Hot, crowded, and running out of fuel: Earth of 2050 a scary place | Hacker News Reader

Hot, crowded, and running out of fuel: Earth of 2050 a scary place

arstechnica.com

150 pointsSteveism90 comments

When someone suggests energy, fuel, fresh water are in danger of "running out", you should ask them to sketch what they think the supply curve is for those resources. They have something in common: a horizontal asymptote. With energy, it's a virtually inifinite supply at a price somewhere between 1-2x coal (nuclear fission) to a conservative 4-8x (solar) -- this for existing technology, today. For water, such an asymptote is desalination cost somewhere around 1-2x treated tap water. Similar stories for fuel -- EVs are one asymptote. In the left corner there's a short slope with a cheap, very limited resource (coal, petroleum, groundwater); then at a slightly higher price you have an infinite supply. I interpret this as saying, in the worst case, developed countries' crisis amounts to trivial negative economic adjustements ("trivial" compared to, e.g. everything else that happens through 2050...); and in the expected case, pretty unremarkable technology gains combine with massive economic growth give you far more, for far less. (The "optimistic" case is singularitarian...)

There are theoretical upper limits on energy consumption:

http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/07/galactic-scale-e...

I lost his reasoning somewhere between the astrophysical power output of a galaxy being ~10^37 watts, to the conflation of energy with economic utility, to the endorsement of deindustrialization and world socialism.

My limited understanding of desalinization is that we avoid it not because of the expense, but because it's environmentally damaging to put a giant pipe in the ocean sucking up water that happens to bring a lot of fish and such with it.

No problem. Soon there will not be that many fish left in the ocean so that won't matter any more.

Where do you think the water goes once we're done with it?

The biggest problem is what to do with the highly-concentrated brine after you've extracted the water - e.g. http://www.ce.utexas.edu/prof/hodges/site2006/project_pages/...

I think you severely overestimate how much water an average desalination plant can process.

If you really believe there's an infinite amount of constant-price solar power available, I've got a solar panel the size of Manitoba to sell you.

He said 'virtually infinite', which I think is reasonable if you take that to mean 'more than we could ever use'.

Already today there are large scale solar development projects that, if scaled, offer the potential to supply enough electricity for a whole continent. eg:[1].

[1] http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/dec/11/sahara-sol...

See nyellin's post with the link, I repeat it for convenience:

http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/07/galactic-scale-e...

Tom Murphy calculates that with the energy needs increasing only "2.3% more per year" the whole solid earth would have to be covered with the solar panels in 275 years. 2.3% per year is 10 times more energy needed in 100 years, 1000 times more in 300 years.

If you don't agree please point to the errors in his calculations. Start from here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insolation

"The irradiance at the Earth's surface to approximately 1000 W / m2 for a surface perpendicular to the Sun's rays at sea level on a clear day."

Then calculate that most of the surface is not perpendicular, factor the whole land area on Earth. I come to around 3e16 W falling on the land area of Earth. World energy consumption in 2008 was 1.5e13 W according to Wikipedia and the growth in 2010 was 5% which is much faster need growth -- approx 10 times in 50 years == 100 times in 100 years == 10000 times in 200 years!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption

So if we cover all the Earth land area with 100% efficient solar panels, we get only 3e16/1.5e13 = 2000 times more energy than we use now. With 5% per years growth, we'd need more than that in around 150 years.

Your first link . . . we seem to be underperforming the logarithmic regression line solidly for the last forty years. Does it really make sense to pretend not to notice that? I guess if you want to sell the claim that solar is going to run out in two hundred years . . .

> If you don't agree please point to the errors in his calculations.

Free downvotes for people doing as you asked!

acqq nails it -- there's an upper bound, and in the meantime you have to put all those panels somewhere. Get ready to write off a lot of land to scale up.

(Get ready to write off a lot more if this is how you're planning to power the magic desalination plants that will give us infinite water).

