Global Catastrophes and Trends: The Next Fifty Years [Hardcover]

Vaclav Smil (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 11, 2008 | ISBN-10: 0262195860 | ISBN-13: 978-0262195867 | Edition: First Edition

Fundamental change occurs most often in one of two ways: as a "fatal discontinuity," a sudden catastrophic event that is potentially world changing, or as a persistent, gradual trend. Global catastrophes include volcanic eruptions, viral pandemics, wars, and large-scale terrorist attacks; trends are demographic, environmental, economic, and political shifts that unfold over time. In this provocative book, scientist Vaclav Smil takes a wide-ranging, interdisciplinary look at the catastrophes and trends the next fifty years may bring. Smil first looks at rare but cataclysmic events, both natural and human-produced, then at trends of global importance, including the transition from fossil fuels to other energy sources and growing economic and social inequality. He also considers environmental change--in some ways an amalgam of sudden discontinuities and gradual change--and assesses the often misunderstood complexities of global warming. Global Catastrophes and Trends does not come down on the side of either doom-and-gloom scenarios or techno-euphoria. Instead, Smil argues that understanding change will help us reverse negative trends and minimize the risk of catastrophe.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"I think Smil should probably be set as homework for every Member of Parliament, and there will be a test later..." Dick Pountain The Political Quarterly

"At home alike in both the natural and human sciences, the author gives an incisive analysis of the way change occurs both in terms of unpredictable discontinuities and gradually unfolding trends. His treatment of trends over the next fifty years is especially interesting, and his pages on America's 'retreat' informed and convincing. Smil offers not predictions but a balanced, holistic treatment of what may be ahead for humanity. Anyone interested in history, demography, economics, environmentalism, or risk analysis, along with globalization, will find this a 'must' book."--Bruce Mazlish, Professor of History Emeritus, MIT

About the Author

Vaclav Smil is the author of more than thirty books on energy, environment, food, and history of technical advances, including Prime Movers of Globalization: The History and Impact of Diesel Engines and Gas Turbines and Harvesting the Biosphere: What We Have Taken from Nature, both published by the MIT Press. He is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Manitoba. In 2010 he was named by Foreign Policy as one of the Top 100 Global Thinkers.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: The MIT Press; First Edition edition (July 11, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0262195860
• ISBN-13: 978-0262195867
• Product Dimensions: 7 x 0.6 x 9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #825,900 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Vaclav Smil is currently a Distinguished Professor in the Faculty of Environment at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada. He completed his graduate studies at the Faculty of Natural Sciences of Carolinum University in Prague and at the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences of the Pennsylvania State University. His interdisciplinary research interests encompass a broad area of energy, environmental, food, population, economic, historical and public policy studies, and he had also applied these approaches to energy, food and environmental affairs of China.

He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (Science Academy) and the first non-American to receive the American Association for the Advancement of Science Award for Public Understanding of Science and Technology. He has been an invited speaker in more than 250 conferences and workshops in the USA, Canada, Europe, Asia and Africa, has lectured at many universities in North America, Europe and East Asia and has worked as a consultant for many US, EU and international institutions. His wife Eva is a physician and his son David is an organic synthetic chemist.

Official Website: www.vaslavsmil.com

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars Way too optimistic. Limits to Growth, Peak resources, planetary boundaries, overpopulation ignored April 26, 2011

By Alice Friedemann

Format:Hardcover

Vaclav Smil is a brilliant scientist who writes about important issues. His book "Enriching the Earth" is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand how agriculture is able to support 5 to 6 billion humans who otherwise wouldn't be here without fossil-fuel based fertilizers.

So Smil must be aware of the famous 1972 Meadows et al "Limits to Growth" and the field of systems ecology - how energy flows through ecosystems (including human societies). Smil surely must know about disappearing and degraded aquifers, topsoil, forests, fisheries, etc. Clearly ecological limits, a growing human population, and declining energy resources is the largest catastrophe arriving within the next 50 years, and there was almost no attention and/or no scientific evidence offered to refute these imminent catastrophes.

This is an incredibly optimistic book that tries to have its cake and eat it too. On page 75 Smil acknowledges that if we can't get off of cheap oil the results could be "fairly catastrophic", but then he says that perhaps we'll make a transition to natural gas (another finite fossil fuel). Yet two pages later Smil contradicts himself when he explains why natural gas is limited in use for transportation on page 77: natural gas has an energy density 1,000-fold less than oil, and it's costly to transport and store.

I find it hard to believe that Smil doesn't realize that what we face is a liquid fuel crisis. Somehow he missed reading Robert Hirsch's "The Inevitable Peaking of World Oil Production" or Gever's "Beyond Oil: The Threat to Food and Fuel in the Coming Decades" and many other books in his giant references list.

