Global Catastrophes and Trends
dichotomy—fundamental shifts in human affairs come mostly in two guises, as low-probability events that could (in an instant) “change everything,” and as persistent, gradually unfolding trends that have no less far-reaching impacts in the long term.
Global civilization has a relatively small number of leading actors (equivalent to keystone species in ecosystems) whose aspirations, commitments (or lack thereof), internal changes, and external postures disproportionately affect the future and fortunes of all.
(1) although the demographic trends in Hungary and Japan appear to be similarly bleak, Japan’s rapidly aging population is a matter of global consequence because the country is still the world’s third largest economy and a principal technical innovator.
Retrospectives reveal that most of the truly long-range quantitative forecasts (spanning at least one generation, or 20-25 years) turned out to be useless within years or even months of their publication.
an effort by the National Intelligence Council (NIC 2004): it offers a Pax Americana (continuing U.S. predominance), a Davos World (robust economic growth led by China and India), a Cycle of Fear (proliferation of weapons leads to large-scale intrusive security measures in an Orwellian world), and a New Caliphate (“ a global movement fueled by radical religious identity politics [that] could constitute a challenge to Western norms and values as the foundation of the global system”).
My firm belief is that looking far ahead is done most profitably by looking far back and that this approach works both for natural catastrophes and socioeconomic trends. Naturally, there are no specifics to be learned from such an exercise, yet those extended retrospectives impress with one key lesson: history advances as much by saltations—sudden discontinuities—as it does by gradual unfolding of long-lasting trends.
None was more stunning than the great Cambrian explosion of highly organized and highly diversified terrestrial life. This great evolutionary saltation began about 533 million years ago and it produced within a geologically short spell of just 5-10 million years, or less than 0.3% of the entire evolutionary span, virtually all of the animal lineages that are known today
International finance is global: money in modest savings accounts is commingled with the legal but excessive profits of multinational companies and with the illegal and even more excessive profits of cocaine and marijuana wholesalers.
Henisz et al. (2005) asked if hurricane Katrina (fig. 1.2) was a global event and answered yes, based on three considerations: disruption of oil and gas production in the Gulf of Mexico, which helped drive up the world price of oil; worldwide insurance and reinsurance implications of this major loss (more than $ 40 billion); and a tarnished image of the United States as billions of people saw televised images of distress and devastation with a tardy and limited response from government.
Mors ultima linea rerum est. (Death is everything’s final limit.) Quintus Horatius Flaccus (Horace)
(1) known catastrophic risks, whose probabilities can be assessed owing to their recurrence; (2) plausible catastrophic risks, which have never taken place and whose probabilities of occurrence are thus much more difficult to quantify satisfactorily; and (3) entirely speculative risks, which may or may not materialize.
Clearly, no one can give examples of the latter, but the likelihood of such unknowable surprises increases as the time span under consideration lengthens.
Kurzweil (2005) placed the arrival of “singularity”—when computer power will reach 1023 floating operations per second, vastly surpassing the power and intelligence of the human brain—quite precisely in 2045.
Symbiosis rather than interspecific competition has been the most fundamental driver of life’s evolution and survival (Sapp 1994; Margulis 1998; Smil 2002).
There are even more speculative, ostensibly science-based suggestions regarding civilization’s demise, including the idea that we are living in a simulation of a past human society run by a superintelligent entity that can choose to shut it down at any time (Bostrom 2002).
Global climate change, a natural event that has commonly been posited as the most worrisome environmental crisis, can take place rapidly only when measured on an evolutionary time scale.
Annual global compilations by the Swiss Reinsurance Company (Swiss Re 2006a) show that floods and storms are by far the most frequent events; during the first years of the twenty-first century they accounted for 70%-75% of all natural catastrophes.
The most disastrous cyclone of the twentieth century, Bangladesh’s Bhola on November 13, 1970, killed at least 300,000 people; the most deadly earthquake, in northern China’s Shaanxi on January 23, 1556, claimed 830,000 lives; and the Huanghe flood of 1931 claimed at least 850,000.
They generate worldwide headlines, elicit humanitarian aid, and have long-term effects on the affected nations, but they are not among epoch-making events on the global scale.
xenophobic China did not ask for international aid following the Tangshan earthquake of July 28, 1976, which killed (officially) 242,219 people in that coal-mining city and surroundings but whose toll was estimated as high as 655,000 (Huixian et al. 2002; Y. Chen et al. 1988).
They are the Earth’s collision with nearby extraterrestrial objects that are large enough to cause death and economic damage comparable to explosions of strategic nuclear weapons; massive volcanic eruptions (with or without major tsunamis); and (possibly) voluminous tsunami-generating collapses of parts of volcanoes sliding into the ocean.
Because of their high impact velocities, even small NEOs have kinetic energy equivalent to that of a small nuclear bomb; larger bodies can bring regional devastation, and the largest can cause a global catastrophe.
But the chances of such an event are roughly 2 OM smaller than the probability of hitting an unpopulated or thinly inhabited region because densely populated areas cover only about 1% of the planet’s surface.
For North America the most likely threat is presented by recurrent eruptions of the Yellowstone hotspot (Smith and Braile 1994).
If a new eruption were to produce as much ash as the last one and affect approximately 2 million km2, then all of the leading wheat-producing states would be buried under half a meter of ash.
