Forgotten Ages Research

If the Present Trends Continue—What the Experts are Predicting

Report Topics:

• A penetrating survey of world experts in climatology, geology, oceanography, the environment, biology, botany, genetics, disease, population growth, pollution, politics, military spending, industrial expansion and world resources—what they are forecasting and when events are projected to happen from the present to the year 2100

Full Report:

In 2007, more than 2,000 scientists and diplomats from 154 countries participated in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. They issued a joint report that concluded that global warming is “unequivocal.” The Panel found that the impact of human activity on the Earth’s heat budget exceeds that of the Sun by a factor of 10. The Sun currently contributes an extra 0.12 watts of energy for each square meter of the Earth’s surface, whereas man-made source trap an additional 1.6 watts per square meter.

The overall result of this is going to be nothing short of disastrous. The final Report released this statement:

“Changes in climate are now affecting physical and biological systems on every continent. Things are happening and happening faster than we expected. Global warming will soon affect everyone’s life. It will be the poor sections that will be the most affected.”

The IPCC made these predictions:

*By 2020 up to 50 million people will be at risk of hunger because of global warming effects on food supplies. By 2050 the number will increase to 132 million, by 2080 up to 265 million.

*By 2025 hundreds of millions of Africans and Latin Americans will begin suffering from potable water shortages.

*By 2030 malnutrition in turn will spawn physical disorders and disease, such as new outbreaks of diarrhea, dengue fever and malaria.

*By 2050 China’s rice production will be reduced by 12 percent, that of Bangladesh by 10 percent, and overall world wheat production could be reduced by one-third.

*By 2050 a billion people in Asia could face the same situation.

*By 2050 the Arctic ice cover will be gone, and the only surviving polar bears will live in zoos.

*By 2050 ozone-related deaths will increase by 4.5 percent world-wide.

*By 2080 water shortages could threaten as many as 3.2 billion people world-wide.

*By 2080, 200 to 600 million people will be displaced because of flooding and oceanic encroachment.

*By 2100 half of Europe’s plant species will either be endangered or extinct.

*By 2100 global temperatures could increase as much as 11 degrees F, compared with just 1.3 degrees F in the last 100 years. An increase of just 3.6 degrees F will cause the world “to be in a regime where the danger of intolerable and unmanageable impacts on human well-being would rise very rapidly.”

Here is a synopsis of what other world experts are predicting:

*Today—The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s most recent mathematical models predicting greater intensity of global weather systems over the next century are having to be drastically revised, because some of the predicted effects are already manifesting. These include Europe’s 2003 heat wave, 6 feet of rain in 3 days generated by Hurricane Mitch in 1998, 5 feet of rain in 36 hours falling in Haiti in 2006. Rising sea surface temperatures are creating more water vapor in the lower atmosphere than anticipated, connected to more severe weather events.

*Today—Medical experts at Harvard University have determined that if a Spanish flu pandemic similar to the one that struck the world in 1918 were to occur again, anywhere from 50 to 80 million people could die within a matter of months.

*Today—Tests conducted by the AP National Investigative Team have found trace amounts of pharmaceutical drugs in the drinking water of 50 major U.S. cities, and in 62 major water suppliers for smaller American communities. Contaminants include medicines and their byproducts used for pain, infection, high cholesterol, asthma, epilepsy, anxiety, depression, mental illness, heart problems, angina, hormonal production and suppression, and blood thinning and coagulation. Some urban centers have discovered as many as 60 different drugs in their watersheds. The problem begins when expired and unused pharmaceuticals are flushed down sewers or are thrown out into landfills, which eventually leak into local water systems. These sophisticated chemicals were found to persist even after having gone through intensive water treatment processing. While such pharmaceuticals are designed to be helpful for individuals with specific problems, when ingested by an otherwise healthy population they can cause harm. Laboratory research shows that small amounts of medications, when administered to the wrong people, create abnormal growth rates in blood cells, kidney cells and fetuses, as well as can initiate inflammation, even cancer. And the contamination is also beginning to have an adverse effect on plant and wildlife, with the appearance of stunted growth, tumors, mutations and stillbirths. The Environmental Protection Agency warns that, as Americans continue to buy record amounts of prescription drugs and dispose of them haphazardly, the pharmaceutical contamination of national water supplies will only worsen, with growing disastrous results.