On page 90 Smil says that "the supply of fossil fuels is adequate for generations to come" but there's no citation to support that. Though if the population goes from 7 billion to 1 billion as oil, coal, and natural gas are used up, then there will be oil for generations to come from the collapsed demand, but surely 6 billion people dying counts as a catastrophe?

At least Smil has some skepticism about some kinds of alternative energy - he explains why auto fuel cells are not going to happen on pages 89-90, fusion has no chance within 50 years on page 89, fission is unlikely on page 89, that wind and solar are too unevenly distributed to be a solution on page 86, and that biomass is not a solution on pages 83 -87. But his "solutions" are ridiculous - he proposes nuclear on page 87 and hydrogen on page 89.

He rejects the collapse writings of Erlich, Diamond, Reese, Kuntsler, and Lovelock without offering any scientific citations throughout the book to convince me that these writers are wrong. The same for Ivanhoe, Cam[pbell, Laherrere and Deffeyes who he says have "disseminated an alarmist notion of imminent global oil exhaustion followed by economic implosion, massive unemployment, breadlines, homelessness, and the catastrophic end of industrial civilization". He adopts Wall Street Journal / economist fantasy arguments to refute them, saying "they disregard the role of prices, historical perspectives, and human inventiveness and adaptability...these predictions are just the latest installments in a long history of failed forecasts..."

As an example of a failed forecast, he lists Deffeyes's 2003 prediction of 2005. Recently, Science published an article "Peak Oil Production May Already Be Here" (25 March 2011 Vol 331), which states that peak oil probably occurred in 2005.

I was greatly looking forward to some science-based refutations because I'm pretty sad about where the world is headed, but this book didn't cheer me up, it made me annoyed with the selective evidence, avoidance of key subjects, and missing references that I would have liked to see refuted in a book with this title. For someone who has read such an astonishing number of articles and books (the references section is 35 pages long), the absence of systems ecologists and other scientists who've written peer-reviewed articles published in Science and Nature makes it clear that Smil must be avoiding reading anything which might contradict what he wants to believe.

Smil totally ignores Peter Ward, who has published books about how all but one of the past mass extinction events can be ascribed to global warming and how our current burning of fossil fuels could bring on a similar event in the future

The best part of his book is the Unfolding Trends chapter starting with the New World Order section. On page 164-166 he explains why "interdependence" is a better word than globalization. I think he's right -- we just saw that the 2011 tsunami and earthquake that hit Japan caused some single-source suppliers of auto parts to fail, which led to a slow-down in auto production. In the future as manufacturers in countries fail for various reasons (economic, resources declining, wars, social unrest, etc) even distant countries will be affected by these failures.

I thought I had a pretty complete list of catastrophes, but I hadn't heard of the once every 100,000 years volcano-triggered landslides that can create waves over 325 feet high that move up to 215 miles per hour. If there were a massive collapse of the western flank of the Cumbre Vieja volcano on La Palma in the Canary Islands, it would devastate the east coast of North America with a series of 33 to 82 foot high waves (worst case).

Important books missing from Smil's reference list:

Collapse of civilizations, systems ecology
------------------------------------------

Walter Youngquist Geodestinies: The Inevitable Control of Earth Resources over Nations & Individuals
Garrett Hardin Living Within Limits: Ecology, Economics, and Population Taboos
David Pimentel Food, Energy, and Society
John Perlin A Forest Journey: The Role of Wood in the Development of Civilization
Clive Ponting A Green History of the World: The Environment and the Collapse of Great Civilizations

The Collapse of Civilization is not what we should be worrying about. We're on the way to driving ourselves and most other species on the planet extinct.
------------------------------------------------------

Johan Rockström Planetary Boundaries. Exploring the Safe Operating Space for Humanity
Peter Ward The Medea Hypothesis: Is Life on Earth Ultimately Self-Destructive?
Peter Ward Under a Green Sky: Global Warming, the Mass Extinctions of the Past, and What They Can Tell Us About Our Future
Peter Ward, et. al. Out of Thin Air: Dinosaurs, Birds, And Earth's Ancient Atmosphere
Michael J. Mills et. al. Massive global ozone loss predicted following regional nuclear conflict
John Atcheson Methane Burps: Ticking Time Bomb Dec 16, 2004 Baltimore Sun

Can we avoid WW III as energy declines and times get harder?
------------------------------------------------------------

Lutz Kleveman The New Great Game: Blood and Oil in Central Asia
Michael Klare Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global Conflict
Chalmers Johnson The Sorrows Of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic
Robert Baer Sleeping With the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude
Ahmed Rashid Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia
Peter Turchin War and Peace and War. The Life Cycles of Imperial Nations.
David Berreby Us and Them. Understanding Your Tribal Mind.
Howard Bucknell III Energy and the National Defense.

