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Report on Planet Earth: A 50-Year Retrospective for A.D. 2042
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20222 |
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Section : |
SPECIAL SECTION
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| Issue
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1 / 1992 |
3,317 Words |
| Author
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Charles Sheffield
Charles Sheffield is the author of several science fiction
novels as well as numerous articles and essays on physics and
space science. |
In the past, they said it could only get worse.
The professional futurists, peering into their cloudy crystal balls back in the 1990s, could see many ways for the world to go downhill. Worse, yet, the decline they perceived would continues as far into the future as they dared to look.
The bogeymen of our grandparents came in two main categories. First, there were impending shortages. The world, they said, would run out of many basic materials in the next half century; cheap oil would disappear by about 2030, natural gas by 2050, low-sulfur coal would be gone by 2090. On the minerals side, although there was enough iron for centuries, lead would show a severe shortage by 2040, and copper by 2050.
Even more alarming, perhaps because less obviously a resource until recent times, the world's demand for fresh water would far exceed its supply by 2020 or earlier. The world's tropical forests would be gone by that date, and the great boreal forests of the Northern Hemisphere would be in decline because of acid rain and the "forest dying" that by the mid-1980s was already affecting half the woods of Europe. Along with forest clearing and the overexploitation of agricultural lands would come the loss of topsoil, increased desertification, and the consequent decline in the area of arable lands. Food production potential would diminish.
Removal of forest cover, especially tropical forest, would lead to another and irretrievable loss of species. In 1990, about three-quarters of the roughly five million species of plants and animals on Earth could be found only in the tropics. In the decade from 1990 to 2000, about a million species became extinct because of deforestation. Another two million would go by 2020.
The projected shortages were alarming. But perhaps more frightening was the second class of problem: the projected surpluses. Air pollution by oxides of nitrogen and sulfur would be on the increase. The water supplies would be increasingly contaminated by harmful toxins. The loss of the world's forests would mean an increase in the amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide. The amount would be further augmented by the burning of fossil fuels. The globe would retain more solar heat and induce an overall "global warming" of anything from 1-5 C. The polar ice caps would melt. Sea levels would rise and inundate the world's coastal plains. Arable land and cities would vanish. The hardcore pessimists even thought it possible that Earth might move
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