I enjoy reading predictions. It’s interesting to read what people have predicted in the past and compare them against the present. Take Thomas Malthus for example, the Anglican parson who, in 1798, at the beginning of UK's industrial revolution, predicted that human population growth would be checked by famine, pestilence and disease. The increase in population is limited by the means of subsistence, he argued (Malthus T.R. 1798. An essay on the principle of population).
More recently, Donella and Dennis Meadows, Jorgen Randers and William Behrens III published Limits to Growth in 1972. They predicted that by continuing on the path of business as usual, the world could not support present rates of growth for more than a few decades; that even with the most optimistic development of new technologies, resource limits and limits to the planet's capacity to absorb wastes would sooner or later come into play and reverse the population growth.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:GISS_temperature_2000-09_lrg.png
The predictions of Malthus and of Meadows et al. have so far failed to materialise. The world population continues to grow and seemingly, each ecological limit that humans have come up against has been overcome - except for carbon dioxide emissions, which are changing the global climate.
Here is another gloomy prediction, written by Robert D. Kaplan for the Atlantic Monthly in February 1994: We are entering a bifurcated world. Part of the globe is inhabited by Hegel’s and Fukuyama’s Last Man, healthy, well fed and pampered by technology. The other, larger, part is inhabited by Hobbes’s First Man, condemned to a life that is “poor, nasty, brutish, and short”. Although both parts will be threatened by environmental stress, the Last Man will be able to master it; the First Man will not. (Kaplan, 2000. The Coming Anarchy, p.24).
He quotes the following metaphor:
think of a stretch limo in the potholed streets of New York City, where homeless beggars live. Inside the limo are the air-conditioned postindustrial regions of North America, Europe, the emerging Pacific Rim, and a few other isolated places, their trade summitry and computer-information highways. Outside is the rest of mankind, going in a completely different direction. (Kaplan, 2000. The Coming Anarchy, p.24).
Kaplan’s predictions are deeply pessimistic. He sees the countries of Central and West Africa as examples of the likely future for many areas of the world, as population growth outstrips resources and weakened states become less and less able to provide for their citizenry or maintain the rule of law. He foresees “an epoch of themeless juxtapositions, in which the classificatory grid of nation-states is going to be replaced by a jagged-glass pattern of city-states, shanty-states, nebulous and anarchic regionalisms” (Kaplan,2000. The Coming Anarchy, p.48).
Will or won’t these gloomy predictions materialise? The latest state-of- the-world reports provide no definitive answer. While the millennium Ecosystem Assessment of 2005 catalogues worldwide ecosystem decline and reports that: The degradation of ecosystem services could grow significantly worse during the first half of this century and is a barrier to achieving the Millennium Development goals (MEA, 2005 p. 14) Millennium Development Goals have shown significant progress towards poverty reduction (from half the developing world’s population in 1990 to a quarter in 2005), improvements in primary education and a decline in deaths of children under 5.
Meanwhile, climate modelling by scientists of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology predict an average global warming of 5 degrees by the end of the century (Sokolov et al. 2009)
Kaplan, R. 2000. The Coming Anarchy, Vintage Books.
Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, 2005. Ecosystems and Human Well-being, Synthesis report. Island Press, Washington, DC.
A.P. Sokolov, P.H. Stone, C.E. Forest, R. Prinn, M.C. Sarofim, M. Webster, S. Paltsev, C.A. Schlosser, D. Kicklighter, S. Dutkiewicz, J. Reilly, C. Wang, B. Felzer, J. Melillo, and H.D. Jacoby, 2009. Probabilistic Forecast for 21st Century Climate Based on Uncertainties in Emissions (without Policy) and Climate Parameters
Illustration of global heating refered to by Wikipedia and downloaded from http://globalchange.mit.edu/files/document/MITJPSPGC_Rpt169.pdf_
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