*Today—Reproductive and evolutionary biologists at Washington State University and at the University of Texas at Austin have been performing tests by exposing one generation of rats to certain pesticides with hormone-disrupting chemicals, then observing the inherited effects over several successive generations of offspring. The results show that male descendants gradually developed sperm deficiencies, infertility and other problems such as tumors and kidney disease. What the researchers discoveed is that, rather than causing mutations from changes in DNA sequencing, the contaminants are instead epigenetic, permanently reprogramming genes that control development and behavior. What concerns the scientists is that the same results seen in the rats potentially could have the same effects in other mammals, including humans. As one of the experimenters, neuroendocrinologist Andrea Gore, noted concerning getting rid of such chemicals shoing up in modern industrial waste, “You could agree, let’s clean up our world, make our world pristine. But here’s the problem—we’re already contaminated, our epigenetic modifications have already happened to us.”

*Today—Since 2001, ships and aircraft traveling the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans have observed in various locations huge floating islands, some of them several square miles in size, composed of noting but plastic bottles, plasting wrapping, rotting cardboard and paper pulp, and other garbage debris that because of its collective durability and buoyancy refuses to decay or sink. The overall accumulation of these waterlogged masses is so large that it would take years of work to remove them, if the effort was ever made. The problem is compounded by various species of sea life, from birds to dolphins and whales, being entangled and suffocating to death in the flotsam. Over time, as the garbage islands slowly disintegrate, they are littering the ocean bottoms with their residue as they travel with the currents.

*Before 2015—In the Arctic region alone, 38,000 square miles of sea ice have melted, an area equal in size to Alaska. According to University of Colorado glaciologist Mark Serreze, “When the ice thins to a vulnerable state, the bottom will drop out and we may quickly move into a new seasonally ice-free Arctic. There is some evidence we may reach that tipping point, and the impacts will not be confined to the Arctic region.” Some estimates place the near-total disappearance of the northern ice cap in as little as the next ten years.

*Before 2015—The National Hurricane Center in Miami warns that the increased intensity of hurricane and tropical storms in the North Atlantic will increase dramatically. What before were termed category 4 and 5 “ten-year storms” and “storms of the century” are now occurring every other year. Kerry Emanuel, meteorologist with MIT, noted that, “When hurricanes do strike in the future, they will on average have much greater intensity, hitting harder and lasting longer.” He projects that in the next few years the average storm duration and wind speed will increase by 50 percent, caused by a steady rise in ocean surface temperatures and evaporation rates due to global warming. According to veteran hurricane researcher William N. Grey of Colorado State University, both the length of the hurricane season and the number of storms are also going to significantly increase.

*By 2015—The population of Tokyo will exceed 30 million, Bombay 25 millon, and New York City 17 million. The thirty largest cities in the world will house a total of 450 million.

*By 2015—The U.S. Department of Defense warns that terrorist tactics will become increasingly more sophisticated, designed to achieve massive casualties. There is an almost certainty level that by this date some form of limited nuclear or biological weapon could be employed somewhere in the world. This includes the possible sabotage of a nuclear power plant or chemical production facility. The effects will be particularly disastrous for the environment.

*By 2015—Studies performed at medical clinics in Scotland, France, Denmark and the United States have found that there is a steady decline in male sperm count in 21 countries, and that in the next few years the decrease could become significant enough to begin to affect world fertility rates. Meanwhile, warnings have been made concerning the increased presence in the global environment of endocrine disrupters, industrial and fertilizer chemicals which mimic estrogen and testosterone. The overall result is a general disabling of the endocrine system regulating reproduction, which is causing sterility and mutational abnormalities in both global fauna and humans.

*By 2015—The United Nations Development Program--which ranks 177 countries by their life expectancy, adult literacy, school enrollment and average incomes—predicts that at least eighteen nations in Africa and central-eastern Europe will fail to achieve UN Millennium Development Goals, resulting in as many as 380 million children either dying in infancy or remaining poor, illiterate and underfed.

*By 2015—A Brussels conference sponsored by the World Wildlife Fund for Nature lists ten global natural treasures that will suffer severe damage from global warming in the next ten years. Among these are Australia’s Great Barrier Reef and Brazil’s Amazon rainforests.

*By 2015—According to Dr. Lonnie Thompson of Ohio State University, all glacial ice on Mount Kilimanjaro in east Africa will be gone. The same fate awaits the glaciers in the European Alps within the next decade.

*By 2015—A report issued by the United States Environmental Program notes that over 40 lakes in Nepal and Bhutan are filling so fast with melt waters from the Himalayan glaciers that within the next decade the lakes will burst their banks and cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands of those who live in the valleys below. According to research teams at the University of Colorado in Boulder, the glaciers of the central and eastern Himialayas will be gone by 2035.

