The 7 Likeliest Disasters of This Century

Let us now look at which calamities and misfortunes we are most likely to see in this century. I will create a list that steers away from fascinating apocalyptic disasters which are very unlikely to occur, and focuses on disasters that have the highest chance of occurring before the year 2100. I do not mean to argue that any of the things on my list are necessarily likely to occur in this century. I simply will look at which gigantic calamities are the most likely to occur in our century, regardless of whether the chance of their occurrence is greater than 50%.

First, I may mention a few fascinating possibilities which make great topics for “disaster porn” (ala Sci-Fi Channel),  but which are not at all likely to occur in our century:

1. An asteroid or comet collision could one day wipe out mankind, but the chance of a very bad asteroid or comet collision occurring in this century is very low. One need merely consider that we haven't had such a collision during the roughly 5000 years of recorded history, so the chance of it occurring in the remainder of this century is much less than 2%.
   
2. There is a gigantic volcanic time-bomb sitting underneath Yellowstone National Park, and scientists think the last time it erupted it pretty much buried North America in ash and dust. It could do the same thing again, as mentioned here, but thankfully the previous eruption was more than 600,000 years ago. So the chance of such a disaster occurring in our century is much less than 1%.
   
3. The widely discussed possibility of a “gray goo” disaster caused by an uncontrollable reproduction of nanotechnology is probably something that has a low chance of happening in this century. Nobel Prize winner Richard Smalley argued that there are technical reasons why he don't have to worry about this possibility.
   
4. There is very little chance that before the year 2100 robots will take over the world or make us slaves or get rid of us. While there will be fantastic leaps in robot hardware, you need equally great leaps in software before robots are a huge risk to mankind; and software is only increasing gradually rather than exponentially.
   

But what calamities have a relatively high chance of occurring in this century? Below is my list.

1. A City-Busting Hurricane

Global warming is slowly increasing the temperature of seawater, and it is warm seawater that leads to hurricanes. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says, “It is likely that greenhouse warming will cause hurricanes in the coming century to be more intense globally and have higher rainfall rates than present-day hurricanes.” 

Unfortunately, many of the world's largest cities are in danger from this possibility. Hurricanes cause storm surges that temporarily and locally raise sea levels. When you combine such surges with sea levels that may already be elevated because of global warming, the chance of devastation is very high. The devastation in New York caused by Hurricane Sandy and the similar devastation in New Orleans may be just a foretaste of far worst disasters in our century. Before 2100 we will probably see at least one major city more or less wiped out by a hurricane.

2. A City-Busting Nuclear Explosion

Despite the progress that has been made in reducing Cold-War worries about nuclear war, there is a still a very large chance that at least one city will be destroyed by a nuclear bomb before the year 2100. Even though the United States and Russia have reduced their nuclear arsenals, they each still have about 2000 active nuclear weapons. India and Pakistan each have about 100 nuclear weapons. The continued risk of nuclear war was highlighted by a recent announcement by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists that it was keeping its Doomsday Clock (a warning of global risk) set at five minutes before midnight. Many of the US and Russian nuclear weapon systems are very old, built using technology that does not meet modern standards of reliability. The risk of an accidental launch or detonation is significant.

Besides the danger of a conventional nuclear war, there is the ongoing risk of nuclear terrorism. Outside of the world's nuclear bombs is enough highly enriched uranium and plutonium to make 40,000 additional nuclear weapons. Much of this exists in places in less than ideal security. If terrorists were to steal only a softball-sized amount of this highly enriched uranium, it would then be fairly easy for them to construct a homemade nuclear bomb. We are very lucky that no city has yet been lost in a mushroom cloud.

3. A Mega-drought

Currently California is facing the worst drought in its 163-year history. A few years ago, Texas faced a similar drought. These are probably just like tremors warning us of the earthquakes to come. This study projects future droughts using a Palmer Drought Severity Index, in which bigger droughts have a larger negative number. The worst drought ever recorded had a Palmer Drought Severity Index of -3 or -4. But the study projects that by the year 2100 some parts of the United States will see droughts with a Palmer Drought Severity Index of -8 or -10, more than twice as bad as the worst drought ever recorded. The same study forecasts that by the year 2100 some Mediterranean areas will face droughts with a Palmer Drought Severity Index in the -15 or -20 range, four or five times worse than the worst ever recorded. 

