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