*By 2015—Experts at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute warn that the planetary heating and cooling mechanisms known as the Great Ocean Conveyor are being disrupted and could fail, dramatically changing global warming into more Ice Age conditions within as little as a decade’s time. They point out that the Gulf Stream, as an important warming part of this system, has kept Europe in a temperate rather than a boreal climate for the past ten thousand years. An essential part of the process is that as the warm waters of the Gulf Stream cool, evaporation regions off of Iceland and Greenland increase the salinity factor in the seawater. This in turn causes it to sink and move back southward only at much greater depths, where it is eventually once again heated in tropical climes, rises to the surface and transports its warmth back into the north.

The Gulf Stream, however, is part of a much larger world-spanning complex of warm surface and deep cold currents which comprise the entire Great Ocean Conveyor. The temperature differentials within these water currents is what also drives the atmospheric prevailing winds that likewise heat and cool large landed regions of the entire planet. As the researchers have discovered, what propels this system is the sinking of cold salty and therefore denser waters downward into the depths of the North Atlantic.

Now, however, with the accelerated melting of the Arctic and Greenland ice caps, a tremendous amount of fresh water is being dumped into the key evaporation zones, diluting the salinity factor and beginning to seriously affect the driving force behind the Conveyor. If the Conveyor fails completely, it would alter both oceanic and atmospheric currents to such an extreme that it could start a new Ice Age, dropping world temperatures greatly for the next 500 to 1,000 years.

*By 2015—According to National Public Radio and the National Geographic Society, the period from November, 2006 to February, 2008 saw record storm winds of 170 miles per hour rip through Europe, the Arabian Sea‘s first Category 4 hurricane, a spring heat wave that killed hundreds in Southern Asia and eastern Europe, the wettest year in England since 1766, over half a million Africans and Chinese fleeing rising river waters, the doubling of India’s monsoon rains, plus snowfalls blanketing temperate South Africa and portions of Israel and Iraq for the first time in recent history. Both NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center and the Center of Atmospheric Research predict such weather extremes will become the norm and will spread into other world regions over the next decade.

*By 2020—A study conducted by the World Health Organization found that in 2006 1.6 million people on the planet died violently from accidents, murders, suicides, executions, genocide and warfare. Within the next two decades this number could double. The same numbers are projected for deaths directly caused by global warming due to coming floods, severe weather, famine and disease.

*By 2020—Fertility scientists world-wide have found that continued falling sex ratio coupled with disproportionate male fetal deaths will result in there being more women than men in the world. This phenomenon has been linked with increases in airborne and drinking water chemical toxins which are responsible for a higher ratio of inherited genetic mutations.

*By 2020—The Center for Disease Control predicts that a major outbreak of a virulent and medically resistant form of contagious new disease will occur that will spread as a pandemic, costing the lives of hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of lives.

*By 2020—Leading American and European economists portend that the growing disparity between wealthy industrialized nations and poor dysfunctional nations will reach an impasse, causing a breakdown in world trade and business, as well as the failure of global banks and financial institutions. This economic chaos will first be felt among nations who possess their own internal disparity, marked by increased rioting in urban centers, even civil war.

*By 2020—The U.S. Department of Agriculture warns that major aquifers which supply underground water for agriculture, particularly in the American Midwest, will either by dried up from overuse, or will become contaminated due to industrial waste pollution, agricultural pesticides or sewage runoff. The same fate will also befall most North American rivers and lakes.

*Before 2025—Columbia University’s Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory warns that models of coming climate change show the American Southwest could become a dust bowl within a matter of two decades. Existing water supplies for the region are already fast disappearing, or are being diverted to more populated areas. A general rise in temperatures will only expand existing near-drought conditions, completely desiccating the soil and changing it to windblown dust.

*By 2025—World population will reach a projected 7.8 billion.

*By 2025—The U.S. Census Bureau estimates that by this date forty percent of the U.S. population will be made up of minorities. The nation will be split into three parts: multi-cultural “melting pot” states, predominantly white heartlands, and “new sunbelts” in the American Southeast and Northwest.

*By 2025—United Nations statistics show that pollution which is already causing a 5 percent world agricultural reduction will by this time cause critical effects in North America, China, Europe and Japan which supply 60 percent of global food products.

*By 2025—A team of 27 scientists from Penn State University and Oxford University have found from a detailed study of ancient DNA samples taken from bison remains that human hunters crossing over the Bering Sea land bridge twelve millennia ago were not responsible for the animals’ near extinction due to hunting overkill. Instead, they point to a major climate change as the culprit, which also was involved during the same period in the disappearance of the woolly mammoth, short-faced bear, the North American lion and a prehistoric type of horse. According to one of the participating scientists, Russell Graham, what once took place could happen again—a dramatic change in climate within the next twenty years, this time on a global scale, might push the existence of many living species into a new wave of extinctions.

