

Hot, crowded, and running out of fuel: Earth of 2050 a scary place - Steveism
http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2012/03/hot-crowded-and-running-out-of-fuel-earth-of-2050-a-scary-place.ars

======
uvdiv
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...)

~~~
benmccann
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.

~~~
macavity23
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/...](http://www.ce.utexas.edu/prof/hodges/site2006/project_pages/project_desalination_brine.htm)

------
Lazare
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...

~~~
loup-vaillant
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.

~~~
nickik
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.

~~~
loup-vaillant
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.)

~~~
nickik
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.

~~~
loup-vaillant
> _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".

------
uvdiv
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...](http://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.cfm?t=epmt_1_1)

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

------
zanny
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.

~~~
tokenadult
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...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/williampentland/2011/09/11/is-thorium-the-
biggest-energy-breakthrough-since-fire-possibly/)

(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>

~~~
hcurtiss
China will:

[http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2011/07/21/china%E2%80%99...](http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2011/07/21/china%E2%80%99s-nuclear-
scientists-unveil-latest-breakthrough/)

See also:

<http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf17.html>

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...](http://waterfortheages.org/2007/10/15/three-gorges-dam-
china-%E2%80%93-more-to-move-and-environmental-problems-acknowledged/)

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...](http://www.oregonlive.com/environment/index.ssf/2012/03/activists_ramp_up_opposition_t.html)

I fear we may be outpaced.

------
tokenadult
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...](http://www.oecd.org/document/11/0,3746,en_2649_37465_49036555_1_1_1_37465,00.html)

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

[http://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/environment/oecd-
environmental-...](http://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/environment/oecd-
environmental-outlook-to-2050/executive-summary_env_outlook-2012-3-en)

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

Thank Christ that will never run out.

------
error
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.

~~~
cletus
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.

~~~
ippisl
|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](http://www.wesolveforx.com/#t=t&n=ee7350c5)

------
danneu
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?

~~~
redwood
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

------
jamesaguilar
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.

~~~
rayiner
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).

~~~
robryan
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.

------
brownbat
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...](http://www.wired.com/science/planetearth/magazine/16-07/ff_geoengineering?currentPage=all)

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

~~~
brownbat
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.

------
cpeterso
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.

~~~
elorant
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.

------
Steveism
"...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.

~~~
rosser
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.

------
yelongren
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.

------
mooneater
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?

------
jakeonthemove
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>

------
ctdonath
Context which I never see addressed: <http://donath.org/Photos/TempChange.PNG>

~~~
zipdog
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.

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

------
insertnickname
The future will be nothing like the past.

------
carguy1983
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.

------
rajpaul
"based on current global trends"

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