If you think solar or nuclear power will bring nigh infinite energy, say "solar/nuclear power will bring us nigh infinite energy." Using the words "asymptote" and "singularitarian" adds nothing to your highly dubious argument. I'm guessing you regret not finding a way to use the word "orthogonal" to mean "unrelated", too.

Completely wrong:

The 80-percent increase predicted by 2050 translates to a total global energy consumption of 900 exajoules (EJ) per year (in other words 9 x 10^20 joules)—65 times the annual energy consumption of the US in 2009.

2008 primary energy consumption was about 100 quads [a] [1] in the US (~100 EJ), compared to 500 quads [1] for the world (or, ~20%). 900 EJ/year would be around 9 times the current US energy intensity.

I'm pretty sure about the etiology of this error: (1/65th) of 900 EJ/year is the US electricity intensity, about 4,000 TWh(elec.)/year [2]. They're mixing different energy statistics (apples & oranges). Primary energy measures the heat energy of the fuel input in power generation, not the output (e.g. 3 joules coal => 1 joule electricity; primary energy is the 3 J). It also measures non-electricity energy uses (like oil for fuel or natural gas for heat), which put together are even bigger than power generation [3].

[a] (a "quad" is short for "quadrillion btu [british thermal unit]", which coincidentally is about the same as 1 exajoule)

[1] http://www.eia.gov/forecasts/ieo/world.cfm

[2] http://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.cfm...

[3] https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/

I want to live next door to a Thorium power plant. I'd be perfectly safe because I know that it would just decompress and stop fissioning, but the land prices would be amazing. And while everyone else is dying and other nonsense I'd have electricity to last me a millennium.

I easily see us using thorium powered desalination plants. Or my favorite, drop a giant turbine in the gulf stream and use that to power the East Coast + desalinate water to sell as a commodity.

A thorium power plant gets its fuel when the thorium "is used as a nuclear fuel through breeding to fissile uranium-233."

http://www.forbes.com/sites/williampentland/2011/09/11/is-th...

(I think this article has been discussed on HN before; yes.)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2985173

Now we've all heard of breeder reactors since decades ago if we are part of the Baby Boom. Indeed, in one of Paul Graham's essays, "After the Ladder" (August 2005),

http://paulgraham.com/ladder.html

we can read, "The big disadvantage of the new system is that it involves more risk. If you develop ideas in a startup instead of within a big company, any number of random factors could sink you before you can finish. But maybe the older generation would laugh at me for saying that the way we do things is riskier. After all, projects within big companies were always getting cancelled as a result of arbitrary decisions from higher up. My father's entire industry (breeder reactors) disappeared that way."

What will make the breeder reactor (thorium reactor) industry reappear? Who will make decisions on behalf of that industry? How much investment cost are we talking about here?

http://www.economist.com/node/21549098

China will:

http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2011/07/21/china%E2%80%99...

At a very fundamental level, when they're willing to displace 1.4 million people for a dam,

http://waterfortheages.org/2007/10/15/three-gorges-dam-china...

and we're not willing to suffer a small water bottling plant in the Columbia River Gorge,

http://www.oregonlive.com/environment/index.ssf/2012/03/acti...

I fear we may be outpaced.

In 1798 Thomas Robert Malthus predicted food shortages as population grows geometrically and food arithmetically. but here we are today with plenty of food :) in fact we have so much more that it causes us health problems...

I think these predictions overlook technological advancements just like Malthus did.

This is what I really want to believe - that technology will ride in and save the day. I even think it is likely that new tech will emerge that can do it, but (and maybe this is my cynicism showing through) I believe powerful interests that stand to be harmed by the "new tech" will make sure it never gets off the ground. I sure hope I am wrong though!

I was at Disney World last week, and they have this neat thing called the Carousel of Progress. It basically shows a household in the early 1900's through to present time. The interesting thing is how little has changed since then. There have been huge changes in communication, but other than that, the family of 100 years ago had an ice box, running water, etc. There were 130,000 cars in the country.

