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xkcd #2889: Greenhouse Effect
(imgs.xkcd.com)
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Once he had the answer, Arrhenius complained to his friends that he'd "wasted over a full year" doing tedious calculations by hand about "so trifling a matter" as hypothetical CO2 concentrations in far-off eras (quoted in Crawford, 1997).
Their work resulted in the often-posted newspaper article speculating how in a few centuries the emissions of burning coal might become a problem for the world's environment. What they didn't anticipate was the rate of increase from a population explosion which would begin its climb in a few decades from various factors.
To their credit, population growth was unimaginable before it happened. A novel of aasimov from the 60s mention a future earth overpopulated with magacities of 20 million people and earth population of 2 billion.
Medicine and agriculture progresses were tremendous.
I took a course in eco biology. And we are already slowing down. There is a maximum capacity of a species and I think many places are fully aware of it and have chosen to hold back. I could quote it, but this was a few years ago. There has to be someone on Lemmy that knows more than me on the subject.
Like the compounding gains from the individual revolution.
In general, a common mistake among would be futurists is not correctly identifying when there are changes in the acceleration of advancements.
It's not only about measuring the rate of change of the present moment, but also how that rate has shifted over time until now and forecasting that forward. And even then seeing if there's been a change in the rate of acceleration.
The majority only look at the rate of change in the present moment.
Compounding effects often fly under the radar in predictions.
And also the inverse. Some optimistic scifi thinks we would already reach Alpha Centauri by now. Predicting the future in general is hard af.