The last episode, in 1783-1784, produced nearly 15 km3 of lava and released about 122 Mt of SO2 in eight months (for comparison, the global emissions of the gas from the combustion of fossil fuels were about 150 Mt SO2/ year during the early 2000s) as well as about 7 Mt of hydrochloric acid and 15 Mt of hydrofluoric acid;
The odds of another eruption like it during the next 50 years are very low ( 0.05%), but there is a high probability that a similar event will take place again during this millennium.
Eastbound flights take advantage of the shifting jet streams, whose course often puts them close to Iceland; westbound flights approximate the great circle route, which puts them close to or right above Iceland.
Perhaps the greatest risk of this kind is now posed by a future eruption of Cumbre Vieja volcano, which created La Palma in the Canary Islands about 3 million years ago (Ward and Day 2001). During the 1949 eruption, the seventh known since 1470, the volcano’s western half moved some 4 m oceanward; another eruption could cause a catastrophic failure of the entire western flank.
The resulting landslide of up to 500 km3 of volcanic rock would generate a rapidly moving (up to 350 km/ h) mega-tsunami, which would, after crossing the Atlantic, hit the eastern coast of North America with repeated walls of water up to 25 m high, assuring the destruction of Miami and severe damage to all coastal U.S. cities, including New York and Boston
all available historic and current eruption data and seismic, deformation, and thermal analyses to predict a > 50% probability of another eruption by 2027, a nearcertainty (> 95% probability) by 2214.
vaccinations have either completely eliminated or drastically reduced a number of previously lethal, deeply injurious, or widely discomforting epidemic diseases, including cholera, diphtheria, pertussis, polio, smallpox, tuberculosis, and typhoid.
Pertussis (whooping cough) is coming back among children too young to be vaccinated (Tozzi et al. 2005).
The number of multidrug-resistant cases is increasing, and four decades have passed since the introduction of the last new effective anti-TB drugs, rifampicin in 1965 and ethambutol in 1968 (Glickman et al. 2006; Murray 2006).
During the early 2000s the annual global death toll from AIDS was about 2.8 million people, less than mortality due to diarrhea and tuberculosis, two diseases that we know perfectly well how to eradicate at an acceptably low cost and that now claim annually about 3.4 million lives (WHO 2006).
In 1830-1833 an unknown subtype originated in Russia; in 1836-1837 another unknown subtype originated possibly in Russia; in 1889-1890 subtypes H2 and H3, originated possibly in Russia; in 1918-1919 subtype H1 (despite its common name “Spanish flu”) originated most likely in the United States; in 1957-1958 subtype H2N2 originated in southern China, with total global excess mortality of more than 2 million people; and in 1968-1969 subtype H3N2 originated in Hong Kong, with excess worldwide mortality of about 1 million people.
There is little certainty regarding the total global death toll of the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic. Perhaps the most commonly cited worldwide aggregate 20-40 million, but a key World Health Organization document refers to “upwards of 40 million people” (WHO 2005),
Even the lowest estimate is higher than all military and civilian casualties of World War I (~ 15 million).
The fairly reliably documented U.S. death toll of 675,000 people (Crosby 1989) was higher than all the deaths sustained by the country’s servicemen in all twentieth-century wars.
The recurrence interval, calculated simply as the mean time elapsed between the last six known pandemics, is about 28 years, with the extremes of 6 and 53 years.
Adding the mean and the highest interval to 1968 gives a span between 1996 and 2021. We are, probabilistically speaking, very much inside a high-risk zone.
Consequently, the likelihood of another influenza pandemic during the next 50 years is virtually 100%, but quantifying probabilities of mild, moderate, or severe events remains largely a matter of speculation
To what extent would Europe’s ravaged countries become open to virtually unchecked Muslim immigration, speeding up the conversion of the continent into Eurabia? What would the collapse of global trade do to the lives of hundreds of millions of factory workers in Asia whose wages depend on exports to affluent economies? How would it affect inequality among the already highly economically polarized populations of Africa and Latin America?
Napoleonic wars, which began in 1796 with the conquest of Italy and ended in 1815 in a refashioned, and for the next 100 years also remarkably stable, Europe.
the Taiping uprising, aimed at achieving an egalitarian, reformist kingdom of heaven on earth, exemplifies a grand transformational conflict because it fatally undermined the ruling Qing dynasty, enmeshed foreign actors in China’s politics for the next 100 years, and brought in less than two generations the end of the old imperial order.
Even a rather restrictively defined list of transformational wars adds up to 42 years of conflicts in two centuries, with conservatively estimated total casualties (combatant and civilian) of about 95 million
If the evidence is initially interpreted as an attack under way, but a few minutes later this is entirely discounted, then in the minds of decision makers the probability of avoiding a thermonuclear war goes from 0% to 100% within a brief span of time.
There has been no shortage of terrorist actions (“ politics by other means”) in modern history
themselves, not by terrorist groups. And in Israel it was the Haganah, the predecessor of the Israel Defense Forces, rather than terrorist groups (Stern Gang, Irgun) that created modern
There is a much greater danger (counterintuitive but credible) that a bioterror agent could be released by a disgruntled employee of one of the 14 new research superlabs built to handle the most dangerous pathogens than that it would be carried to the United States in a suitcase by a fundamentalist zealot from the caves of Waziristan.
In general, people made the best of their often taxing experiences, and if they looked upward, they were rewarded by a rare sight, dark Manhattan under a starry sky.