We marvel at our advances in medicine, but the biggest advances in life expectancy, from relatively simple techniques combatting child mortality, are long behind us. Life expectancy at age 65 has increased only 4 years (from 12 to 16) in the last 100 years.

In any given field, we see technology progress rapidly than plateau. Aerospace plateaued in the 1960's, for example. Even semiconductor technology, which has progressed at a breathtaking pace over the last half century, has improved markedly slower in this decade.

I think the faith in technology to save the day is misplaced. Improvements in energy technology peaked in the 1950's with the invention of nuclear power. Indeed, we still get most of our electricity from coal power plants that aren't dramatically different than they were 100 years ago (the city of Chicago just shut down two coal plants that are 100+ years old).

I have no doubt that technology will solve these problems, eventually. But the scenario in the article isn't something that might happen hundreds of years into the future. The projection is for 2050. I won't even have retired by then. We need a revolution to happen in the next 38 years, and I don't think one is forthcoming.

Life expectancy of a white male at 20 yrs was 62.1 in 1900 , 76.7 in 2004[1]. that's 14.5 years. And that's under somewhat harsher health conditions: more stress, bad diets, pollution and chemicals.

And don't forget what medicine for quality of life. for example the pill.

Other changes that happened in that time span: personal cars, affordable international travel, home air-conditioning, home cleaning automation, the microwave, pre cooked food,walmart prices.

[1]http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0005140.html

Are you seriously suggesting that health conditions are worse now than in 1900?

I meant that if we lived in the environment of 1900(most people living in villages in the u.s.?) and use current health and sanitation technologies , we would live even longer.

The reason I looked at life expectancy at 65 is that it tells you how far medicine has come at addressing the fundamental biological limits on life--the answer is not very far. The premise behind the "technology will solve our climate change problem" is exactly that sort of science that will let us overcome what we now perceive as fundamental limits. It's breaking the sound barrier, not moderate improvements in life expectancy through better treatment of contagious diseases.

The other examples you mentioned don't come anywhere near the sorts of technologies that are necessary, and also happened quite long ago. The personal car was well on its way by 1910--almost a million cars on the road by 1912. The first regular international airline service was in 1919. Buildings were air conditioned starting in the 1920's. Frozen food dates to 1929. There have been dramatic in making these advancements cheaper since then, but they were already quite prevalent more than 80 years ago.

The time scale of global warming projections are not hundreds of years from now. In that time scale I can imagine revolutions in energy technology. 2050 is only 38 years away. For reference, NTT rolled out the first cell network in Japan about 33 years ago. The Xerox Alto came out 39 years ago, with most of the basic elements of modern GUI's: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/1/10/Alto_Neptune_F...

Malthus's prediction was also not based on science like contemporary predictions are.

I actually think that food is the least of our problems.

Now growing animals for food is incredibly wasteful (in terms of water and other resources). Lab-grown meat isn't economically viable yet but by 2050 I imagine it may well be. Still, it'll be hard to argue with the economics of how cheap it is to grow a cow.

Fuels and metals are the big problem. The first is I believe a much bigger problem than the second. The reason is that there fuels are a means to an end: energy. When it comes to the electrical grid, you can supply that power with coal, oil, natural gas, nuclear power, wind power, solar power or nuclear power. It doesn't matter to the end user. It will be reflected in the price but the point is that you can make substitutions.

The bigger problem is metals as we're rapidly running out of those or, rather, the cost of extracting those will in the next century or two drastically increase. It is incredibly cheap to rip up iron out of the ground (~$10-15/tonne IIRC). Transportation and smelting to steel may increase the overall cost by an order of magnitude but that's still cheap.

