The Worst Is Yet To Be

This book review actually made me feel good, in some twisted way. I'm laughing ... I'm giddy. Not sure why.

GLOBAL CATASTROPHES AND TRENDS: The Next Fifty Years. Vaclav Smil. xii + 307 pp. The MIT Press, 2008. $29.95.

Prolific writer Vaclav Smil characterizes his latest book, Global Catastrophes and Trends, as “a multifaceted attempt to identify major factors that will shape the global future and to evaluate their probabilities and potential impacts.” Smil is fluent in many languages of the East and the West, and his voluminous citations demonstrate an impressive command of the literature. His two major themes are sudden, catastrophic events and unfolding trends that are catastrophic in their accumulative consequences.

The past 50 years have been exceptionally stable and unusually benign in global terms, Smil says, but this will change. The risks of what are, in his view, the two most likely cataclysmic future threats—nuclear war and pandemic influenza—can be substantially reduced, he believes. He does not see terrorism as a great risk. He also notes that mega-eruptions of volcanoes are quite rare and that the risk of a near-Earth object striking our planet is even more remote and can be handled. Instead, it is unfolding trends that worry him most and occasion the book’s most striking observations.

Energy is a key variable affecting many trends. Smil’s substantial discussion of this topic connects only loosely to the theme of catastrophe but well illustrates his debunking posture toward scary headlines and faddish “solutions.” He gives short shrift to renewable energy. For example, he considers “massive biomass energy schemes” that have been proposed recently to be “among the most regrettable examples of wishful thinking and ignorance of ecosystemic realities and necessities.” Conversion of enough farmland for the production of biofuels is out of the question, he says—we would starve. Wind power will be only a marginal and unreliable source of energy. As for energy from nuclear fusion, it is a mirage, on which the United States has spent a quarter of a billion dollars a year for the past 50 years. Large-scale expansion of nuclear power plants would face significant opposition, Smil says, because of concerns about safety and the lack of permanent waste-storage facilities. (He does, however, note with approval Edward Teller’s proposal to build a nuclear power plant completely underground with enough fuel to last its lifetime.) And he sees no realistic possibility of a hydrogen economy for many decades.

Read the complete review in American Scientist

Summary of article: We're screwed.