4. An Energy Crunch

By an energy crunch I mean a gap between the amount of energy the world has and the amount of energy the world needs for its current economic activities. There is a huge risk of a gigantic energy crunch in this century, because we have limited supplies of fossil fuels. It is predicted that global oil production will peak within a few decades. It is also predicted that global coal production will peak in this century, probably a few decades later than oil production will peak. The result may be a catastrophe even worse than global warming, one that leaves millions shivering or sweating in a world where electrical power is unreliable. In this study a Cal Tech scientist cites a forecast that 90% of global fossil fuels will be exhausted by 2067.

5. Mass Famine

There are four reasons why a mass famine is a large possibility before the year 2100:

1. The large possibility of terrible droughts, discussed above.
   
2. The global stressing of available water supplies, which will make it harder to irrigate crops.
   
3. The large possibility that global oil supplies will plunge long before the year 2100, because of the depletion of this limited resource. Oil is a major factor in agricultural production, being used to transport food and make fertilizers.
   
4. The fact that global population will have greatly increased, rising to as high as ten billion.
   

Add up all these things and you have a very high risk of a mass famine that may kill millions.

6. Global Depression or Economic Collapse

The global economy is something that has grown erratically, in fits and starts, with very little previous planning or design. No one ever designed the global economy to last a thousand years, and there is no reason to be very confident that it can survive something such as a gigantic energy crunch, particularly if such a disaster is combined with some of the other disasters discussed here. In particular, the global economy has a strong tendency to rely on debt, and once things start going wrong, many people lose the ability to repay debts. We saw a tremendous ripple effect caused when many people couldn't repay their debts during the 2008 economic crisis. Something similar could happen to a degree that could be ten times worse, and it bring down the whole economy like a collapsing house of cards. The result would at best be a global depression like we saw in the 1930's, and at worst a global economic collapse. The chance of such a thing seems worse when one considers that after the 2008 financial crisis, the world's nations patched on a lot of band-aids and used "extend and pretend" to muddle through, rather than making the hard choices needed to reduce the risk of similar problems in the future. 

7. A Global Pandemic

The risk of a global pandemic or plague is described in my previous How to Have a Pleasant Pandemic. The risk is very substantial because of three main factors: (1) global warming will increase the risk from certain types of diseases; (2) increased jet travel increases the chance of diseases spreading around the world; (3) there is a very substantial risk that mankind will be inflicted by some new disease deliberately cooked up in a laboratory by some malevolent party.

In regard to the third of these factors, consider that gene-analysis technology that used to cost millions of dollars is now available in desktop devices for a few thousand dollars. Technology leaps such as that may in a few decades make it so that any Tom, Dick, or Harry can whip up a new virus or bacteria in his garage, or genetically turbocharge an existing type of germ. Once that happens the risk of a global pandemic will rise much higher.

So that is my list of the seven likeliest disasters of this century. If it leaves you depressed, please read my vastly more optimistic post The 8 Luckiest Things That Could Happen in the Future.

Slow Your Aging While You Help Save the Earth

Today's headlines are reporting a very interesting study reported in a scientific journal. Healthful Living May Improve Telomeres and Lifespans says one headline. Healthy Diet May Reverse Aging, Study Finds says another headline.

But it seems that the real headline should be: Stop Eating Meat and Slow Your Aging.

Telomeres are little cap-like structures on the ends of the chromosomes in your cells. As cells age, the telomeres grow shorter and shorter. Eventually when the telomeres in a cell grow short enough, the cell stops dividing, which results in cell death. The more of this cell death that occurs, the faster you age.

Chromosomes (gray) and telomeres (white)

The newest study (reported in Lancet Oncology) was done on a small group of men who adapted a vegan diet, increased exercise, and underwent an anti-stress program that included meditation and support groups. After five years on such a program, the men had telomeres that were 10% longer than at the beginning of the five years. The control group had telomeres that were 3% shorter than at the beginning of the five years.

