Everybody tries to predict the future. Within my lifetime the following predictions have been made by prominent people:
We will all freeze to death.
We will all starve to death.
We will run out of natural resources.
We will all die in a nuclear holocaust
We will all die of the heat.
Here’s a recent one: All of us will get Covid.
Some of the “experts” who constantly predict disasters have never been right. You could make money by betting against them, and other people have. Politicians, who are power-hungry, love predictions of disasters by these so-called experts because it means they can spend more of our money and take away more of our freedom and claim they are saving us from disaster.
Nowadays, computer simulations are used to predict the future. After all, computers aren’t biased, so what they predict must be the truth. However, in spite of everything that’s been written about artificial intelligence, computers still do what people tell them to. In my computer days the results of bad input were known as GIGO (garbage in, garbage out). If you want a computer to predict what will happen in the future, you have to give it assumptions to work with. All these assumptions are bound to be wrong to some extent. Small errors are compounded, and the resulting predictions may be completely worthless.
Anybody can make a straight-line prediction. If the temperature rises X degrees every year, in ten years it will be 10X degrees warmer than it is now. Simple, isn’t it? Unfortunately, the universe, and by association the earth, doesn’t work like that. Everything that happens in the universe is cyclical.
Take the earth, for example. The earth rotates once a day on its axis. Each year it makes a revolution around the sun, causing the seasons. The moon has its cycles and the sun does also. Our galaxy, the milky way, has cycles with lengths of millions or billions of years.
Throughout the earth’s 4.5 billion years of existence temperatures have varied, as have carbon dioxide levels and ocean levels. It’s not surprising that the earth is getting warmer at the moment. It is forever changing, and people who think they can create stasis are wrong. One thing we can say for sure. Whatever the trends are now, they will not continue in a straight line forever. So don’t throw away your winter jacket.
1. Tomorrow the Atlantic Ocean will be...right where it is today.
2. Tomorrow 2 + 2 will equal 4.
3. Sunrise, sunset, and the tides will occur just when scientists say they will.
4. Tomorrow I will still be broke.
Unfortunately, most of the most successful predictions are those used in marketing to get people to buy more of products they don't need. Some very detrimental, especially when it comes to foods and pharmaceuticals.
I believe you are hinting at the prediction of global warming and the climate repercussions. All of the statistics are reporting toward it being human caused and rapidly approaching, much faster than originally predicted, toward a turning point we all would regret ignoring.
Perhaps you are too old and entrenched in your thinking. Or you may be politically influenced because the hard science on this has been so politicized. But, I've known without any political regard that we'd better get our act together for over 50 years and counting. Thankfully, political will is finally starting to catch up with scientific fact.
Ron