According to the National Counterterrorism Center (NCC 2006), the year saw 11,111 terrorist attacks, but in 5,980 of them (54%) there were no fatalities, 2,884 had a single fatality, and 1,617 had two to four fatalities. This means, fortunately, that in nearly 95% of all terrorist events the human impact was akin to the level of moderate to serious car accidents.
Finally, given the prominence of the United States and its citizens as the targets of Islamic terror, it is notable that in 2005 only 0.4% (56 people) of all deaths due to terror attacks were U.S. citizens.
Analysis of 40 years of about 25,000 worldwide terrorist events shows about 34,000 deaths and 82,000 nonfatal injuries (Bogen and Jones 2006), a small fraction of the nearly 20 million fatalities caused by traffic accidents, and an annual average close to deaths from volcanic eruptions or airline accidents (fig. 2.24).
Murder by suicide has deep roots in Muslim history, going back to the shī’a Nizari state of the eleventh through thirteenth centuries, which perfected the practice of skilled sacramental suicidal assassins (Lewis 1968; Andriolo 2002).
in the marginHashassins
The third sobering consideration is that neither personal instability nor an individual’s hopelessness or overt personal defects, factors that come immediately to mind as the most likely drivers, are dependable predictors of candidates for suicidal martyrdom (Atran 2003; 2004). Nor are such indicators as poverty, level of education (a typical shahīd is not an illiterate simpleton), or religious devotion (before their indoctrination, many youngsters are initially only moderately religious or even secular-minded). Institutional manipulation of emotional commitment (by organizing fictive kin groupings) seems to be a key factor, and one not easily eliminated. Other obvious contributions are rapidly rising youth populations in countries governed by dictatorial regimes with limited economic opportunities, and the disenchantment of second-generation Muslim immigrants with their host societies. But none of these factors can offer any selective guidance to identify the most susceptible
in the marginReasons behind suicidal terrorists are not what we typically see them as
The fourth consideration is that our understandable fixation on suicidal missions may be misplaced.
in the marginLOL
Rather than following Joy (2000) or Rees (2003), with his concerns about the annihilation of the Earth through particle physics experiments,
A widely held assumption is that these DansgaardOeschger (D-O) events were hemispheric or global in extent and that they originated because of shifts in North Atlantic ocean circulation
Ever since that time, δ18O variations have been remarkably stable, and there appears to be virtually no possibility that another D-O warming could take place during the next 50 years.
For decades consensus posited a massive flood of fresh water (~ 9500 km3) pouring from the glacial Lake Agassiz via the Great Lakes to the North Atlantic and disrupting the normal thermohaline circulation
In the absence of any reliable explanation, it is easy to imagine that an as-yetunidentified trigger might act once more to cause cooling of 5 ° C-10 ° C over several decades.
An outstanding example is France’s successful strategy to produce most of its electricity from nuclear fission; the country quintupled its nuclear generation during a single decade, the 1980s (Dorget 1984).
From a fundamental biophysical (thermodynamic) perspective, the fortunes of nations are not determined primarily by strategic designs or economic performance but by the magnitude and efficiency of their energy conversions (Smil 2008).
The energy density of natural gas is typically around 34 MJ/ m3 compared to 34 GJ/ m3 for oil, or a 1,000-fold difference. This limits the use of gas as transportation fuel; gas is also more costly to transport and store. Consequently, modern economies will do their utmost to stay with the more convenient liquid fuels, and contrary to alarmist claims about the end of oil production, the transition to renewable energies will be a protracted affair.
This means that coal’s global reserves/ production (R/ P) ratio is nearly 160 years, and new extraction techniques could expand the reserves. Coal production is thus constrained not by resources but by demand, and by old (particulate matter and sulfur and nitrogen oxides) and new (emissions of CO2, the leading anthropogenic greenhouse gas) environmental considerations.
But until recently long-distance pipeline exports were limited to North America; Russian supplies of Siberian gas to Europe; and pipelines from Algeria and Libya to Spain and Italy.
The modern tradition of concerns about an impending decline in resource extraction began in 1865 with William Stanley Jevons, a leading economist of the Victorian era, who concluded that falling coal output must spell the end of Britain’s national greatness
The Jevonsian view was reintroduced by Hubbert (1969) with his “correct timing” of U.S. oil production, leading those who foresaw an early end to oil reserves to consider Hubbert’s Gaussian exhaustion curve with the reverence reserved by Biblical fundamentalists for Genesis.
True, there is an unfortunate absence of rigorous international standards in reporting oil reserves, and many official totals have been politically motivated, with national figures that either do not change at all from year to year or take sudden suspicious jumps. But this uncertainty leaves room for both underand overestimates, and until the sedimentary basins of the entire world (including deep offshore regions) are explored with an intensity matching that of North America and the U.S. sector of the Gulf Mexico, I see no reason to prefer the most conservative estimate of ultimately recoverable conventional oil (no more than 1.8 trillion barrels) rather than the substantially higher totals favored by other geologists, although not necessarily the highest values estimated by the U.S. Geological Survey, whose latest maximum is in excess of 4 trillion barrels.
We have no such understanding because that demand will be shaped, as in the past, by shifting prices and unpredictable technical advances. Who would have predicted in 1930 a new huge market for kerosene, created by commercial jets by 1960, or in 1970 that the performance of an average U.S. car would double by 1985?
“Finite resources is an empty slogan; only marginal cost matters.”