*By 2025—Biologists from the British Antarctic Survey and oceanographers from Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia have discovered that, since the 1970’s, there has been an 80 percent decline in the ocean population of krill, a tiny shrimp-like crustacean that inhabits the seawaters off the Antarctic Peninsula. What is of major concern is that krill is the main food source for indigenous seals, whales and penguins. Such a significant loss is already having an adverse effect on the entire marine food web. This rapid decline is connected to a strong regional warming trend over the past 50 years which has resulted in a general loss in sea ice. Sea ice, in turn, is the source of algae which krill feeds off—and with its projected disappearance in the next 20 years the entire Antarctican food chain is threatened.

*By 2025—Ecologists at the University of Michigan have predicted that, in just two decades, the increasing numbers of environmental refugees as sea levels rise and storm surges increase will be in the tens of millions.

*By 2025—A survey funded by the Pew Institute for Ocean Science and the Census of Marine Life has found that 40 percent of all predatory sealife has already been wiped out by commercial fishing, and that if nothing is changed in fishing practices, in the next two decades they will become all but extinct.

*By 2025—According to Lucy Jones, a seismologist for the U.S. Geological Survey, there is a 25 percent possibility that the San Francisco Bay Area will experience a magnitude 7 or greater earthquake. This estimate jumps to a 62 percent possibility by 2030.

*By 2025—The United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification portends that, because of the continued growth of deserts throughout the world, within twenty years two-thirds of arable land in Africa, one-third of Asia’s and one-fifth of South America’s will disappear, accompanied by a displacement of at least 135 million people.

*By 2025—The United Nations has declared the estuaries of China’s leading rivers, the Yangtze and the Yellow, to be “dead zones.” The Yangtze River in China carries over half that nation’s waste and sewage, an increase over 70 percent in the last 50 years. Europe’s Danube has lost 80 percent of its surrounding wetlands and flood plains. The Rio Grande is so shallow due to excessive extraction for agriculture that salt water is seeping in, destroying freshwater species. In a dozen other temperate zone estuaries in the United States, Europe and Australia, 91 percent of the species have been seriously depleted and 7 percent are extinct. Only 21 of the planet’s 177 longest rivers run freely from their source to the sea, the rest having dams and other construction that are destroying habitats because of the altered natural ebb and flow. One-fifth of the world’s freshwater fish and plant species are either extinct or endangered. The Nile, the world’s longest river, is expected to reach a critically low level by 2025, threatening the source for drinking water for Egypt, Sudan and Ethiopia.

*By 2030—The West Coast and Alaska Tsunami Warning Center portends that within the next quarter-century the chances are very good that a huge tsunami or tidal wave—like the one which occurred on December 26, 2004 in the Indian Ocean resulting from a 9.1 magnitude quake and which killed 240,000 people in eleven countries—could happen again, only this time in the Pacific Ocean region. The Sumatran-Andaman quake ruptured along a 780-mile fault-line, lasted more than ten minutes, and caused the entire surface of the Earth to rise and fall 0.40 inch. The tsunami wave it generated reached nearly 80 feet high near its epicenter. Seismologists warn that the entire Pacific Rim, paralleling the Ring of Fire volcanic chain, has far more numerous hot spots where there is even greater risk of land displacement and tidal wave generation. Potential regions include the Pacific Northwest, southern California and Baja, the Chilean coast, the Hawaiian Islands, New Zealand, the Philippines, Japan and the East Indies.

*By 2030—The number of total city dwellers will climb to 5 billion. Unfortunately, at the same time a rise in ocean levels will turn large portions of Florida into a shallow sea, while New Orleans, New York City, Boston and other U.S. and world coastal cities will either have to build Dutch-like dikes or face abandonment altogether.

*By 2030—Because of the general effects of global warming in the next 25 years, energy needs and costs world-wide will surge 50 percent. This is beyond the economic capacity of many nations to achieve, even among a number of industrialized nations. The executive director for the International Energy Agency, Claude Mandil, stated: “These projected trends have important implications and lead to a future that is not sustainable from an energy-security or environmental perspective. We must change these outcomes and get the planet onto a sustainable energy path.”

*By 2030—Worldwatch Institute, which monitors key indicators of the health of the planet, warns that within 25 years up to 25 percent of the global biological inheritance will be gone, with the very real possibility of its entire disappearance within a decade or two later.

*By 2030—The National Academy of Sciences predicts that Glacier National Park in Montana will have to be renamed, because all of its glaciers will have melted. Most of the rest of the glaciers of the world will also be either severely reduced or gone—even those in Alaska and Iceland.

