) other will suffer.
2) Whats a global collapse? Break down of transportation? Breakdown of communication? I don't think either is like to happen to many people profit.
"Productivity growth is wonderful, but right now is not used the way it should be. It makes us richer, and make us work less, but those gains are not reasonably distributed, hence poverty and unemployment."
You don't get 10 productivity growth points ever year that you can throw at whatever you want (that would be nice). Its not an equall distribution but people are generally speaking better of then 50 or 10 years ago all this while the world population grows very fast. Economiclly an politiclly speaking things get better slowly.
"investigate what actually works and do that, simplify and localize the means of production"
Well we clearly see is that what works is to grow the food where it grows the best and bring it to where people want to eat is. If transporation gets much more expensive localization of will be cheaper and it will happen.
1) I think overall, the suffering is most likely to outweigh the benefits.
2) Starvation. Our soil is dying. What Acari used to do for free, we now do with chemicals, poorly. Peons have to buy their seed instead of re-using their own (mostly due to the usage of hybrid seeds, which are designed to reproduce very poorly). Plus, the seed is not adapted to the soil which then has to be irrigated, pesticized etc. Not to mention transgenic plants, which are not used to feed the world, but starve it (terminal seeds and patents come to mind).
We are already seeing some of the effects now, and it sucks (health, peasant suicide…). But for now it merely sucks. The real danger lies elsewhere.
See, we hardly need fertilizers or pesticides. Except when the soil is dead, with no fungus nor acari to provide what the plants need to grow. Or when the soil is compressed by excessive ploughing, and the roots can't set in. Or when the soil is burned by the sun at the end of the summer, and is not protected by weeds (which in this case wouldn't actually be weeds). Most our soil is suffering all three. Therefore, we badly need a heavy industry, mostly based on oil.
When there is no oil, we starve.
It won't be quick. Oil will get more expensive, and so will food. Add in some random financial crisis, and the industry could halt for a time. This wouldn't be a big deal if our soil was alive. But when it's dead, you can't grow squat on it without a relatively heavy industry. Fortunately, we can revive soils. With hedge wood, actually (systematically cutting hedges was a really bad idea). It takes 3 years however, so we'd better start before we actually need live soils.
> You don't get 10 productivity growth points ever year
I wasn't clear. I just meant that producing more and more goods in less and less man-hour would be a wonderful thing, and we should basically push for it. I also meant that we do have bit of that kind of growth (if I recall correctly, productivity doubled since the 70s, mostly due to computers and robots).
> Economically an politically speaking things get better slowly.
Agree. It does get better. My fear is that we are too slow. We need something good enough before we start starving. Because if we do, things will get ugly. Will something good come out of that? Maybe. The French Revolution itself started as an ugly uproar of starving people. But I'd rather avoid it, if at all possible.
> Well we clearly see is that what works is to grow the food where it grows the best and bring it to where people want to eat is.
It works in the short term, for the West. I think the cost of transportation is vastly underestimated, because the price of fossil fuels is vastly underestimated. The market hardly measures environmental costs, nor does it plan for several decades ahead —classic tragedy of the commons. I have some hopes for a cleaner (and actually cheaper) transportation however. (Airships and self driving cars come to mind.)
If food gets to expensive more people will trie to make money with food. People will have a bigger insentive to produce, store and consume food in other ways then befor. You advocate one solution. I just trues in markets insentives, People spend moeny on food and the would spend more if needbe. People will sell me food. It may come with reduced life quality in other stuff but thats ok.
If your sure about your solution do a startup.
There are to many variables to accuratly predict ahead so much.
> If food gets too expensive more people will try to make money with food. People will have a bigger incentive to produce, store and consume food in other ways then before.
That'll work as long as it's only a price problem. But If the lack of resources is sufficiently dire, we will lack food, period. And our current lack of foresight tells me that the probability of such an outcome is far from negligible.
> If you're sure about your solution do a startup.
