Future Scenarios

August                                                                                2017

                                                                           An Iceberg the Size of Delaware
                                                                           Just Broke Away From Antarctica                                                                                                                                                                      New York Times  July 12, 2017

As the Trump administration continues to eviscerate the EPA and the Paris Climate efforts to reign in carbon emission some are getting a visceral feeling that our goose is cooked. Were frogs in the pot with the water heating up. Does anyone believe there will be a Rapid Emissions Reduction in GHG? Thought not, so that’s not a plausible scenario. In the heat of August we look at some scenarios and predictions of the future of Planet Earth including the recent opinion piece by David Wallace –Wells.

If we’re going to explore Future Scenarios we should start with the original, Limits to Growth (LTG) . The analysis first appeared in 1972 and ignited a firestorm of repugnantation from economists and even George W Bush.

In his 2011 book, The Limits to Growth Revisited   Ugo Bardi states that:

 “… LTG was not “wrong”: nowhere in the 1972 book will you find the mistakes that are commonly attributed to it. LTG never predicted catastrophes to occur soon, never estimated that some specific mineral resources should run out by some specific date, it never contained prophecies of doom. In other words, LTG is not, and never was, “Chicken Little with a computer.”

I would like to quote Jeremy Lent, author of The Patterning Instinct, (see video below), who gives us hope that we can re-pattern our culture to reach a Sustainable Future.

“The one thing we can rely on about humanities’ future trajectory is its nonlinearity. That fact presents us with both humanities’ greatest peril and our greatest reason for hope. Our peril arises from the fact that we can’t just look at the recent decades of prosperity enjoyed by much of the world and assume it will continue indefinitely; at the same time, we can glean hope from the realization that humanity’s unsustainable growth in consumption, inexorable as it appears, will not necessarily continue until our global civilization is doomed”