2013: an Ominous Year For Warnings and Predictions 94
dcblogs writes "This year may be remembered for its striking number of reports and warning of calamitous events. The National Intelligence Council released its Global Trends 2030: Alternative Worlds report that included a number of dire possibilities ahead, including the prospect of a catastrophic solar storm, on par with the 1859 Carrington Event. Historical records suggest a return period of 50 years for a repeat of the Quebec-level storm that knocked out the power for 6 million in 1989, and 150 years for very extreme storms, such as the Carrington Event, according to Lloyd's, in a report this year. Scientists at the Idaho National Laboratory recently demonstrated in tests that 'geomagnetic disturbances have the power to disrupt and possibly destroy electrical transformers, the backbone of our nation's utility grid.' This was also the year the average daily level of CO2 reached a concentration above 400 parts per million. In a recent National Academies report this year, 'Abrupt Impacts of Climate Change: Anticipating Surprises,' scientists recommend creation of a global early warning system to alert mankind to abrupt climate changes. A recent paper in Nature, Abrupt rise of new machine ecology beyond human response time, said financial trading systems are driving transaction times down to the speed of light, and 'the quickest that someone can notice potential danger and physically react, is approximately 1 second.'"
Re:How are we going to harness tech and knowledge (Score:4, Insightful)
Will you teach your children to flake flint hand axes?
Thought not.
Re:Yeah and there's no more North Pole (Score:5, Insightful)
More fun: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/04/22/failed-mirth-earth-day-predictions/ [wattsupwiththat.com]
http://reason.com/archives/2000/05/01/earth-day-then-and-now [reason.com]
Here's a joke:
Q: What's the difference between a Bible-Thumper who predicts the Rapture and an Environmentalist who predicts a religious Eco-Apocalypse?
A: There are actually two differences: The Bible-Thumper actually has the decency to predict a firm date, and then admits that he was wrong when the rapture didn't occur.
Re:Yeah and there's no more North Pole (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Yeah and there's no more North Pole (Score:4, Insightful)
Get with the program: Everything bad that has ever occurred in the 20th century is due to Reagan and Reagan alone. Don't let the corporatist media fool you into thinking that anyone other than Reagan was running the show in the 20th century. DON'T BE A SHEEPLE.
Oh, BTW, Reagan was also so stupid that he couldn't tie his own shoes.
Re:Yeah and there's no more North Pole (Score:4, Insightful)
You mean +5 funny satire? The sad truth is that there are plenty of "enlightened" people who post all the "correct" beliefs spoonfed to them over at HuffPo who basically believe that post at face value.
Re:Yeah and there's no more North Pole (Score:4, Insightful)
These predictions are all 100% accurate, just like Ted Danson's prediction that all U.S. cities will be completely uninhabitable by 1980 because Reagan was president throughout the 1970's and are even MORE accurate than ALGORE's 100% accurate prediction that the entire polar ice cap has permanently melted and all polar bears are dead.
Which specific predictions are you talking about? Nobody brought up Ted Danson, so I fail to see his relevance unless you are making this argument: if Ted Danson's predictions aren't accurate, then nobody's can be.
In any case it seems to me that the summary and linked article is kind of sloppy, almost as if it were designed to provoke this kind of silly strawman response.
For example, the notion that the power grid might be vulnerable to a geomagnetic storm the size of the 1859 event [wikipedia.org] isn't a prediction. It's merely an assessment of vulnerability to a rare but possible event (e.g., a 14+m tsunami hitting Japan). A large geomagnetic storm is a possibility that should be taken into account, not an event to put on the calendar.
Likewise, nobody is suggesting that there's anything special about the 400ppm CO2 figure, other than that it is a round figure. It's common sense to look for climate impact, not because we've hit some "magic" number, but that CO2 levels are higher than they've been at any time in the past three million years. This is especially so because the slope of the CO2 concentration graph shows no sign of topping out.
Keep in mind there's no such thing as a "natural disaster". There are only natural events that catch us unprepared. There's nothing inherently disastrous about flooding in Bengladesh, except that economics and politics forces people to live in the flood plain. Likewise there's nothing about a world that's two or three degrees warmer that makes it uninhabitable by humans, but the changes involved along the way will be *perceived* as catastrophic. For example models predict a drier western US. That doesn't mean that one day it will stop raining, it only means that rainy years will be less common and drought years more common. For all we know we'll have a rainy year in 2014, but it still makes sense to plan for the day when the Colorado River won't be able to supply all the water cities in the west require from it (Los Angeles, San Diego, Denver, Phoenix, Tucson, Salt Lake City, and others). The disaster won't be lack of water, it will be lack of preparedness.
2013: an Ominous Year For Warnings and Predictions (Score:4, Insightful)
Like every other year before it.