A vegan diet is one that includes no meat, fish, or animal products such as cheese or milk. But we don't know exactly what causal factors played a part in the results. It might have been that the results would have been as good if the participants had merely followed a vegetarian diet, one which excludes meat but does not exclude fish, eggs, or cheese.

There was a previous study that compared diet and telomere length. Published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, this study involved 840 people, many times more than the small group studied by the study published in Lancet Oncology. The study analyzed a large variety of foods and drinks consumed by the 840 people, and found only one type of food that tended to shorten people's telomeres.

That type of food was processed meat.

In other words, the study found that sausages, hot dogs, salami, and similar food is making you age faster.

No one should be surprised that sausages and similar food makes you age faster. You never really know what is in a sausage. I'm reminded of a line from the song Master of the House in the musical Les Miserables, in which the inn keeper confesses that his sausages are made with the livers of horses and the kidneys of rats.

You should give up processed meat, and your best best for slowing your aging is to give up all red meat. If you do so, you will not merely be helping yourself, but our planet as well.

Meat consumption is one of the largest causes of global warming. Five years ago the United Nations produced a report called Livestock's Long Shadow, which estimated that raising livestock for food is causing 18 percent of global warming. Two environmental specialists for the World Bank produced a report arguing that raising livestock for food is causing 51 percent of the world's global warming. The exact percentage is a matter of debate, but there can be no doubt that a large amount of global warming could be prevented if we stopped eating meat, or greatly reduced our meat consumption, particularly the consumption of beef. Beef consumption is a particularly large factor in global warming, because cows abundantly produce methane, which speeds up global warming much more dramatically than carbon dioxide.

There is also the moral issue that if more gave up meat eating, there would be more food available. To make a pound of meat available, you have to feed an animal as much as 13 pounds of grain. If the world ate much less meat, there would be much more grain available, and we would not have a world where up to a billion people suffer from hunger.

Let me end this post by simply considering what is best for helping you slow your aging rate. I will list three options: an easy option, a more challenging option, and a most challenging option.

The easy option is for you to simply stop eating processed meat such as sausages. That will eliminate from your diet the one and only food product that the previously cited AJCN study found to be a telomere shortener (a food that accelerates your aging).

The more challenging option is to give up all red meat, or all meat. That might well help slow your aging rate, and will help reduce global warming and help increase the world food supply.

The most challenging option is to go vegan, and give up consumption of all animal products. While it might seem to be justified by the study recently published in Lancet Oncology (which showed the big telomere improvement for vegans), you might wait for a follow-up study before taking this most difficult step (as that study used only a small sample size).

An Elysium Future?

This week I saw the new science fiction film Elysium starring Matt Damon and Jodie Foster. I thought the movie was fairly plausible and realistic, with the exception of one laughable scene in which a computer expert looks at a few screens of hexadecimal code for a few seconds, and then deduces the extremely complicated task the program was designed for. (This scene is utterly unrealistic because no programmers can read hexadecimal, and even if the program had been written in a more high level language, it takes programmers hours or days to figure out what any complicated program is doing just by reading programming code.)

Credit: Sony Pictures

The movie is set in the year 2154, and depicts a vast gulf between the poor and the rich. The poor are living on an overcrowded, run-down, over-polluted Earth. The rich are living in a huge luxurious rotating space station orbiting Earth. The space station rotates to produce artificial gravity, and those on the space station have an almost suburban lifestyle, with lovely houses and lawns, in addition to medical devices which can cure any health problem. But those left on Earth live in conditions like the filthy shanty towns of third world nations.

There is actually a plausible Malthusian case to be made that the future may resemble the future shown in this movie, although the movie does nothing to explain what caused the world to reach the state the movie depicts. Let us look at some of the factors that might end up producing a world rather like the world depicted in Elysium, not in the next century but in this century. When I refer to a world like the world in Elysium, I don't specifically mean a world in which the rich are living in outer space. I mean instead a world in which the many live in squalid, run-down, overpopulated conditions, and the lucky few live in wonderful high-tech splendor, isolated from the unlucky rabble. The isolation is more likely to occur by the rich fleeing to gated communities, fenced mansions, or high-rise buildings.

