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 (more…)
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 (more…)
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 (more…)
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 (more…)
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 (more…)
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 (more…)
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 (more…)
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 (more…)
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 (more…)
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 (more…)
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