*By 2030—Both the Danish Centre for Planetary Science and the University of California at Berkeley have determined that the present strength of the geomagnetic field of the Earth has been dropping steadily for the last two centuries, and by 2030 or even sooner it could disappear entirely. This will be a precursor for a coming “flip” of the magnetic poles of the planet. As measured from magnetic dipole changes in geologic strata world-wide, geomagnetic reversals have occurred many times in the past, usually accompanied by large-scale disruptions. The geomagnetic field serves as a buffer surrounding the Earth that protects it from harmful solar flares and helps deflect incoming meteors and comets. If the field were to completely disappear for a significant length of time before reversing and being re-energized, then our planet will be left vulnerable to any number of possible cosmic catastrophes. Already, the field is so weakened that gaping holes are appearing in certain locations and letting in huge drafts of ionized solar wind, especially over the South Atlantic and the Arctic. In other areas slight hints of a reversed field are beginning to manifest. These changes in both field strength and directions are predicted to have major disruptive effects in all electronics communications and computer systems the world over during the next three decades.

*Before 2035—Increased global warming will have a disastrous effect on the survival of major flora and fauna world-wide. “It is not just the weather data telling us there is a warming trend going on. We are now seeing the living world responding to the climate change as well. If the interdependence and synchronicity between animals and plants are disrupted by global warming effects, the very survival of some species could be threatened.”—David Wolfe, plant ecology professor at Cornell University and a specialist with the National Regional Climate Center:

*By 2035—The United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization projects that an estimated 40,000 plant species that could be developed as important food sources will have disappeared. What makes this statistic especially tragic is that by this date world population will reach an estimated 8 billion. Population will outstrip both world food supply and agricultural land usage.

*By 2035—According to the National Academy of Sciences, the Indan Ocean will be very likely struck by another massive earthquake and tsunami similar to the one that hit Sumatra on December 26, 2004 within the next 30 years.

*Before 2040—The U. S. State Department estimates that by this date the chances are good that a conflict involving Third World nuclear powers might break out, or there will be a major accident with a nuclear weapon being launched or a uranium enrichment facility spilling large-scale radiation contamination.

*By 2040—Computer models created at University College in London and the University of California at Santa Cruz demonstrate what could happen if a major eruption occurred in the Cumbra Vieja volcano in the Canary Island of La Palma, situated in the southeastern North Atlantic. It could trigger a massive underwater landslide in the unstable strata along the island’s west side, which in turn would generate a huge tsunami wave in the direction of the East coast of the United States. By the time this wave hit, its height could be between 30 and 70 feet high. The probabilities that an Atlantic tsunami might happen within the next 25 to 30 years are very good. A similar disaster is predicted for Kilauea volcano on the island of Hawaii. A large eruption could loosen an already separated slab off the volcano’s southern flank, and its collapse into the Pacific would produce a giant tsunami shock wave toward the U.S. West coast. Again, the odds are favorable for such an event within the next three decades.

*By 2040—Computer models done by NOAA suggest that the present ozone hole over the Arctic region will not be “healed” until this time. According to atmospheric scientists Paul Neuman of the Nasa Goddard Space Flight Center, “From a human perspective it is a little dismaying because this means there is still going to be higher levels of ultra-violet light which causes skin cancer reaching the Earth’s surface.”

*By 2040—Disease-carrying human waste that for centuries has been dumped as sewage into rivers and transported into the oceans is being continually deposited in deep cold waters. Recent changes in ocean currents are stirring up these deposits, and long dormant pathogenic microbes are washing ashore and are infecting coastal populations. Several recent outbreaks of cholera in Bangladesh and India have been blamed on this deep sea source. The National Science Foundation predicts that, as global warming increasingly alters sea currents, old ocean bottom sewage brought back to the surface could bring potential pandemics.

*By 2045—A study conducted by the Halley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research and the University of Oxford forecasts that the catastrophic heat wave which plagued Europe and killed tens of thousands of people in the summer of 2005 will not be the exception but instead will become the norm within the next four decades.

*By 2045—The U.S. Geological Survey which is carefully monitoring sudden changes in terrain configuration and temperatures throughout Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming warns that the region could be ready to literally explode. Yellowstone sits on top of a huge caldera which several times in the geologic past has been the source of what is called a “super volcanic” eruption. Vulcanologists note that since 1996 an area 28 miles by 7 miles has bulged upwards by several inches, and the temperature only an inch below the surface has steadily risen, caused by an upwelling of magma that is now only three-tenths of a mile from breaking through. Projections indicate that an initial explosion could be 2,500 times greater than the Mount St. Helens eruption of 1980. It will outright destroy everything within a 500-mile radius, and potentially cover almost the entire North American continent in several feet of ash. A Yellowstone explosion two million years ago released an incredible 600 cubic miles of material into the atmosphere, and changed world climates for more than a century.