Between 1973 and 1985 the U.S. CAFE (corporate automobile fuel efficiency) was doubled to 27.5 mpg, but further improvements were not pursued largely because of falling oil prices. A mere resumption of that rate of improvement (technically easy to do) would have automobiles averaging 40 mpg by 2015, and a more aggressive adoption of hybrids could bring the rate to 50 mpg, more than halving the current U.S. need for automotive fuel and sending oil prices into a tailspin.
Technical advances will also make possible the conversion of that gas (and coal) into liquids, and increasing recoveries of coalbed methane and extraction of methane from hydrates will supply more hydrocarbons.
First, the steam turbine, the most important continuously working high-load prime mover of the modern world, was invented by Charles Parsons 120 years ago, and it remains fundamentally unchanged;
Second, the gasoline-fueled internal combustion engine, the most important transportation prime mover of the modern world, was first deployed (based on older stationary models) during the same decade as the Parsons machine,
Fourth, the gas turbine, the most important prime mover of modern flight, is now entering the fourth generation of service
Fifth, Nikola Tesla’s induction electric motor, commercialized during the late 1880s, diffused rapidly to become the dominant prime mover of industrial production as well as of domestic comfort and entertainment.
There are five major reasons that the transition from fossil to nonfossil supply will be much more difficult than is commonly realized: scale of the shift; lower energy density of replacement fuels; substantially lower power density of renewable energy extraction; intermittence of renewable flows; and uneven distribution of renewable energy resources.
Persian Gulf Zagros Basin, which contains nearly two-thirds of the world’s known oil reserves.
A general agreement among energy experts is that nuclear electricity must have a significant place in a nonfossil fuel world. This conclusion is based on the high capacities of nuclear power plants and on the high load factor of fission-powered generation.
Three key factors drove the transition to fossil fuels: declining resource availability (deforestation), the higher quality of fossil fuels (higher energy density, easier storage, greater flexibility), and the lower cost of coals and hydrocarbons.
The plea for an accelerated transition to nonfossil fuels results almost entirely from concerns about global climate change, but we still cannot quantify its magnitude and impact with high confidence.
Europe’s labor productivity and ample leisure time have been bought by mass (and in some countries, persistent) unemployment, roughly twice the U.S. rate for the entire work force (~ 10% vs. ?5%).
As for the EU’s morally superior risk-sensitive policies (as opposed to what Europeans see as unsophisticated, brutal, and blundering U.S. ways), they allowed EU member states to watch the slaughter of tens of thousands of people and the displacement of millions of refugees in the Balkan wars of the 1990s.
Additionally, and sadly, the continent’s ever-present anti-Semitism is undeniably resurgent (requiring the repeated assurances of political leaders that it is not); it surfaced in some stunningly direct comments during the Israeli-Hizbullah war of August 2006.
Italy’s economy suffers due to the combined impact of rapid aging (rivaled only by Japan), precipitous destruction of traditional smalland mid-scale artisanal manufacturing by Chinese imports, and growing numbers of immigrants.
The deep economic and cultural breach between the Nord and Centro on one hand, and Mezzogiorno on the other, has not diminished.
there is one inescapable factor that will determine the future of Europe’s most affluent western and central parts and poorer eastern regions: a shrinking and aging population.
Western Europe’s total fertility rates slid below replacement level (2.1 children per mother) by the mid-1970s. A generation later, by the mid-1990s, the total fertility level of EU-12 was below 1.5; the new members did nothing to lift it: by 2005 the average fertility of EU-25 was 1.5 (Eurostat 2005b). Europe’s population implosion (Douglass 2005) now appears unstoppable.
As most countries finance the current retirement costs of their workers by current contributions from the existing labor force (pay-as-you-go arrangement), increasing retiree/ worker ratios will bankrupt the entire system unless current contributions are sharply raised, pensions substantially cut, or both.
Higher dependence ratios and a higher share of very old people (> 80 years old)—for example, every eighth person in Germany will be that old by 2050—will put unprecedented stresses on the cost and delivery of health care.
The only way to avoid both massive Muslim immigration and the collapse of European welfare states would be to raise the retirement age—now as low as 56 (women) and 58 years in Italy and 60 years in France—to 75 years and to create impenetrable borders. The second action is impossible; the first one is (as yet) politically unthinkable.
Yet the ruinous agricultural subsidies, national electorates alienated from remote bureaucracies, Brussels’s rule by directive, and inability to formulate common foreign policy and military strategy are, in the long run, secondary matters compared with the eventual course of the EU’s enlargement.
No matter how far the EU expands, what lies ahead is highly uncertain except for one obvious conclusion. An entity so preoccupied with its own makeup, so unclear about its eventual mission, and so imperiled in terms of its population foundations cannot be a candidate for global leadership.
This is perhaps the likeliest prospect: Europe as the museum of the world.
At the same time, increasing numbers of young people (more than 1 million) have opted out of the labor market. This NEET generation (not in employment, education, or training), which prefers just hanging out in strange clothes and hairdos, can be seen as a sign both of Japan’s national decline and its continuing personal affluence.
it is virtually certain that by the middle of this century Japan will become the most aged of all aging high-income societies.
But the actual gap between Japan and the rest of industrialized world is not that large because Japanese statistics also include data on simple manipulators that are controlled by mechanical stops, and these machines would not pass a stricter definition of industrial robots used in the United States and the EU.
