Now that I think of it the article is understating the problem. Long before 2050 there won't be enough fossil fuel left to move food around (and grow it) to feed the earth's billions.
__________________ There are more humans in the world than rats.
There are and will be plenty of fossil fuels by 2050, the oil cartels restrict the outflow and total available resource numbers to keep the price high now. It's a common practice in many fields. This is not counting the alternative sources that will be used more and more in the following decades.
It will be business as usual come 2050. Barring an asteroid impact or super-virus.
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Do you mean as in everyone will be dead? Or that it's so far in the future that all of us reading it will be dead..because that seems unlikely barring an extinction event like implied in the first interpretation.
To some degree I agree with you Robtard, but ofcause the world will over the next 39 years change drastically from what we know today.
Normally you say that a guy from 1660 can awaken with a 100 year interval up until 1960 without noticing any signifant difference, but at 1960 he will be really scared. I think the same (to some degree) applies to us, because if you see (just over the last 20 years) how much the world has changed well... give us another 39 and it'll be interesting.
IMO, I think a super pathogen will hit before long. As I've gone on about before, a weaponized form of Rabies is the best candidate for the greatest amount of death...considering there's been only 1 or 2 survivors from full on rabies (and they were vegetables.) The way we survive it now is through mitigation of the actual infection. Weaponized when it's peak is realized within a day or two instead of weeks? Yeah, that's a lot of death and we would have ourselves a virtual "zombie" apocalypse similar to the Rage virus.
I searched and searched and it was the only virus that had a 100% death rate...if left untreated. Others did not even come close with up to 90% untreated death rate being seen (like a strain of Ebola.)
World economies will not be able to whistand the high oil prices, especially ours. Given that almost all farm equipment (in the western world) runs on diesel and what do you think will happen to food prices?
Alternative fuels are simply decades away from any type of large scale implementation. Then there's the fact that the world is running out of enough fresh water both drinking and irrigation.
And like the article says...we will need to produce more food in the next 40 years than in the last 8000 to feed everybody.
The earth simply does not have the resources to supply 9 billion humans who want to live the American lifestyle..and yes, everyone wants to drive cars and eat meat.
Business as usual? I'd like to make a large bet with you on that but it's very unlikely I'll be around to collect it.
__________________ There are more humans in the world than rats.