Why there are no replacements for fossil fuels
----------------------------------------------

Martin Hoffert, et al Advanced Technology Paths to Global Climate Stability: Energy for a Greenhouse Planet 1 Nov 2002 Science
Joseph J. Romm Hype About Hydrogen: Fact and Fiction in the Race to Save the Climate
U.Bossel & B.Eliasson Energy and the Hydrogen Economy
Alice Friedemann The Hydrogen Economy: Energy and Economic Black Hole
Howard Hayden The Solar Fraud: Why Solar Energy Won't Run the World
Ted Trainer Renewable Energy Cannot Sustain a Consumer Society
Jacqueline Langwith, ed. 2008. "Opposing Viewpoints: Renewable Energy, vol. 2."
Sheila Newman, ed. 2008. "The Final Energy Crisis". Pluto Press.
Alice Friedemann Peak Soil: Why Cellulosic and other Biofuels are Not Sustainable and a Threat to America's National Security
D. Pimentel, T. Patzek Ethanol Production Using Corn, Switchgrass, and Wood; Biodiesel Production Using Soybean and Sunflower
H Hirsch, O Becker, M Schneider, A Froggatt Nuclear Reactor Hazards: Ongoing Dangers of Operating Nuclear Technology in the 21st Century
Richard Wolfson Nuclear Choices: A Citizen's Guide to Nuclear Technology

Infrastructure: alternative energy sources must maintain the infrastructure we built when oil had an Energy Returned on Energy Invested of 40-100
--------------------------------------------

Charles Hall et al. Hydrocarbons and the Evolution of Human Culture 20 Nov 2003 Nature 426, pp. 318-22
Brian Hayes Infrastructure: A Field Guide to the Industrial Landscape
Kate Ascher The Works: Anatomy of a City
ASCE American Society of Civil Engineers Report Card for America's Infrastructure. Environmental Protection Agency. The Clean Water and Drinking Water Infrastructure Gap Analysis. 2002. Read more ›

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Very balanced and insightful thinking on the topic September 3, 2010

By Gaetan Lion TOP 1000 REVIEWER

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

Contrary to what the title suggests, this is not about over-hyping any apocalyptic scenarios. To the contrary, Smil thinks through issues in an insightful and detached way. From the book, you develop critical thinking skills to vaccinate your mind against Media hype. You also develop a healthy skepticism towards any forecasts as they always miss the boat.

Smil classifies changes that could affect our civilization into two categories. First, the abrupt ones are unpredictable and potentially devastating. They include natural phenomena such as asteroids, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis, floods, earthquakes, and influenza pandemics. They also include man-caused wars, genocides, and terrorism. The second type of changes occur over half a century or more. Those include the energy transition away from fossil fuel, and the slow changes in balance of geopolitical powers.

Smil states we are notoriously bad at forecasting risks or anything else. He mentions numerous Peak Oil forecasts that were invariably wrong. Smil mentions how in the 1970s, we were concerned a next ice age was upon us. Geopolitic, economic, and demographic forecasts have been wrong too. The rapid economic ascent of China and rapid retreat of Japan since 1990 were unforeseen by everyone. The sudden break up of the USSR was also unexpected.

Smil states we are even bad at explaining what already happened. As an example, Diamond in his book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed mentioned only deforestation as a cause of the devastation of the Easter Island community. But, he missed out on rats infestation, infectious diseases, and enslavement. We invariably miss out on tons of variables when explaining past events.

Smil geopolitical outlook is fascinating. The prospects for Europe and Japan are problematic because of declining populations due to aging societies. Also, Europe's identity will be challenged by the massive migration of Muslims who do not integrate themselves. This will stress Europe's already fragile fiscal condition. Japan's political system renders the country unable to adapt and resolve any upcoming national issue.

Russia, even more than Japan and Europe appears to face insurmountable demographic problems. It is the only modern society that is suffering an accelerated population decline due to both a drop in fertility rate and a rapidly decreasing lifespan. The latter is due to alcoholism among men. Russian officials have attempted to reduce the rate of alcoholism for decades in vain. This section contrasts with the embarrassingly bad After the Empire: The Breakdown of the American Order (European Perspectives: A Series in Social Thought and Cultural Criticism).

The Middle East prospect is dire due to poor governance, poor living standard, high illiteracy rates, outdated legal body, weak social infrastructure, repression of women, lack of any scientific achievement, and lack of water resources and arable land. Those societies also do not provide employment opportunities causing large young male population being diverted towards terrorist networks. For a good book on this topic, I recommend The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad.