Some look to space as a means to solving that problem but I have trouble fathoming a situation where extracting metals from the Moon or asteroids or whatever will be within even a few orders of magnitude of the cost of digging a big pit on Earth. Even if energy were free (in fuel terms), the cost of travelling far, retrieving the ore, refining it (probably in space) and getting it back to Earth are just fundamentally high (in comparison).

I honestly believe there needs to be at least one order of magnitude less of us than there is now and there will be one way or the other in coming centuries.

Yeah, I tend to think it will be viable for say mining the moon for local structures long before it would be to cart them back to earth.

You should also consider that fertilizers and pesticides are derived from fossil fuels. Modern agriculture and oil go hand in glove and not just because equipment, processing, shipping and storage all rely on it to function.

|Still, it'll be hard to argue with the economics of how cheap it is to grow a cow.

There's some interesting work being done on manufacturing food elements using synthetic biology[1]. they think it will cost one tenth of cheapest foods we have today, and will require little water. one of their food elements is a healthy substance with the taste of fat.

[1]http://www.wesolveforx.com/#t=t&n=ee7350c5

Once we reach a stable population, can't most metals be recycled indefinitely?

One great example of that is the Haber Process. Fritz Haber (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Haber - a controversial figure as you can see) figured out how to synthesize nitrogen fertilizers, which basically solved a hunger crisis that was growing in Europe at the time. As the wiki says, "The food base of half of the current world population is based on the Haber-Bosch process." I originally heard this on a Radiolab episode; they claimed, among other things, it took us from a world capacity of ~1.5bn to ~13bn, and that people needed fertilizer so bad at the time that wars were fought in South America over bat guano. Hey, now we fight over oil.

The guy also gassed Allied troops and felt pretty good about it, so, you know. He had range.

Right. The fallacy of Malthusianism is that all those extra people turn out to have a knack for producing the stuff they need. Of course there's an ultimate limit, of the total insolation energy to Earth or maybe a Dyson sphere, but there are many multiples of headroom compared to Earth's current population and productivity.

The other fallacy of Malthusianism is that people (like other life forms) breed faster when there's surplus, and slower when there's not. Thus, as the population approaches the resource limit, it grows more slowly.

See, for example, Verhulst's mathematical description of population growth [0], written in response to Malthus. You can chart the data and see a very clear divergence from Malthus' expectations [1].

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_function#In_ecology:_m...

[1] for example, http://www.growth-dynamics.com/articles/Kurzweil_files/image... -- the higher curve is exponential, the lower curve is logistic

Nobody has a health problem because the celery farm was overproductive. It is the technological advances that have introduced the health problems, because it's hard to get a quick meal that doesn't involve hormone-injected beef and genetically-modified potatoes.

Malthus may still some day be proven right. It's a common fallacy to think that because something hasn't happened yet is a reassurance that it will never happen.

Don't forget there are a lot of people that have little or no food at all (according to statistics about 1/7th of the world is malnourished). We're really, really spoiled in the West ("plenty of food").

Earth is already a scary place. And it will still be scary place in 2050. Even scarier for those at the bottom of the social order, and probably slightly happier for those at the top.

Energy and water consumption projections seem to just take current per capita consumption rates and raise them against projected population growth. Then they ask the question of "how will energy producers cope with these demands?" and start guessing at which technology will swoop in to save the day. But that doesn't appear to be how things work in the world.

I imagine a lot of us on HN live in a world where you can blast your AC all day and leave all your faucets running with no repercussions beyond a cheap marginal bill.

Isn't it more likely that we'll encounter the economics of scarcity and an adaptive market instead of one day turning on our faucet and nothing comes out because, dang, we've run out?

I hear stories of parts of America fighting over water access, but aren't they really just fighting over a supply that still lets people run their faucets all day?

Perhaps, as the water supply becomes more and more jeopardized, it will stop being practically free. Like every other market in the world, its price will reflect and dictate nominal availability. And the introduction of new technologies will come, like most markets, when the price of water/energy hits a tipping point. In other words, if we start running out of fossil fuels, won't that just jack up the price until alternatives become cheaper? And the higher price of energy will mean we may have to be more deliberate about saving energy, for once?