*Before 2050—Climatologists at Princeton University, using computer modeling and carbon dioxide transient experiments, have determined that before mid-century the U.S. will lose 35 percent of its soil moisture, and within two decades after this, with a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide, the loss will rise to 60 percent.

*By 2050—World population will reach a projected 9.3 billion. The population of India alone will be more than the entire world population in 1850. Eight of the ten fastest-growing nations in the world will have Islamic majorities. The population of Africa will be about 2 billion. Brazil will have gained an additional 42 million. Europe on the other hand will have a population 25 million less, Japan 27 million less. America’s population will reach 420 million. American whites will grow by 26 percent, blacks will grow by 73 percent, Hispanics by 182 percent, Asians by 234 percent, and Native Americans by 100 percent.

*By 2050—Medical researchers at John Hopkins University and at Elan and Wyeth Pharmaceuticals forecast that the number of people world-wide suffering from Alzheimer‘s will quadruple by mid-century. There may be as many as 106 million, with Asia alone to have 63 million.

*By 2050—The British government announced that it has abandoned any projects to protect its North Sea eastern coastlands to the encroaching waters, from both storm surges and gradual rise in sea levels. Britain is anticipating both coming flooding and droughts in the British Isles will displace 200 million of its citizens by mid-century. Collapse of offshore barriers dating back to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries will no longer be rebuilt or reinforced. Instead, money will be diverted to strengthen barrier systems that prevent the Thames River from flooding London’s riverside landmarks, including the Houses of Parliament. Southeast England appears to be sinking faster than anywhere else, up to 10 meters (33 feet) a year in places.

*By 2050—Glaciologists at Ohio State University predict that by mid-century the glaciers of North and South Americas, Europe, Africa and Asia will all be greatly reduced if not gone altogether. What they warn is that, because these glaciers have supplied a significant quantity of fresh water in these regions, their vanishing will seriously affect continued agricultural production and livestock raising, as well as cause tremendous drinking water shortages for their human populations.

*By 2050—The U.S. Geological Survey predicts that there is a probability of one in ten that by mid-century a 7.5 magnitude quake will strike the Midwest, East or Southeast portions of the United States. These could mirror those which occurred within the last three centuries that shook Boston, Massachusetts (1755), New Madrid, Missouri (1811–1812), Meers, Oklahoma (1800), and Charleston, South Carolina (1880).

*By 2050—Population Action International and the Foundation of World Population warn that by mid-century as many as 6.8 billion people globally will face fresh water shortages. The competition to secure dwindling fresh water sources could lead to open conflict among many nations, particularly in the Middle East, Africa, Central Asia, Central and South America.

*By 2050—According to the latest United Nations Millennium Ecosystem Assessment Report, out of 24 major ecosystems of the globe, 15 are presently in trouble, with the rest soon to follow. Chemically induced “dead zones,” in which hypoxia or a total lack of oxygen in seawater kills all life, now number 50 world-wide and are predicted to expand by two-thirds by mid-century. More than 32 percent of all amphibian species, 25 percent of mammals and 12 percent of birds will be gone. The Report concludes: “At the heart of this assessment is a stark warning. Human activity is putting such a strain on the natural functions of the Earth that the ability of the planet’s ecosystems to sustain future generations can no longer be taken for granted.”

*By 2050—Geologists at Northwestern University predict there is a 40 percent probability that a major earth movement within the New Madrid Fault Zone in the center of the U.S. could generate a 6.0 or greater magnitude quake that will severely damage the region from St. Louis to Memphis.

*By 2050—Beginning in 2000, researchers at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado, in studying satellite surveillance images of Antarctica and Greenland, have noticed the appearance of “dark spots” in various places over the glacial caps. On-location inspections have revealed that these spots are the formation of meltwater lakes either on the surface or just under the ice sheets. New seismic readings indicate further that the growing ponds are only a part of a complex system of subsurface streams and rivers that are starting to flow deeper beneath. In a number of cases, particularly in Greenland, the melt water is forming into moulins, or openings into which the liquid is plunging and drilling their way to the very bottom of the ice cap. As the flows finally empty into the ocean, it is helping to lubricate the glacial underpinnings, and is greatly speeding up surges in the ice fields themselves. All this is accelerating the overall melting process, and experts at the Earth Institute of Columbia University, using the latest computer projections, warn that within the next four decades we may witness a three-fold tragedy. First, the West Antarctica ice sheet will disappear and raise ocean levels by 19 feet. Secoind, the Greenland ice sheet will vanish next, flooding all coastal areas by an additional 24 feet. And finally will come the melting of the East Antarctica ice sheet, adding 170 feet to global sea levels, for a grand total of 213 feet. To put this into perspective, when the last melting is done, the waters will reach 60 feet above the top of the Statue of Liberty.