The now common Western perception of Islam as a zealous, monolithic faith with a nearhypnotic power over populations imbued with a uniform hatred of the West is a figment of historical ignorance and unhelpful generalization.
Nor should the term Islamic fundamentalism generate reflexive fears. The term has entirely different connotations when understood as a strictly religious identifier or as a modern call to arms against “infidels”
Most Muslim fundamentalists (sensu lato) will never commit any acts of violence, and the actions of Muslim terrorists have been condemned (albeit belatedly) by a fatwā authored by the Fiqh Council of North America (2005) as well as by a Saudi fatwā (Sandi Committee 2004) issued by the most fundamentalist (sensu stricto) body of all, Saudi Arabia’s Permanent Committee of Religious Research and Ifta, which is chaired by the kingdom’s leading religious authority, Grand Mufti Skaikh Abdulazī z Al-Shaikh.
The problem is not Islam, a religion with tenets as contradictory, as open to diverse interpretation, and as confusing in its totality as are its two great monotheistic inspirations, Judaism and Christianity. The problem is political or politicized Islam, Islam tendentiously interpreted, or not interpreted at all and hence stubbornly anchored in its medieval origins.
There are at least three intertwined problems and trends that are influenced by this contest and whose evolution will, in turn, help to determine its outcome: the lack of secular sources of state legitimacy, Muslim countries’ modernization deficit, and a tardy demographic transition.
Reiterating the glories of medieval Muslim science and engineering (Al-Hassani 2006) will not change the fact that at the beginning of the twenty-first century researchers in Muslim nations (with more than 12% of the world’s population) authored only 2% of all scientific publications, and 60% of that minuscule share came from a single country, Turkey (Kagitçibasi 2003; Butler 2006). No
The global repercussions of this internal instability will be compounded by the fact that five Persian Gulf countries (Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, and United Arab Emirates) control about 65% of the world’s remaining reserves of inexpensive liquid oil (BP 2006) and that they will strengthen their dominance of global oil production by 2030.
No other modern industrialized country is expected to experience such a population decline: in absolute terms, ?35 million people, or a Canada-sized population loss, in just two generations;
Russian cardiovascular disease mortality is about three times higher than in the West; premature cancer mortality is also considerably higher.
In the early 2000s the Russian death rate due to road accidents was nearly 0.4/ 1,000, compared to about 0.15/ 1,000 in the United States
During the late 1990s the Russian suicide rate peaked at more than 50/ 100,000, and since 2000 it has been about 40/ 100,000, four times the rate in the EU and the United States
China produces more than 90% of Wal-Mart’s merchandise and contributed just over $ 200 billion, or 26%, to the U.S. trade deficit of $ 767.5 billion in 2005
By 2020, China’s continuing high economic growth rate will allow it to spend on its military as much as the United States spends today, and this will make it a real superpower impervious to any threat or pressure.
Official exchange rates pegged China’s GDP in 2005 at only about 18% of the U.S. total ($ 2.25 trillion versus $ 12.5 trillion), whereas the adjustment for PPP (up to $ 9.4 trillion) put China’s GDP at about 75% of the U.S. total (IMF 2006).
They also estimated that the value of Chinese currency could double in ten years’ time if growth continued and the exchange rate were allowed to float. This adjustment would lift China’s 2020 real GDP close to $ 15 trillion, near the U.S. level at that time. With a higher share of it going to the military, China could indeed match U.S. defense spending by 2020.
For example, a complete ban on China’s imports (if such a thing were practical) would bring a surge of products from other Asian exporters (South Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam, Indonesia, Thailand) but hardly a resurgence of U.S. manufacturing (many of its sectors are simply defunct).
key trends concerning China’s population, economic progress, environmental degradation, and power of ideas. These trends, rather than the endlessly discussed possible outcomes of the China-Taiwan dispute (Bush 2005; Tucker 2005), will determine the reach and limits of China’s rise during the first half of the twenty-first century.
A single war could go a long way toward returning China’s skewed gender ratio closer to normal.
In 2005 about 11% of China’s population was 60 years and older, compared to some 17% in the United States, but by 2030 the two shares will be equal, and China’s age structure will resemble that of Japan in 2005 but with only about one-fifth of its per capita income. By 2050, China will have more old people (about 30%) and a higher dependence ratio than the United States (fig. 3.17).
The proportion of persons of working age in the total population, currently about 68%, will fall to 53% by midcentury, equaling the corresponding figure for the G-6 countries.
This burden will be aggravated by the fact that some three-quarters of all Chinese have no pension plans, leaving tens of millions of young men responsible for two parents and four grandparents.
Western nations had about 800 million people, or some 12% of global population, but they cultivated nearly one-quarter of the world’s farmland, averaging about 0.5 ha per capita (FAO 2006).
This means that China, with 20% of the world’s population in 2005, had only 9% of the world’s farmland, or just a little over 0.1 ha per capita.
Even without further acceleration of recent trends, the average per capita availability of farmland will be no more than 0.08 ha/ person by the year 2025 or not much more than the Bangladeshi mean. And the loss of usable farmland will continue. For example, these are plans to build a national trunk highway system whose length, 85,000 km, will surpass that of the U.S. interstate highways by more than 10%.
China could thus absorb all of the world’s grain exports and still satisfy less than two-thirds of its demand.