China is on the way up. It is the world's leading exporting manufacturer. By 2050, it should become the largest world economy. But, China faces challenges of its own. Its GDP per capita will remain a fraction of the US for several generations. Its one child policy has caused an uneven female/male ratio. This will cause a rapid aging of its population. This has implication for a country relying on an abundant and vibrant labor force. Its rapid economic growth is stressing the environment. China is losing scarce arable land to both industrialization and erosion impairing the country to feed itself. This will result in China relying more on food imports. But, given its huge population this is not a sustainable solution.

Within chapter 3, Smil outlook for the US is not encouraging. This is because it has gigantic Budget and Current Account Deficits. Those are the symptoms of the U.S. excessive spending, inadequate savings, and hollowing out of its manufacturing base. The U.S. is now even a net importer of hi tech equipment. Smil notices that the US economy's share of World GDP has already declined from 35% in 1945 to 20% currently. The US has lost its share of World GDP mainly to China.

However, within chapter 5. Smil's US outlook is more upbeat as he focuses on its strength and relative position. Smil notes that the US fiscal position is better than many European countries and Japan. Also, the US is still the champion of innovation and scientific discoveries. In 2004, 30% of the world's scientific papers were authored by the US vs only 6.5% for China. Adjusted for population size, the US is 20 times more productive than China. For another good book on this topic, I recommend The Post-American World.

Smil's section on climate change is very nuanced. He confirms that temperatures are rising and is probably due to anthropogenic CO2 emission. But, he states estimates of rise in CO2 concentration, temperature increase, and sea level rise are uncertain. But, prospective sea level rise should be moderate and due to warmer water expansion and very little from ice caps melting. Relying on several estimates from insurers and scientists, he states that the economic costs of adapting to climate changes are very manageable. This message contrasts with An Inconvenient Truth: The Planetary Emergency of Global Warming and What We Can Do About It apocalyptic tone.

Smil states that if we were a rational society we should be more concerned about changes in the water and nitrogen cycles than the rise in CO2 emission. He indicates that by 2050, nearly half of the world's population is projected to live in areas with scarce water resources. In 2003, half of the world's hospital beds were filled with patients with water-borne diseases (diarrhea, cholera, typhoid fever, etc...). Such waterborne diseases kill over 5 million people a year.

Smil mentions antibiotics resistance as a major environmental threat. Because of common overuse antibiotics resistance is now present in humans, domestic animals, and even wild animals that have never been exposed to those drugs. Some scientists think we may be near the point of returning to the pre-penicillin days, when we will have run out of antibiotics to defend against rapidly evolving bacteria. The same scientists deem such a situation catastrophic as it would result in additional millions of yearly deaths.

Smil conveys how we are paranoia about infrequent risks that we don't control such as terrorism vs being phlegmatic about extremely frequent and very high risk we do control such as car driving. He states "When strong emotions are involved, people tend to focus on the badness of the outcome rather than the probability [of the outcome]." This leads to bad social and individual reactions to risks. For another good book on this subject, I recommend Calculated Risks: How to Know When Numbers Deceive You.

16 of 20 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Careful Thought January 21, 2009

By Wolf Roder

Format:Hardcover

There is something arrogant about an author who in the same book covers economics, history, and physical science. He questions the peak oil calculations, instructs us on which will be the leading civilization of the future, and criticizes the global warming scenario among a multitude of other expectations for the future. Here are some examples of his trends for the next fifty years.

He questions the estimate that peak oil production will be reached between 2012 and 2020 because (1) estimation models are simplistic, (2) many past estimates have failed, and (3) published reserve estimates are not complete or to be trusted. He carefully considers the probability of Europe, Japan, Islam, Russia, and China or the United States as the leading civilization of the future. Europe is too heterogenous, Japan too old, Islam too backward, Russia too primitive, China still has a long way to go, and we all know the retreating fortunes of the United States.

His discussion of global warming stresses the limitations of our knowledge. Especially the computer models we use to project future warming rely on "highly uncertain assumptions" (p.178). He stresses that IPCC forecasts consider a 21st century global temperature increase of less than 1.5 C unlikely, but also an increase of more than 5 C as equally unlikely. Thus the most probable global warming in the 21st century will be in the range 2.5 to 3 C (p. 180). Most societies will have to adapt to this gradual temperature increase, but will be able to do so.

The book is thoroughly footnoted, and the author provides 37 pages of references. Vaclav Smil is a careful thinker, who despite the broad spread of his discussion has mastered the subject matter and carefully considers his words. He is the first to admit his prognostications can not be on the button, that all he wants to point out is "a wide-ranging, historically based interdisciplinary appraisal of sudden discontinuities and unfolding trends,"(p. xi). An insightful read.