Notwithstanding the old adage that the future is beyond prediction, it’s been a pretty pessimistic few weeks on planet Earth. Our global experts have pondered what is to come and they don’t like it.

We’ve had report after report, each spreading more doom and gloom than the last. We face disasters, floods and pestilence, famines and wars.
Among the challenges identified in a British foreign policy review leaked 10 days ago were threats to security, proliferated weapons of mass destruction, competition for energy, climate change and increased risk of disease. That’ll be HIV in Africa and Eastern Europe and an almost certain influenza pandemic.
The advance guard – bird flu in the UK, possibly imported from Hungary – took the headlines for a while, but it was upstaged by the United Nations report on climate change which, as it happens, has overtaken terrorism as the number one fear of electorates in many western countries.
The message from the UN’s panel of 2,500 experts was bleak in the extreme. The world is heating up they say, and humans are to blame. The effects will be irreversible in a decade and catastrophic within two generations at most.
Rising sea levels and increasingly violent storms will grab the headlines, but the impact will be universal. Droughts and floods will be commonplace. And in the worst case scenario glaciers, will melt in Antarctica and in the world’s great mountain ranges.
This is not good news at all – apart altogether from the disaster of rising sea levels, billions of people depend on the agriculture that’s sustained by the world’s biggest rivers, each of which originates in glaciers in the highest parts of the earth. Even the Mekong, which wanders through South East Asia, starts out on a Tibetan plateau.
And if this happens, there will be terrible wars over water and food, over the most basic of human requirements.
We know the cause. We’ve been burning fossil fuels at an increasing rate for generations. And now, with India and China aspiring to the same standard of living as the West and burning ever growing amounts of coal, gas and oil, there seems little chance of a respite.
The result? Atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide are at their highest for over 650,000 years. The rise began with the industrial revolution and has grown exponentially. Furthermore, the increase in carbon dioxide in the upper atmosphere has begun to accelerate.
Nobody is sure why this is happening. It may be that the earth’s ability to absorb extra CO2 is being exhausted. If so, there will be more and more of it in the air and therefore the greenhouse effect will also accelerate.
Much is being made of the Kyoto agreement and the need for us all to cut back on consumption that produces greenhouse gases.
Some of the injunctions to behave ourselves have a strong puritan (that is to say, misanthropic) tone. They are perilously close to other admonitions that we should drink and eat more sparingly and expose less of our flesh.
Another approach, part alternative and part complementary, has been suggested by Richard Branson and Al Gore. And Branson has put his money where his mouth is too. He has announced a $25 million prize for the first person to come up with a way of ‘scrubbing’ greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere.
What he’s hoping is that innovative and creative thought can help resolve the problem. It is, according to Ozzie environmentalist Tim Flannery, the world’s “first attempt at planetary engineering.”
It’s a fascinating prospect, that we might be able to suck the carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and park it somewhere…. Well, we engineer for most other things so why not this?
Put your thinking cap on! Statistically, you’ve probably got a better chance of winning this than snaffling the Eurolotto!!
Details of the competition are on this site - www.virginearth.com
Good thinking!