China can never rely on imports to satisfy most of its enormous food demand. Cropping intensification is the only way to produce more food from less arable land, and irrigation is key. In absolute terms China already irrigates more land than any other country, and in relative terms it ranks only behind Egypt and Israel, but its water supply situation is already very precarious.
Actual per capita northern supply in China for all uses—agriculture, industry, services, and households—amounts to little more than the amount used in the United States to flush toilets and wash clothes, dishes, and cars.
The need to feed at least 100 million additional people, to satisfy rising urban demand, and to secure water for growing industries means that the northern China’s strained resources will be, even with the south-north transfer, under more pressure during the next two decades.
Economic losses attributable to China’s environmental degradation have been conservatively quantified as equal every year to 6%-8% of the country’s GDP, or almost as much as annual GDP growth (Smil 1996; World Bank 1997).
And as for serving as a social and behavioral model, China—despite (or perhaps because of) its ancient culture, and in a sharp contrast with the United States—has little soft-power appeal to be a modern superpower of expressions, fashions, and ideas.
The limits of U.S. military power have already been demonstrated, for instance, by the wars in Korea and Vietnam and an ill-fated 1992-1993 Marine mission in Somalia. But the attacks of 9/ 11; the occupation of Iraq; Iran’s bid for the Middle Eastern leadership; a defiant North Korea; a newly confident Russia, economically powerful and assertive; a militarizing China and Europe, more reluctant than ever to follow almost any U.S. initiative—all of this has left the United States in such a bind that no Houdini-like contortions can release it with its power and global influence intact.
More important, Most Mexican immigrants actually do not feel that they are emigrating. In a 2002 survey, 58% of Mexicans maintained that the U.S. Southwest “rightfully belongs to Mexico”
Huntington (2004) argued that the new immigration is fundamentally different from previous (transoceanic) inflows because it taps into a large pool of poorer, less well-educated migrants who come from a culturally resilient place and who thus may not be amenable to swift integration with U.S. culture. Illegal immigrants waving Mexican, not U.S., flags during their protest marches in U.S. cities only reinforce this observation.
This would further alienate U.S. citizens from participating in the political process (the percentage of U.S. population voting has dropped steadily and is now lowest among all Western countries).
After adding other fossil fuels and electricity, the total deficit in the U.S. energy trade amounted to $ 265 billion in 2005. In order to satisfy its excessive energy use, the country thus had an embedded annual deficit of about one-quarter trillion dollars, and with higher world prices this has increased substantially since 2005. Still, these large imports would not have to signify any large overall trade imbalance. Japan or South Korea import virtually all of these basic supplies and materials but then turn them into value-added products.
Dominance in high-quality steel production, still the cornerstone of all modern economies, is a thing of the past in the United States. In 2005, U.S. Steel was the seventh-largest steel company in the world, outranked not only by European and Japanese producers but by giants whose names are unknown even to well-educated Americans: Lakshmi Mittal’s company, South Korea’s POSCO, and Shanghai Baosteel (IISI 2006).
in the marginVAT
By 2005 the U.S. surplus in trading civilian aircraft, engines, and parts was less than $ 19 billion, considerably less than the imports of furniture or toys. So much for high-tech manufacturing making up for the losses in traditional sectors.
A rapid reduction of the country’s traditionally large surplus in trading agricultural commodities is the most recent, and perhaps most surprising, component of the U.S. decline. The country has been a net exporter of agricultural commodities since 1959, and the export/ import ratio of the value of this trade was 1.83 as recently as 1995. By 2000 it was 1.30; in 2004, 1.18, with the surplus falling below $ 10 billion a year; and in 2005, 1.08.
When the accounting is done in terms of a larger, actually more meaningful, category that comprises all traded crops (food and feed), animal products, processed foods, and beverages (including wine, beer, distillates, and liqueurs), the United States already had a substantial trade deficit in 2005 (about $ 9.1 billion), and it is almost certain that the country will become increasingly dependent on imported food. In 2005 imports (by weight) claimed nearly 15% of all food consumed, with individual shares surpassing 80% for fish and shellfish, 30% for fruits, juices, nuts, sweeteners, and candy, and 10% for meat and processed meat products. This has been an inexplicably unreported shift with enormous long-term impacts. After borrowing abroad to support its need for crude oil, gadgets, and toys, the United States will be borrowing just to feed itself. Autarky in food is an impractical and unattainable goal for many small nations, but were the United States to become a permanent net food importer, who would be left to do any net exporting—Brazilians and heavily subsidized French farmers?
Given an embedded trade deficit of about $ 0.5 trillion per year, which cannot be swiftly eliminated by policy changes, and a growing dependence on energy imports, it is hard to imagine how this dismal trading trend could be reversed short of a substantial devaluation of the dollar and a precipitous decline in the standard of living.
In any case, a United States forced to live within its means would be a very different place. It has already turned into a very different place because of a multitude of interconnected demographic, social, and behavioral trends that have weakened it from the inside.
That is why Siegel (2006) expects that stock prices in rich countries could fall by up to 50% during the coming decades, unless newly rich investors from Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America step in.
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Nader (2003) included displays of gluttony among his four signs of societal decay, together with electoral gerrymandering, ubiquitous corporate crime, and corporate excess.
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Regrettably, the latter possibility is even less likely than the first proposition, and both could become real (perhaps) only if the country were thrown into a truly deep financial and existential crisis. But by that time it might be too late for the United States to regain its great power status.