Here in Dhaka, Bangladesh I do sometimes wonder if we're experiencing the past (e.g. the industrial revolution) or the future. Hopefully it's the former. Check out my new project: www.smsdemandresponse.com

That's a little more than the UN medium estimate of world population, but the absolute number of people doesn't seem like a huge problem. That's only 30% more than today. We have plenty of coal to get at least the electricity, and although oil might be a problem, I imagine that we can substantially reduce our consumption of that if governments get serious about pricing in externalities.

The global warming aspect is very concerning though.

I agree about the global warming. My worry is that continued political pandering and posturing (at least in the US) will result in an effective "stalemate" that prevents anything from being done about it until it becomes undeniable to those who refuse to believe it is happening. As a father of 3 I really want to believe that their future is brighter than ever, but in my gut I worry that we're racing towards a cliff with no brakes...

Obama hasn't mentioned global warming since his 2008 campaign.

I don't know if this is true, but his administration is certainly working on the issue [1].

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/29/opinion/new-rules-for-new-...

Um. I don't mean to be nit-picky, but that proposal isn't going to do anything. Let me explain.

The proposal is to prevent new power plants from producing more than 1,000 pounds of CO2e per MW of power produced. Coal is around 1,600 pounds/MW, natural gas is around 800 pounds/MW. So what happens?

1) We build new natural gas plants, and burn all available natural gas at ~800 pounds/MW. Given newly discovered shale gas reserves, this is going to be a fuckton of gas, and hence, CO2e. (Note: This would have happened without the new regulation.)

2) We keep all the old ones around, and burn all available coal at 1,600 pounds/MW. Given known US coal reserves, this is going to be a fuckton of coal, and hence, CO2e. (Note: This would have happened without the new regulation.)

All the new regulation does is ensure that all available coal is burned in old plants, instead of being burned in a mix of new and old plants. Since coal produces the same 1,600 pounds/MW either way, this is completely pointless. At best we're delaying the rate that we burn coal (with fewer coal plants, it'll take longer to chew through the coal), but the climate, sorry, couldn't care less about that. Either that carbon is in the ground or in the air, and if it's in the air, it's causing damage.

If you want to have some impact on the climate, you need to figure out a path that leaves fossil fuels in the ground unburned. Tinkering with the rules about new power plants doesn't even help.

I'm not informed enough to say whether this will do anything. I only used it to illustrate that the administration is putting effort into the problem.

Water is a huge problem. Even in the U.S. the southwest is already fighting over diminishing supplies of water, and global warming is only going to make that problem worse.

The irony of the situation is that states like Arizona and Texas, who stand to lose the most from climate change and environmental damage, are politically the most intransigent about taking the measures to avoid it. When water supplies start drying up, people in those states are going to feel the pain far sooner than the dirty hippies in Washington and Massachusetts (though total pandemonium in the southwest isn't going to be good for anybody).

Interesting, we were going down a similar path in Victoria, Australia with falling water supplies. They build a very expensive desalination plant. Now it has turned around with 3 or 4 wet years so we are about to have this plant come online and not needed in the foreseeable future.

Google Arizona v. California. It's the reason states like Arizona oppose 'environmental' legislation. Because it always seems like what's good for the 'environment' is whatever allows CA to steal more water for itself.

Why Earth 2050 is going to be an awesome place:

1) Hot: shoot a tiny amount of sulfur dioxide into the arctic atmosphere, planet cools. See also #3.

2) Crowded: current upward global health trends will halt population growth naturally, and more people isn't necessarily bad anyway. Malthus was wrong to just consider resource consumption and ignore the benefits people provide to society. When you only have 100 people, they all have to look for food full time. When you have 7 billion, you get to siphon some off as scientific researchers and medical professionals, who pay back to others far more than they eat. (Lowly gas station attendants likely pay back more value than the raw resource cost it takes to sustain them too, but let's start with the low hanging fruit...)