*By 2050—A NASA-funded research project at Cornell University has discovered that as thunderstorms increase in both size and intensity in the skies above the Congo, Indonesia and the Pacific, the meeting between more violent high altitude winds that are stirred up is producing gigantic electrically-charged gas or plasma which rises into the ionosphere and can disrupt radio transmissions, satellite computer links, and even GPS positioning. When these charged bubbles were first found in the 1970’s, they were considered only rare events. But more disturbed weather patterns in just the past few years have greatly multiplied their appearance to the point that half the night hours around the planet is when these effects are being generated. If this trend continues, by mid-century the disruption to world-wide communication systems could be total.

*By 2055—The Environmental Protection Agency predicts that, if no changes occur to curb global industrial pollution, then by this date 14 billion tons of carbon will be added to the Earth’s atmosphere.

*By 2065—According to NOAA, the ozone hole over the Antarctic Polar region will not recover until this date.

*By 2075—Biological oceanographers at California State University are warning that increases in carbon dioxide emissions are causing pH levels in the world’s oceans to drop, making them become more acidic. This is already causing calcifying plankton not to grow properly, in some cases even dissolving their protective shells outright. Since the food chain for most oceanic life is built on plankton, their potential demise in large numbers within the next few decades because of rising seawater acidity will have devastating ramifications for the entire planetary food supply.

*By 2080—The Arctic Ocean could be completely ice-free, based on computer models of the Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory, a division of the U.S. Army.

*By 2090—The Arctic Council, an eight-nation intergovernmental organization, projects that before the end of the century average temperatures over the Arctic territories will be 4 to 7 degrees Celsius warmer, and over the local ocean waters will reach 10 degrees Celsius warmer.

*Before 2100—A study conducted by Florence University warns that if temperatures throughout Italy go up 7 to 8 degrees by the end of the century as predicted, the nation’s entire wine industry will not be able to survive. The change will result in warmer rains concentrated into fewer yet more violent rainfalls that will greatly damage soils, not only for vineyards but for other indigenous fruit and vegetable crops as well. As the climate changes, grapevine growing will be forced to move northward, possibly into the Baltic region and Scandinavia.

*Before 2100—The National Center for Atmospheric Research projects that by the end of the present century the top dozen feet of permafrost or earth that remains frozen year round in the Arctic region, will be gone throughout Alaska, northern Canada and Siberia. This will constitute the greater mass of permafrost existing in the Northern Hemisphere. Already, global warming is responsible for a number of both Siberian and Alaskan frozen lakes drying out and being taken over by vegetation. These lakes had been important habitats for migratory birds, which have had to move elsewhere. Though the ice fields in Antarctica are melting more slowly simply because of the greater volume of ice involved, 17 polar lakes along the southern continent’s shorelines are growing in number and size because of melt water. By the end of the century researchers predict that extensive stretches of open waters and ice-free land will appear in the areas of the Antarctic Peninsula.

*Before 2100—Members of the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics predict that the global fatality rate from earthquakes is going to increase tenfold, that disasters taking the lives of millions or more peoples will become commonplace. This is due to not only the general increase in world population, but also because the population tends to concentrate more in cities and locations at greater seismic risk.

*Before 2100—There are 1,500 known active volcanoes in the world, with eight to twelve eruptions occurring at any given moment. Despite modern advances in the technology of early-warning detection systems, some 30,000 people have been killed by volcanoes in the last fifteen years. Vulcanologists with the U.S. Geological Survey have discovered that, based on the world-wide distribution of volcanic ash taken from deep sea drilling projects, the present increase in global eruptions is part of a much larger buildup that has been going on for the past two million years. They feel we may be entering a transition between two geologic eras, usually marked by a major amplification in land-building and sinking activities around the planet. Projections indicate a continued steady increase in global volcanic activity, which will trigger greater fatalities, through the rest of this century.

*By 2100—NASA climatologists foresee that the Greenland ice sheet will be completely gone, possibly raising the world’s ocean levels by 25 feet.

*By 2100—Climatologists at the University of Wisconsin predict that by the end of the century, with the average global temperature to rise between 4 and 6 degrees F, whole regional ecosystems will collapse and disappear, and be replaced by other ecosystems the likes of which we cannot yet imagine. The entire Amazon basin will lose its rainforest and be converted into a grassland savanna. The main agricultural areas of North America, Europe and Russia will move northward into Canada, the Baltic states and Siberia. What is now the Arctic and portions of Antarctica could be covered by temperate forests. The American Midwest, the Mediterranean region, India and Southeast Asia could be turned into dust bowls. And the Sahara and other global deserts will become even hotter and completely devoid of all life.

