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This is just a page to collect predictions about the big issues of the near future.
water rights
As Hero Joy Nightingale points out, the degradation of the world's water systems is already critical. Startingplaces:
Some geographic regions are simply going to support far, far fewer people, and the losers will die off in great waves, by the millions, during droughts.
Those who have the gold, and the guns, will get the water rights. International boundaries will not be honored. [intl study]
(New technologies probably can't solve this anywhere near fast enough or cheaply enough, unfortunately.) [UN cost estimate just $25B/yr]
Overview and links: [Dana]
Google searchpattern: water crisis
global warming
Clearly, weather is going thru changes... but that's what weather does. (Even a prediction of more-extreme extremes has to include 'extreme more-of-the-same' as one option.)
It's already clear that we can't foresee most of the side-effects. Tiny changes in climate will routinely cause vast changes in the balance of ecosystems, as every single species finds it either harder or easier to prosper, with these small statistical changes being vastly amplified in unpredictable causal chains.
The most extreme result, speaking eurocentrically, would be if the Gulf Stream as a whole changed direction, plunging Europe into a much colder climate. [more]
If you can figure out which dry regions are going to get wetter, that's where the property values should jump the most. Coastal areas will be riskier than ever (flooding during storms gets worse very quickly as sea levels rise slightly).
Climate predictions: Europe
pollution
Along with water, I think 'food pollution' is going to get a lot worse, as corporations feel driven to trim costs by skimping on quality controls. They'll have to promote themselves as quality-conscious, but this will always be a calculation of what they can get away with.
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