3) Fuel: Solar's price is halving exponentially. 3b) Water: We're not really running out of low salinity water; we couldn't drain any of the world's large lakes if we tried. It's just a purification or transport issue. Limitless energy solves both.

Most importantly: technology is going to be so cool!

Heralds of optimism / references:

1) Caldeira.* http://www.wired.com/science/planetearth/magazine/16-07/ff_g...

2) Rosling. http://www.gapminder.org/videos/what-stops-population-growth...

3) Kurzweil. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfbOyw3CT6A 3b) Kamen. http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/03/colbert-and-kam/

* Caveat, Caldeira doesn't advocate the sulfur dioxide solution as a first stop for combating global warming, his research just confirms it would be worth using as a backstop.

I don't understand this faith in technology. We aren't any closer to going to another planet today than we were 50 years ago. Medicine has extended the natural limits of a human life a scant four years in the last century. Electric vehicles have been around for a century and still haven't gotten over the tipping point.

In the time scale we're talking about for global warming, three to four decades, it is unlikely that we'll see any technological innovations that fundamentally change the math. Climate change is about as far into the future as the invention of C and Smalltalk are in the past.

It's not faith in some undiscovered technology, we already know how to quickly cool the planet for almost no money.

The concerns you raise are addressed by the references provided in the original comment.

Are there any interesting advances in desalination technology on the horizon? Access to fresh water is already a critical health issue and it will become more challenging with population growth and global warming.

Desalination is a solved problem if you have energy. It's unlikely that the energy/liter of desalinated water will get much lower, so the big issue, as always, is producing more electricity.

There are self sustained mobile desalination platforms. You can see one here, made by a Greek university: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GTuh2wIz32M

The platform which weighs 150 tons produces 70.000 liters of water daily and it costs around 700 thousand Euros. It’s not much but it’s a good start, I’m sure there are other advancements in this area.

I checked the other commments here before looking for the full report "OECD Environmental Outlook to 2050: The Consequences of Inaction"

http://www.oecd.org/document/11/0,3746,en_2649_37465_4903655...

by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). The Executive Summary of the report

http://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/environment/oecd-environmental-...

sums up the future challenges: "Over the last four decades, human endeavour has unleashed unprecedented economic growth in the pursuit of higher living standards. While the world’s population has increased by over 3 billion people since 1970, the size of the world economy has more than tripled. While this growth has pulled millions out of poverty, it has been unevenly distributed and incurred significant cost to the environment. Natural assets have been and continue to be depleted, with the services they deliver already compromised by environmental pollution. Providing for a further 2 billion people by 2050 and improving the living standards for all will challenge our ability to manage and restore those natural assets on which all life depends. Failure to do so will have serious consequences, especially for the poor, and ultimately undermine the growth and human development of future generations." In other words, a disastrous future is not a certainty, but a risk, and planning to minimize the risk is worthwhile. The long-term human trend, meanwhile, has been improving living conditions for people all over the world, ever since the ideas of science and personal freedom and democratic limited government have spread around the world.

http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/readers-digest.aspx

AFTER EDIT: Do any of you remember reading the book The Population Bomb (1968) by Paul Ehrlich in your youth? I was amazed last week to discover a friend a bit younger than I am (born in the 1960s, a few years before the book was published) had never heard of the book. I've been seeing gloom-and-doom predictions for my whole life, and so far there is still a lot of petroleum, lifespans are going up and health is improving all over the world except in pathological countries like Russia, and most of the disasters predicted during my youth have failed to occur.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Population_Bomb#Predictions

"there is still a lot of petroleum"......

Thank Christ that will never run out.

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...

> 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.

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) 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.

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.

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.

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.)

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".