For some four generations the country has been the world’s dominant agent of change, an unselfish savior, a reluctant arbiter, and a brash trendsetter. At the same time, it has never been averse to realpolitik, as attested by détente with the USSR, support of dictatorial regimes in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, and rapprochement with Communist China. But in its fundamentals, and very often in its execution, U.S. foreign policy has been imbued with moral (and moralistic) convictions about the duty to act as a global promoter of freedom, a call to action that unites John F. Kennedy and George W. Bush.
As for modern hegemonies, the British one, with the peak in 1902 (end of the Second Boer War) and the end in 1947 (quitting of India) took only 45 years to unravel. (The violent Malay and Kenyan conflicts after the British left India just wrapped up Britain’s retreat.)
Indeed, an argument can be made that the coming transition will be unprecedented because the United States was history’s first true global power. None of the great powers of antiquity, not even the Roman Empire or the Han dynasty of China, were global powers; their reach was far too restricted for that. The history of global power began only with Europe’s grand maritime expansion, which gradually brought all continents into interaction.
Low birth weight is an important predictor of future health; in China its share is 6%, in India 30%. China’s adult illiteracy is less than 7%, India’s more than 35%. In 2005, China’s share of people engaged in R& D was more than five times that of India (WHO 2006; UNDP 2006). And India’s rate of immunization against childhood diseases has actually been falling; for measles, it is well below the rate in Bangladesh and on a par with such modernization laggards as Haiti or Chad (IMF 2006).
By 2050, India will have the world’s largest population. It might have the world’s second-largest economy, but in per capita terms it will still most likely be no richer than Mexico is today, and its rich native cultural heritage of Hinduism and Sikhism will not become any more transferable abroad than it is today.
Who is on top matters—be it as savior, hegemon, pacesetter, model, irresistible attractor, or brutal enforcer. The United States may have been one or the other of these to different nations at different times, but its retreat from such roles will not create a more stable world, particularly if there is no clearly dominant power or grand alliance.
As Ferguson (2004, 39) has warned, “Be careful what you wish for. The alternative to unipolarity would not be multipolarity at all. It would be apolarity—a global vacuum of power. And far more dangerous forces than rival great powers would benefit from such a notso-new world disorder.”
As Mandelbaum (2006, 50) noted, the world complains about U.S. recklessness, arrogance, and insensitivity, but we should “not expect them to do anything about it. The world’s guilty secret is that it enjoys the security and stability the United States provides.”
An outstanding example of this is the fact that African termites may consume annually as much biomass per unit of savanna as do elephants (Smil 2002).
In 2005 the United States, with less than 5% of the world’s population, accounted for 20% of the world’s economic output and claimed about 23% of the world’s commercial primary energy.
By 1998 fewer than 4% of world population lived in countries with PPP GDPs between $ 8,000 and $ 20,000, and 80% were below the threshold. Everything we know about social stability tells us that this is a most undesirable situation.
Income inequality has been on the rise not only in the United States, where riches have always been rather unequally distributed, but also in Japan, for decades a paragon of well-distributed riches, in China, where globalization of the country’s economy lifted all boats but at the same time made them more unequal than anywhere else in East Asia, and in Russia.
Japanese Ministry of Health, the country’s Gini coefficient (perfect equality of income 0, perfect inequality 1), which used to be on a par with that of the Nordic countries (around 0.25), rose to 0.37, well above the German or French level (Ota 2005).
it is hardly surprising that a ranking of the fairness of financial contributions to health systems makes China 188th of 191 countries, only marginally above Brazil, Myanmar, and Sierra Leone (WHO 2000). Surely these are not the solid foundations of a new superpower.
The Earth’s actual average surface temperature of 15 ° C is 33 ° C higher than its blackbody temperature, with the absorption by water vapor accounting for almost two-thirds of the difference (fig. 4.1). CO2 accounts for nearly one-quarter of the temperature difference; CH4 and N2O come next, with minor natural contributions from NH3, NO2, HNO3, and SO2 (Ramanathan 1998). A greenhouse effect amounting to at least 25 ° C-30 ° C had to operate on the Earth for nearly 4 billion years for life to evolve.
Atmospheric CO2 levels are now known for the past 650,000 years thanks to the ingenious analyses of air bubbles from ice cores retrieved in Antarctica and in Greenland.
These would not be the highest-ever concentrations of CO2. Boronisotope ratios of planktonic foraminifer shells point to levels above 2000 ppm 60-50 Ma ago (with peaks above 4000 ppm), followed by an erratic decline to less than 1000 ppm by 40 Ma ago. But since the early Miocene era of 24 Ma ago atmospheric levels of CO2 have been relatively stable and low, remaining below 500 ppm (Pearson and Palmer 2000). Consequently, continued large-scale combustion of fossil fuels could increase atmospheric CO2 to levels unseen since large herds of horses and camels grazed on grassy plains of America.
Cycling rates of soil carbon range from minutes to centuries, and different soils have different shares of slowand fast-cycling carbon stocks.
All economies are only subsystems of the biosphere, as any significant perturbations of ecosystems must have a multitude of economic impacts.
Munich Reinsurance Company produced an itemized appraisal of the eventual costs of global warming that would result from the doubling of preindustrial greenhouse gas levels (UNEP 2001).
Stern (2006) concluded that the cost of climate change can be limited to about 1% of global economic product only if concerted action is taken within the next 10-20 years. Otherwise these will be a perpetual cost equivalent to at least 5% of annual gross world product.