Doesn't work. There are already plenty of ethical peasants which try their best to grow good food with few enough resources. They succeed, though they are often hindered by silly regulations and the sheer weight of their more "conventional" colleagues. The problem is, unlike software, food doesn't scale. Everyone must adopt better ways, and that takes advocacy. In programming, the equivalent would be trying to significantly reduce the usage of, say, mutable state (self plug: http://loup-vaillant.fr/articles/assignment).
> There are to many variables to accuratly predict ahead so much.
Fair enough. A more reasonable prediction would run like this: "we may one day have depleted so much resources that a good deal of us will die of starvation, or of secondary effects like war".
Okay, you had me up until > up to and including a technological singularity.
Please...please stop this Ray Kurzweil religious BS. This will most likely not happen within our lifetime and I sure hope it doesn't. The Singularity is based on the notion that we will all have access to immortality, knowledge, etc.. the beautiful concepts we are already losing access to (See SOPA, PIPA, freedoms getting taken away, etc..)
The 'sheeple' will never get to reap the benefits of 'The Singularity'.
This may surprise you, but I think Ray Kurzweil is waay too optimist. Partly because reaching the Singularity will mean messing with forces we barely comprehend, and partly because we may collapse before we even have the time to mess with those forces. If you have some time, I suggest you to take a look at http://facingthesingularity.com/
In the meantime, just ponder this: we are, in a trivial sense, machines. Machines capable of reasoning about themselves. In principle, there is nothing stopping us from making actual machines that beat us in every domain. Yesterday, Chess. Today, Jeopardy. Tomorrow, driving. And maybe someday, machine building itself.
If we ever reach that point, you know enough about recursion to know how this will goes: recursive self-improvements leading to something way more capable than your average Einstein. Now let's hope that our little Skynet is programmed to do good (whatever "good" is), instead of, say, using us as raw material to fill the solar system with paper clips. Because unlike with the fictional Skynet, we won't even stand a fighting chance.
link2009: I suspect your account may have been killed (i.e. everything you post is visible only to you). You should check since your most recent post is dead. (However that can also happen if you post a duplicate, so I can't say for sure.)
It's risky for a new member to post something controversial - you have to build up a karma cushion first. (I personally don't approve of downvoting a controversial comment, but I'm fighting a loosing battle on the subject.)
The core concept is an event we can't predict beyond, so claiming it means any specific benefit (such as immortality) is misunderstanding it, and so is claiming some specific people won't be affected, and so is claiming that the outcome must include 'benefits' for living humans.
There are now 3 core concepts that we may call "Singularity".
1) Event horizon: past the point where there are entities smarter than us, we virtually can't predict anything.
2) Accelerating change: things will get bigger/better/smarter at an exponential rate. The "Singularity" is a point somewhere on that exponential curve. (Or something)
3) Intelligence explosion: if it's smarter than us, it will be made by us (whether it is an AI, or brain computer interface, or whatever). Therefore it can recursively improve itsef to super-intelligence very quickly.
Taken loosely, those 3 visions are mostly compatible. But taken to their extremes, they are contradictory. It is important to distinguish the 3 to avoid confusion.
> But according to the IPCC models, [global warming is] also a very very slooooow problem. We shouldn't be complacent, but it's probably counter-productive to panic.
Given the large number of people who voraciously deny the basic existence of global warming, I fear that a little bit of mass panic is just about the only thing that will actually get us to do anything about the problem.
There's some negative feedback associated with that strategy.
One of the major reasons people voraciously deny (manmade) global warming is because they see so much irrationality coming from certain people trying to convince them of the problem. It comes across as dishonest and desperate, which is not really a good way to convince people.
What we really need is calm, clear science being described by actual scientists (rather than politically controversial figures). We need clear delineation of risks and costs associated with mitigation strategies, not mass panic.
When i see global warming i see a scientist looking for additional funding.
I see politiciams wanting to levy taxes that will leave me poorer but not solve the problem (which i don't believe is as serious as it is generally assumed. People always seem to think the end is near)
I see people unwilling to accept that our modern life depend on cheap energi and that if a bit of ice melt then we should accept that as a cost of doing business.
What i don't see is people talking about cheap migration strategies, more neuclear plants, mirrors to reflect some of the sun back into space, etc, etc.