Here are factors that may lead to a future like the movie Elysium.

Peak Oil and Peak Coal

Our civilization is centered around cheap oil, but in the future oil may be very expensive, and the global demand for oil may soon far exceed the amount of oil we are producing. In the United States, the production of oil peaked in the early 1970's, and oil production has also peaked in many other countries. Oil is a nonrenewable resource, and we probably only have decades left of crude, easy to get oil. Although there is significant disagreement among experts, many predict that before long the global production of oil will peak, and then begin declining at a rate such as 2 percent per year. This will be at the same time that the world's demand for oil will be growing, as more and more people in countries such as China and India start to drive.

The situation regarding coal is a little brighter, as coal production is expected to increase for a few decades. But many experts predict that coal production will peak around 2040 or 2050, and then begin to sharply decline, because of the depletion of limited fossil fuel resources. This is exactly what happened locally in Pennsylvania, which was once a center of coal mining, until it mined itself out. If coal production plunges, it will be good for the environment, but a potential disaster for civilization. Imagine a time around 2040 when more and more internet-loving people are using ever more electricity, to power their digital devices and to cool their homes (increasingly necessary because of global warming). Then imagine coal production starts plunging because of resource limits. After a few decades of dwindling electricity, the result would be grim. Solar power and wind power will help to bridge the gap, but many are worried that there will still be a huge energy crisis in this century that degrades our civilization.

Overpopulation and Overconsumption

The world population is growing at a rate of about 74 million per year, and experts predict that the population will grow to about 9 billion by the year 2050. Perhaps more worrying than the growth in population is the growth of consumption, with increasing numbers in countries such as India and China
adopting Western lifestyles that include driving, heavy use of electronic gadgets, or heavy meat eating. Increasing levels of consumption and population are straining the Earth's resources and causing environmental harm. For an example, we only need look at the air pollution levels in China.

Global Warming and Soil Depletion


Global warming was not an element in the movie Elysium, but it is easy to imagine global warming playing a part in the sad birth of a planetary landscape like the one depicted in the movie. Global warming may shorten the growing season and may lead to increased droughts in prime agricultural areas. Another severe problem is soil depletion, a process by which soil gradually loses nutrients that it took centuries to acquire. The combination of global warming and soil depletion may mean that we are not able to meet the food demands of the future, possibly resulting in widespread famine.

Water Shortages

Another problem that may lead to a future like that of the movie Elysium is future shortages of fresh water, as described here. For example, the movie is set in Los Angeles, and the California Department of Resources says that if more water supplies aren't found by 2020, the region will face a shortfall nearly as great as the amount consumed today. The Wikipedia article on water scarcity says, "The water tables are falling in scores of countries (including Northern China, the US, and India) due to widespread overpumping using powerful diesel and electric pumps... This will eventually lead to water scarcity and cutbacks in grain harvest.”

Growing Economic Inequality

Another trend that may lead to a future like that of the movie Elysium is the accelerating trend towards wealth inequality , meaning the excessive concentration of wealth in the hands of the few. The graphic below illustrates very vividly the ridiculous excesses of wealth inequality in the United States. As wealth inequality has grown steadily worse over the past twenty years, we have every reason to suspect things will get worse in the future.

Credit: Stephen Ewen

Dystopia or Utopia?

So are we likely to see an earthly dystopia like that depicted in the movie Elysium? I can merely give the same answer given by last year's World Economic Forum's annual report on future risks. The report said that we are now planting the “seeds of dystopia.” If we continue with business as usual, we may well see a grim future like that depicted in the movie, a future of the fortunate few and the miserable many.

We probably won't see the super-rich fleeing to luxurious space stations, as in the movie. But we can expect to see more and more gated communities in which the rich flee to try to live in their own little worlds of comfort, from which the suffering masses are excluded.