*By 2100—Katey Walter, a research scientist at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, has spent the last several yeas measuring methane gas released throughout the Arctic region, and has mapped the locations of huge subsurface hydrate reservoirs which containing methane. Her concern is that, as the polar ice fields and permafrost continues to rapidly melt, significant methane emissions will add greatly to the present global warming trend for the planet. Methane is 21 times more heat absorbant than carbon dioxide. One permafrost field in Siberia alone that covers almost 400,000 square miles possesses an estimated 55 billio tons of potential methane, which is ten times as much as is currently in the atmosphere. Walter forecasts that over then next century, as the Arctic becomes more ice-free and the permafrost disappears, the resulting massive release of methane from buried hydrates will bring about a global climate change the likes of which the Earth has not experienced for the last 11,000 years.

*By 2100—The Journal of Nature Geoscience reported recently that the Earth’s wettest and driest regions are both expanding dramatically. Since 1979, the equatorial tropics have increased both northward and southward up to 330 miles, while desert areas that often stretch along the tropical edges are likewise moving into new territories, especialy temperate zones. As global warming temperatures continue to climb, however, it will be the deserts that will eventually win out. Climate scientists with the University of Victoria and the Scripps Institute of Oceanography foresee that, by the end of the century, rainforests such as the Amazon, Indonesia and the Congo will be reduced to grasslands, the present African, Asian and South American savannas, steppes and pampas will turn to scrub brush before becoming barren, while such locations as the American Southwest, portions of the Mediterranean and southern Australia will become giant dust bowls.

*By 2100—Sir Martin Reese, a Cambridge astrophysicist and Britain’s Astronomer Royal, gives humanity only a 50-50 chance of surviving until the end of the century. He has also posted a $1,000 bet that a “bioterror” or a “bioerror” incident will claim one million lives by 2020. As he states it, “In this increasingly interconnected world where individuals have more power than ever before at their fingertips, society should worry more about some kind of massive calamity, however improbable.”

*By 2100—British atmospheric chemist James Lovelock, who developed the Gaia Hypothesis—that our planet exhibits all the signs and traits of being a living entity—gave these stark warnings concerning a global catastrophe that modern humanity is precipitating:

“The climate centers around the world, which are the equivalent to pathology labs in hospitals, have reported the Earth’s physical condition, and the climate specialists see it as seriously ill, and soon to pass into a morbid fever that may last as long as 100,000 years. I have to tell you, as an intimate member of the Earth’s family, that civilization is in grave danger.

“Even if we stopped immediately all further poisoning the air, it will take the Earth more than a thousand years to recover from the damages which have already been done, and it may be too late even for this drastic step to save us.

“We suspect the existence of a threshold, set by the temperature or the level of carbon dioxide in the air. Once this is passed, nothing the nations of the world will do will alter the outcome and the Earth will move irreversibly to a new hot state.

“When we ran our (computer) models by either steadily increasing the input of heat from the sun or by keeping the sun constant but increasing the input of carbon dioxide, as we are now doing in the real world, the model showed good regulation, with both the ocean and land ecosystems playing their part. But as the carbon dioxide abundance approached 500 ppm (parts per million), regulation began to fail and there was a sudden jump in temperature. The cause was the failure of the ocean ecosystem. As the world grew warm, the algae were denied nutrients by the expanding warm surface of the oceans, until eventually they become extinct. As the area of ocean covered by algae grew smaller, their cooling effect diminished and the temperature surged upwards.

“The sun is now warmer, and as a consequence the Earth is now returning to the hot state it was in before, 55 million years ago, and as it warms, most living things will die. Once started, the move to a hot state is irreversible.

“Much of the tropical land mass will become scrub and desert, thus adding to the 40 percent of the Earth’s surface we have already depleted to feed ourselves. Not only will wildlife and whole ecosystems go extinct, but the planet will lose a precious resource—civilization.

“Before this century is over, billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic region where the climate remains tolerable.

“Is our civilization doomed, and will this century mark its end with a massive decline in population, leaving an impoverished few survivors in a torrid society ruled by warlords in a hostile and disabled planet? I hope that it will not be that bad. Once a technically advanced nation wakes up to its responsibility, perhaps in response to our alarm call, they will say, ’we can fix it.’”

[Copyright 2009. Joseph Robert Jochmans. All Rights Reserved.]