Hardin Tibbs

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 »

You are unlikely to be aware of this unless you work in a chemical laboratory, but since late last year there has been a critical shortage of a key chemical solvent, acetonitrile. This chemical is a by-product of plastics manufacturing for the car industry, and as the global financial crisis caused demand for cars to collapse, supplies have all but disappeared Read the rest of this entry »

The UK’s Daily Telegraph carried a story today about the possibility that the satellites of the Global Positioning System “could begin to fail as early as next year.” As is often the case with news stories, this is not a useful statement about the future – they could break down next week, or not for years, as the actual substance of the story is Read the rest of this entry »

This site is new in May 2009. Its theme is the future, and it has a selection of my writing and a sampling of resources for tracking key future themes, and information about my consulting work. 

There will be occasional blog entries that have some direct or indirect bearing on thinking about the future. That is a pretty broad remit, given that the future will contain all of human life. My intention is to 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 also include scientific and philosophical ideas about time and the future, and methods for learning from and about the future.