One of the ways we can help prevent such a future is by introducing hefty luxury taxes on very expensive items, which will discourage excessive extravagant consumption, and help encourage a more equitable distribution of wealth. Every time a millionaire buys a mansion or a yacht or a jet or a diamond necklace, he or she should be paying a large luxury tax.

Can We Feed the World in the 21st Century? (Part II)

In the previous blog post we looked at some of the reasons for being pessimistic about the ability of mankind to meet all its food needs in the 21^st century. Now let's look at some reasons for being optimistic that mankind will be able to meet its food needs.

The Optimistic Case

Over the past ten thousand years the number of persons fed per acre of food has grown by a factor of perhaps a thousand times. Back around 6000 BC it would take perhaps 100 acres to feed a single person, because both the planting of crops and the picking of crops was very inefficient. These days a single person can be fed by only a single acre. Modern day tractors are many times more efficient than the horse-drawn plows used long ago, and modern day reapers are many times more efficient than a single person using a scythe or cycle to cut and gather crops.

We can assume that with the growth of technology this trend will continue. Given that Google is making fantastic strides in developing self-driving cars, we can imagine there will be soon be robotized tractors and planting machines that will be able to plant crops more efficiently than we can do today. We will presumably also have robotized crop reaping and crop picking machines that will allow grown food to be reaped far more efficiently than today.

Moore's law is the law that processor power roughly doubles every two years. Because of factors such as Moore's law, you can now buy a computer a hundred times more powerful than was available a few years back, and you can also buy it at a much cheaper price. If we assume that Moore's law will continue in the next decades, it may well be that within a few decades super-efficient agricultural machines become available at a low price throughout the world.

If that happens, the food production per acre for the rest of the world (currently about 1.5 tons of grain per acre) may catch up to the current US food production per acre (currently a little less than 3 tons of grain per acre). If that happens it would probably be enough to meet the world's food needs. It is estimated that we will need a productivity of 2.5 tons of grain per acre to feed the world by 2050.

Another factor that may increase the productivity per acre is the development of new genetically engineered crops. Scientists are working on new genetically engineered crops that will require less water, produce more food, require less fertilizer, and require less pesticide. A single breakthrough in this area could produce a huge increase in global food production.

The concept of eating insects is unattractive to most US citizens, but the United Nations recently stated there is a huge potential for increasing global food production by supplementing food with insects, which can be an excellent source of protein. Such a possibility is at least something that could be used as a last resort to stop famine.

There is also a huge potential for increasing food supplies by decreasing global consumption of meat, and using more land to directly grow crops rather than using the land for raising livestock. Raising livestock such as cows and pigs is a very inefficient way to produce food. The amount of land and energy needed to produce a single kilogram of beef would produce ten kilograms of grain. The production of livestock is a major cause of global warming. It could well be that in the future more and more people will become vegetarians to help reduce global warming. If that happens (and grazing land is converted to grow grain), global food productivity may increase sharply.

Another reason for hope is the possibility that 3D printing technology will be harnessed to help improve global food supplies. We are currently seeing explosive growth in this technology, which uses a “layer by layer” approach to manufacture items entirely different from the factory production technique. Some scientists think that in the future people will have 3D printers that allow them to create food items from raw nutrients, in a very efficient way that bypasses the whole traditional agricultural process.

Despite all these reasons for optimism, there is still a significant risk that in this century there will be a huge shortfall between the amount of food we need and the amount of food we produce. You can do your part to help minimize this risk by sharply reducing (or ideally even stopping) your consumption of meat, particularly red meat. If you don't have the willpower to be a vegetarian, try skipping meat every day or 5 days a week. You will help decrease global warming, and decrease the chance of starvation in the future (not to mention decrease your chance of getting cancer and heart disease).

Can We Feed the World in the 21st Century? (Part I)

One of the great clouds hanging over this century is whether we will be able to feed the rising human population.  Already millions go to bed hungry every night, but what will happen when the human population grows much greater? Will there perhaps be mass starvation? Let's look at the issue from a pessimistic standpoint and an optimistic standpoint. Today's post will look at the pessimistic case.  Tomorrow's post will look at the optimistic case.

