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...)
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.
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.
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)
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.
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),
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?
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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...
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!
* 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
"...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.
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...
> 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.
[+] [-] uvdiv|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nyellin|14 years ago|reply
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/07/galactic-scale-e...
[+] [-] phil|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] benmccann|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sampsonjs|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] uvdiv|14 years ago|reply
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/
[+] [-] zanny|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] tokenadult|14 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] error|14 years ago|reply
I think these predictions overlook technological advancements just like Malthus did.
[+] [-] pfraze|14 years ago|reply
The guy also gassed Allied troops and felt pretty good about it, so, you know. He had range.
[+] [-] T-hawk|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jamroom|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rayiner|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wladimir|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] MikeAmelung|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cletus|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] thomasdavis|14 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] danneu|14 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] redwood|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jamesaguilar|14 years ago|reply
The global warming aspect is very concerning though.
[+] [-] rayiner|14 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] jamroom|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brownbat|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] rayiner|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] cpeterso|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] elorant|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Tuna-Fish|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tokenadult|14 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] sampsonjs|14 years ago|reply
Thank Christ that will never run out.
[+] [-] Lazare|14 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] rayiner|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] loup-vaillant|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] lazerwalker|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] zipdog|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] csomar|14 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] macavity23|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] lwat|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|14 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] Steveism|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] rosser|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yelongren|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mooneater|14 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] jakeonthemove|14 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] ctdonath|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zipdog|14 years ago|reply
.. 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.
[+] [-] unknown|14 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] insertnickname|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] carguy1983|14 years ago|reply
> 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.
[+] [-] rajpaul|14 years ago|reply
Interesting bit of science fiction, but current trends never continue like that.