Hardin Tibbs

This site combines a blog and a selection of writing and public domain project work. My occasional blog posts have some direct or indirect bearing on thinking about the future. This is a pretty broad remit, since the future encompasses every aspect of human life. Mainly I comment on public pronouncements about the future by others, and on various developments that seem to reveal something useful about where we are going. This may sometimes include scientific and philosophical ideas about time and the future, as well as methods for learning from and about the future.

Looking into the future often seems like watching a shifting reflection in a distorting mirror. In the last year, we have moved from the prospect of worsening global financial meltdown to a recovery that is presenting at least the appearance of normality.

Under the surface things are not so reassuring. It feels uncomfortably as if this part of the world has shot itself resoundingly in both feet, and its power is ebbing away. This applies to both the US and the UK, but the UK in particular seems to have nowhere to go in conventional economic terms. For the moment it is living on borrowed time, waiting for the full consequences to play out.

Nevertheless, as one thing ends another inevitably begins. Focusing on the aspect in decline can make it seem like the end of the world. Turning to the aspects of newness and promise reveals a new world in the making, one utterly unlike the world of the last hundred years. As the adage has it, things are getting worse and worse and better and better at the same time.

Conventionally, commentary such as this tracks the gyrations of business as usual, but what to do when the party is over and a hangover is imminent? The coming decade will not be a time to hold on to old ways of thinking and acting. This is a time to be tracing the outlines of the new – and I hope this blog can make a contribution. There is enormous promise hidden in the confusion of what humanity has achieved so far, and I am convinced a way of living is in prospect that can resolve the confusion and deliver on the promise. My personal New Year/New Decade resolution is to help in piecing together a new and optimistic vision for what is possible.

As we enter this new decade, we are at a tipping point between civilizations, a prospect that is both exhilarating and terrifying. Let us hold fast to optimism and see this as a time of birth and celebration. Happy New Year and Happy New Decade!

Earlier this week there were two signals that the oil price is threatening to return to dangerous levels as economic growth begins to pick up. On Monday, the FT reported that forward oil prices are now $20 higher than two years ago, even though spot prices are much lower. And on Tuesday, the Guardian reported allegations by a whistleblower at the International Energy Agency in Paris that the agency has been underplaying the rate of oilfield decline, while overplaying the chance of finding new oil Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday evening I took part in a wide-ranging discussion in London that included a number of senior civil servants. Although I need to respect the anonymity of the participants, I do have permission to mention one fairly abstract point that caught my interest.

A view was expressed that rising complexity in an instantaneously interconnected and interdependent world has reached the point where governments Read the rest of this entry »

The UK’s celebrated TV illusionist Derren Brown appeared to get the future right on Wednesday this week when he predicted the outcome of the National Lottery on live TV. As this blog is concerned with the future it seems appropriate to comment. Setting aside the temporarily beguiling explanation offered on his Friday night TV show, on this occasion he was given away by a slight error Read the rest of this entry »

Last Monday, Nouriel Roubini, writing in the Financial Times, said there are now three open questions about the economic crisis: when will it end, what shape will it be, and are there risks of relapse? Clearly these are pertinent questions, but they reflect a general tendency for commentary to be framed in terms of a desired return to normal, a restoring of economic growth. The assumption that this is a ‘normal’ crisis Read the rest of this entry »

In the last week, the Economist and the Financial Times have both told us that macroeconomics is in a state of meltdown because it failed to prevent or predict the global financial crisis. This is more than a spat in the corridors of academe. In the real world, it actually makes it harder to predict the future of the current financial crisis, and potentially increases volatility Read the rest of this entry »

In 2007 Australia announced plans to ban incandescent light bulbs from November 2009 onwards, and in March this year the EU adopted a regulation that will phase them out from September 2009 onwards. Several other countries are also planning phase-outs. Much of the credit for this is attributed to a campaign called Ban the Bulb, which has been arguing for the banning of incandescents since 2005 Read the rest of this entry »

There seems to be a widespread perception that global climate models capture all the important factors that will determine the future of the global climate. The previous post showed how changes in the underlying assumptions can cause the models to indicate less change, at least in the short term. But it is also relatively easy to show how things could be much worse than any model can currently capture Read the rest of this entry »

Just as climate scientists finally succeeded in convincing everyone that global warming is imminent, the latest versions of their models seem to be leading them to take a more cautious line.

In May last year, a study led by Noel Keenlyside of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences in Germany reported that due to multi-decade-long changes in ocean currents, “global surface temperature may not increase over the next decade Read the rest of this entry »

On Wednesday this week I attended the GAIN Business Alliance Forum in Amsterdam, where I gave a presentation on the future prospects for global food production. I was not aware of GAIN before receiving the invitation to present at the forum, but it turns out to have a tightly focused and potentially very effective purpose. GAIN stands for Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition Read the rest of this entry »