The Pessimistic Case

We don't know how much population will grow in the coming decades,
but the United Nations has three projections  shown below:

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population

According to the first projection the population will grow to 16 billion. According to
the second projection, the population will grow to 10 billion. According to the third projection, the population will grow to 8 billion, and then begin to decline. Most likely, there will be a much greater need for food supplies as the population grows.

However, the production of food is critically related to the availability of fossil fuel energy supplies, particularly oil. Oil is used throughout the process of producing and transporting food, most notably in the production of fertilizers and in shipping and trucking food products. But global oil production may have peaked, or may be near to peaking.

Below is a graph from the International Energy Agency predicting future oil production:

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:IEA_2010UnknownSources2.jpg

Now upon first looking at this graph, you might say: it doesn't look too bad, because the prediction is that production will slightly increase. But notice the dark blue portion of the graph above. That represents how known developed oil fields will decline in the next few decades. The other 2 blue parts of the graph basically fall under the category of “what we may get if we are incredibly lucky.” We have every reason to be skeptical that all this huge amount of oil production from “fields yet to be found” and “fields yet to be developed” will actually come about. Many say that the International Energy Agency prediction shown above is guilty of a gigantic degree of wishful thinking. They could have just as easily made a graph predicting vastly less future production from “fields yet to be found” and “fields yet to be developed.”

Here is a graph from a few years back showing future oil production from various estimates:

Source: http://www.theoildrum.com/story/2006/11/13/225447/79

As we can see from this graph, many experts predict that global oil production will soon begin to decline very substantially. Such predictions shouldn't be surprising. Oil is a non-renewable resource created from biological and geological processes that occurred millions of years ago, over the course of millions of years. We know that oil production in the United States followed a bell-shaped curve, reaching its peak around 1970. The US's current oil production is only a little more than half of what it was in 1970.  Many countries around the world have experienced the same bell-shaped curve, and have  oil production much lower than it once was.

Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c5/US_Oil_Production_and_Imports_1920_to_2005.png


So what will happen to our food production if oil production declines sharply? With a rising population, the most likely result may be mass starvation. There would seem to be a high chance of mass starvation involving many millions of people.  Since modern food production is so dependent upon oil, it seems that to adequately feed a growing population, we need a sharp increase in oil production, but the exact opposite may be in store.

Another reason to worry about the future food supply is soil erosion.  Some 40% of the soil used for agriculture is classified as depleted.  It is estimated that soil is being used at a rate that is ten times greater than the rate at which the soil is naturally replenished. Some think that we have only about 60 years of topsoil left.  (http://world.time.com/2012/12/14/what-if-the-worlds-soil-runs-out/)

Much of the world's food comes from fishing, but fish stocks are being stressed around the world.  All too efficient methods such as bottom trawling are leading to situations where some areas now have few of the fish they have provided for food in the past.  The UN Food and Agricultural Organization estimates that coastal fisheries have declined by 50% in the past 30 years.

Another factor to consider is global warming. As the temperature rises in the decades ahead, it may have a negative effect on global agricultural production. Temperature rises lead to more droughts. Temperature rises increase the need for irrigation. Warmer winters will mean that fewer insects will be killed off during the winter, leading to an increase in some insect populations that may threaten crops.

In fact, as population grows, more and more of the world's forests are being turned into farmland, which may itself increase global warming (since forests soak up the carbon dioxide that is causing global warming). There is also the fact that fresh water supplies are becoming more and more stressed, which may have a very negative effect on our ability to irrigate farmland.

Below is a graph based on predictions of a computer model called World3, popularized by the famous “Limits to Growth” books:

Source: http://www.fraw.org.uk/mei/ecolonomics/00/ecolonomics-20090912.shtml

In this model food production hits a peak a little into the 21st century, and then starts to decline, partially because of declines in resources (which include oil and also fertile soil). After a lag of a decade or so, population starts to plummet, presumably because of mass starvation.

So is this what the future has in store? Perhaps not, because there are some optimistic factors to consider. We will examine those in the next blog post.