As a result, if we were a rational society, we would be paying a great deal more attention to these changing water and nitrogen cycles.
By 2025 (assuming the UN’s medium population projections) nearly 30 countries will have water scarcity and another 20 will join the stressed group. The most populous countries in the first category will be Nigeria, Egypt, Ethiopia, and Iran, and in the second category, India and Pakistan (WRI 2006).
A conservative estimate for the year 2050 would put at least 60 countries, with nearly half the world’s population, into the water-scarce and waterstressed categories. Only the installation of the most efficient irrigation systems as well as near-complete recycling of urban and industrial water could ease the deficits, but even so there will be a massive new need for desalination (and hence for substantial constant energy inputs).
In 2005 more than 1 billion people in low-income countries had no access to clean drinking water, and some 2.5 billion lived without water sanitation (United Nations 2003).
About half of all beds in the world’s hospitals were occupied by patients with water-borne diseases.
Human interference in the global nitrogen cycle is an inherently more intractable challenge than the decarbonization of the world’s energy supply. That will not be an easy transition (see chapter 3), but a carbon-free energy system is an eventual inevitability.
Both Europe and North America have seen a gradual decline of pollinators, including domesticated honeybees and wild insects. Pollination by bees is an irreplaceable ecosystemic service responsible for as much as one-third of all food consumed in North America, from almonds and apples to pears and pumpkins (fig. 4.11) (NRC 2006a).
Human activities have thus entirely erased natural plant cover on least 20 million km2, or 15% of all ice-free land surface.
At the same time, nearly every third person in low-income countries is infected with Mycobacterium tuberculosis, and while under normal circumstances fever than 10% of infected individuals develop the disease, the activation rate of latent TB rises once the immune system is weakened, a condition increasingly common with spreading HIV.
Quam multa fieri non posse prius quam sunt facta iudicantur? (How many things are judged impossible before they actually occur?) Gaius Plinius Secundus (Pliny the Elder), Naturalis Historia, VII.i, 6
A number of potential catastrophes that could transform the world in a matter of months (extraordinarily virulent pandemics, a sequence of volcanic mega-eruptions) or even minutes (collision with a massive extraterrestrial object, accidental nuclear war), and a much longer array of worrisome trends (whose outcome can be a new world order or a historically unprecedented global environmental change) add up, even when approached with a robust belief in the problem-solving capacity of our sapient species, to an enormous challenge.
Uncertainty rules, and there are no shortcuts to lead us from these dim perceptions to clearer understanding.
While it is very difficult to find a uniform metric to compare risks of injuries or economic losses (both of these categories span a wide range of qualities), the finality of death makes it possible to compare the risk of catastrophic or accidental dying on a uniform basis. This evaluation is best done in terms of fatalities per person per hour of exposure, a risk assessment approach that was originally developed by Starr (1969; 1976).
Put another way, in affluent countries one person out of a million dies every hour. Cardiovascular diseases account for about one-third of this total, so the overall risk of succumbing to them is about 3 × 10-7 per person per hour of exposure.
Even in the United States, with its poor rail transport (compared to Europe and Japan), people who travel every day by train enjoy the safest form of public transportation. Traveling by train has a fatality risk of about 10-8, adding a mere 1% to the overall risk of dying while en route.
The last number illustrates the problems of comparing different risks using individual exposure metrics. The Baghdad death risk was of the same order of magnitude as the risk faced by an average American while driving. But there are critical differences of exposure, understanding, and dread.
And the Mafi a analogy also suggests an important conclusion. Anti-terrorism strategy should be framed not as a war but as a repressive action against a cellular, secretive, networked, violent organization. A clear collateral of this reality is that there can be no meaningful end to this effort, and no victory (Schneider and Schneider 2002).
Allah should simply be translated as God and not transliterated because that treatment exaggerates the difference among the three monotheistic faiths. Jihā d (whose primary meaning was explained in chapter 3) should not be used as a blanket label for brutal indiscriminate terrorist killings. Hirabah, sinful warfare waged contrary to Islamic law, is the proper term, and so is mufsid (evil, corrupt person), not mujā hid. Such terms, readily understood by Muslims, would remove any moral ambiguity from our dealings with al-dar al-islā m.
by 2004 30% of the world’s scientific publications were still authored by U.S. researchers, compared to 6.5% in China (Zhou and Leydesdorff 2006). Adjusted for population size, this means that the U.S. output was 20 times higher than in China. Judged by these measures, China will not be taking over anytime soon.
The ultimate, still elusive, goal—a vaccine that could protect against all human influenza strains—is being pursued by academic and big pharma researchers (Kaiser 2006).
But if the 1973-1987 CAFE rate of improvement had been maintained (no great challenge from the technical point of view) and applied to all passenger vehicles, the average fleet performance in 2005 would have been close to 50 mpg. This means that automotive hydrocarbon, NOx, and CO emissions as well as U.S. crude oil imports could have been cut by about two-thirds.
If we are to act as rational risk minimizers, the current preoccupation with terrorism should not blind us to what are historically two much more likely threats: another mega-war and another pandemic (possibly two) during the next 50 years.
Trends may thus seem obvious, but because they have a multitude of drivers whose importance shifts constantly, the resulting mix is beyond anyone’s grasp.
The success of our species makes it clear that humans beings, unlike all other organisms, have evolved not to adapt to specific conditions and tasks but to cope with change (Potts 2001).