Good reply from coldarchon. Unfortunately they've been hellbanned, so most people won't get to see it.

> I believe the current best guess is around 2 degrees C by 2050, > In short, the world of 2050 looks like it'll be almost unnoticeable warmer

The 2 degree C by 2050 projection is for if we stabilize CO2 emissions by 2020. Otherwise the projection is up to 5 C.

For reference, during the last ice age the world was 5 C colder, and Chicago was under two miles of ice.

A warming of two degrees is not about us noticing (as in, gee, time for a tshirt) but about the impact on the ecosystem.

Someone in reddit (http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/reo35/the_discus...) pointed to an article noting that a 7 degree warming would suck moisture from the ground and substantially inhibit plant/food growth.

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'm not sure you can draw that conclusion. Historically, there also did not exist 7 billion people burning fossil fuels.

You must mean the recent past, because that's exactly what happened for 10s of millions of years during the late Cretaceous.

Edit: and of course a bunch of other times during the Phanerozoic - I just picked one.

Wasn't the term 'global warming' been deprecated in favor of 'climate change' precisaly because it is misleading?

From http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/climate_by_any_oth...

>> 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.

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.

"...biofuels and renewable energy sources are all projected to increase steadily."

That was the only happy thought I took away from that article. At some point the world will just run out of fossil fuels. Regardless of which side of the fence you're on regarding global warming one thing is for certain, we need new forms of energy.

Depends on what they mean by biofuels. Many current biofuels are net energy losers, and specifically require more fossil fuel as (energy) input than they yield in energy output. Moreover, I'd expect the food-vs-fuel issue to become significantly more prominent as population increases.

To think that the water I'm gonna drink today is the exact same water that soils, plants, animals have been drinking since the beginning of time, makes me feel connected...to dinosaurs! Our problem has never been quantity but recycling rate, and not realizing we are all in the same boat.

That article is like a giant danger sign saying, we should be putting our energy towards improving that 2050 picture.

At that point my kids will be a bit older than I am now, and considering the future for their own kids. How the hell will that feel, can you imagine??

This picture is also optimistic in that it seems to assume there was no massive war or plague.

What are we doing, if we arent focused on improving that bleak vision?

We'll just have to make a few adjustments (like shifting power generation to individual houses using solar, wind and other methods that will undoubtedly be affordable by then, if only because oil will be pretty expensive).

Myself, I'd like to build a house (out of containers, maybe) somewhere near a mountain, powered by wind+solar, with a satellite or long range WiFi connection to the Internet (aka the rest of the world). I'd be happy to retire this way, hiking in the summer and snowboarding during winter :-), growing food (including farm animals) on a patch of land and a hydroponic farm...

Also, make the images here your wallpapers - there's enough space and energy for everyone, even in 2050: http://www.landartgenerator.org/blagi/archives/127

Context which I never see addressed: http://donath.org/Photos/TempChange.PNG

I'm not sure if you're suggesting that the Earth's temperature has a background variability ...

.. or noting that if the Earth's average temperature warms by 5 degrees it will spike higher than any sustained period in the last 400,000 years.

Put 'em together, and perhaps that 5 degree increase will balance the we're-due-for-it 5 degree decrease.

The future will be nothing like the past.

From the article:

> It predicts a world population of 9.2 billion people, generating a global GDP four times the size of today's

Global domestic product is currently $63T. 2050 GDP = 4 * $63 = $252T.

Current per capita GDP = $63 trillion divided by 6.8 billion = $9,264.70588

2050 per capita GDP = $252 trillion divided by 9.2 billion = $27,391.3043

So basically everyone will be 3 times richer, at a cost of "80% more energy" (less than 2 times the energy), which means energy efficiency will increase dramatically, probably due to the fact that we'll harness more solar and geo energy, which is delivered from the giant nuclear furnace in the sky, aka our sun.

"based on current global trends"

Interesting bit of science fiction, but current trends never continue like that.

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