>> But temperature change itself isn't the most severe effect of changing climate. Changes to precipitation patterns and sea level are likely to have much greater human impact than the higher temperatures alone. For this reason, scientific research on climate change encompasses far more than surface temperature change. So "global climate change" is the more scientifically accurate term. Like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, we've chosen to emphasize global climate change on this website, and not global warming.
Thing is: if you look at the historic temp. record, seldom did temps ever make it to +7 from today's already high temps. Thus almost certainly something will provide feedback to negatively impact temps before that level is reached. Still we could lose all the arctic ice before then and live on a very different planet.
I believe the current best guess is around 2 degrees C by 2050, which it certainly noticeable, but perhaps not best summed up as "hot".
Yes, it's not hot. But that's not the point. +2 degrees C can make an end for the 5 million olive tree in my home town. See how much of an issue is this?
3) Running out of fuel. Again, this comes with a big caveat. We're suddenly finding huge amounts of fossil fuels
You're right, we're not going to run out of oil in an absolute sense - but we're unlikely ever to be able to get the stuff out of the ground faster than we're doing now.
See http://www.indexmundi.com/energy.aspx?product=oil&graph=... for a nice illustration, and bear in mind that the last few years have been at record oil prices, so if there was any room to grow production, we'd expect it to have done so.
Limited supply and growing demand means rising prices. I think this is a self-fixing problem to a large extent as higher prices will mean alternatives become cost-effective, but steadily- and sharply-rising energy prices does seem as safe a long bet as one could take.
I don't have any sources but I've heard that it will be 2 degrees warmer on average, BUT there will also be much more extreme variations. So some places might not be warmer at all while others are significantly hotter.
1) Hot. Current models predict that 2050 will be warmer, but not much warmer. I believe the current best guess is around 2 degrees C by 2050, which it certainly noticeable, but perhaps not best summed up as "hot". (For people not following this subject, physical observations have produced lower amounts of warming than the models expected; as a result the estimate of the climates sensitivity to CO2 has been revised downward.) Don't get me wrong, this doesn't mean that global warming is not real, and a big problem. But according to the IPCC models, it's also a very very slooooow problem. We shouldn't be complacent, but it's probably counter-productive to panic.
2) Crowded. Well, not really. We're talking about an overall increase of 1/3, which sounds a lot but keep in mind that this is just about as crowded as the world is ever projected to get. Further, the linked report says this will happen mostly via the less-crowded places getting more crowded, not increased crowding in the megacities. That's not so bad, really. I LIKE big cities, personally.
3) Running out of fuel. Again, this comes with a big caveat. We're suddenly finding huge amounts of fossil fuels - mostly gas, but also oil. (Or rather, we're figuring out ways of accessing the ones we already knew about. Remember that "reserves" are fossil fuels which are known, proven, economical to extract, and - in the US - legal to get to. A small rise in oil prices or - in the US - a change in law can lead to "reserves" multiplying without a single new survey.) We're really not going to "run out of fuel" by 2050, or even get close. Fuel may be significantly more expensive because what's left is hard to dig up, or we might decide to simply not dig some of it up (in order to fight global warming), but there's more than enough for the next few decades. And yes, that includes projections of increased Chinese consumption.
4) Richer. One of the reasons 2050 looks so hot, crowded, and out of fuel is because we have 38 years for small growth rates to compound. Small temperature changes can add up - but so does growth. We generally expect productivity to increase by at least 2% per year. If that continues then by 2050 we'll all be a little over twice as rich as we are now. True, it's not certain those trends will continue until 2050, but the same could be said of the first three trends too, and productivity growth looks like at least as good a bet to me.
In short, the world of 2050 looks like it'll be almost unnoticeable warmer, small cities will be more like the Bay Area or New York, fuel will be more expensive but plentiful, and we'll all be twice as rich (and with MUCH more awesome tech).
I'll take that deal. Got a time machine? :)
Edit: Water is a much more major problem, and deserves a lot more attention than it's getting. However as other commentators have pointed out, thorium reactors should allow us to just brute force it via desalination plants. Fingers crossed...