At the start of 2026, this blog moved to AMS Headlines after 15 years and over 1,000 posts on a stand-alone WordPress platform. Seems appropriate to run a few retrospective posts on LOTRW’s origins (that history will help any new readers to see what to expect from future posts here). The first such look at LOTRW origins appeared on January 20. Here is Part 2.
The starting point for much of LOTRW has been this: for the past two or three centuries—a short period of time—the human race has been on a roll. During that period, human numbers increased to the present population of eight billion. At the same time, a considerable fraction of that eight billion has dramatically increased its material quality of life, largely by consuming resources—food, energy, water—at a faster rate. This resource consumption amounts to factors of 10 or more per capita (depending on the resource). We don’t eat 10 times as much food as we have before, but we consume a lot of animal protein. Take that, Big Mac. Protein from beef requires about 20 times more land and 10 times more water than protein from kidney beans. Here in America we consume several gallons of fresh water per day for our individual drinking needs, but another 80 or so gallons daily (mainly in the bathroom) in today’s developed society. U.S. water needs for agriculture and industrial processes are a factor of 10 higher still. Energy usage shows a similar trend; U.S. energy use per capita these days is some 10 times what it was in 1800. While the world population has increased by a factor of 10, the footprint of that population has increased by a factor of 50 or so.
A short period of time? Short compared with what? Five things:
- The time scale of climate variability.
- The recurrence interval separating extreme natural hazards
- The time required for the emergence of unintended consequences.
- The time required to see whether we can keep this up.
- The time required for populations, and for individuals, to internalize the changes in human circumstances.
We can therefore forecast five realities about the future.
Because climate hasn’t changed very much over this interval, and because we have tuned our success to a narrow range of climate conditions, any coming change in climate, whether local or global, whether from hotter to colder or vice versa, or drier to wetter or vice versa, will likely be unfavorable.
People have moved off the farm to big cities, and transitioned to manufacturing and service economies, dependent on critical infrastructure, in times too short for our new ways of doing business at local and regional scales to be stress-tested by infrequent natural hazards and extremes of flood and drought, heat and cold. We will find ourselves vulnerable to natural disasters in new ways and continually struggle to cope.
We are introducing new chemicals pell-mell into the air, water, and land, and even into our bodies, in order to reap the advantages of crop production, quick transportation, and virtual climate control in our homes and at our places of work. The future will therefore present a series of unprecedented challenges to public health and safety. Microplastics come to mind. Another example (out of thousands more): GLP-1 injections (now also available as pills). Utterly transformative. But just as we’re growing dependent on them as a society, some concerns are cropping up.
Because we’ve achieved great material success in a short period of time doesn’t mean we can sustain it. We’re raising all that beef and extracting all those mineral resources at greater rates than ever before. But can we keep it up? Think of the marathoner, after 400 yards, “looking good.” There’s another 26 miles still to go. Sustainable development doesn’t mean a steady state; it requires constant, perhaps even accelerating innovation. The best we can do through innovation is fend off that enemy entropy a bit longer and buy time.
Finally, the pace of technological advance and social change has been rapid, but our human mindset hasn’t kept up. We—eight billion of us—are failing to internalize our new global and personal circumstances. An example, close to home for meteorologists. In the mid 1800s, virtually everyone thought that climate was unchanging, the assimilative capacity of the atmosphere was unlimited, and weather was unpredictable. The science of the last 200 years hasn’t just tweaked these notions. It’s turned each on its ear. We know that climate can change, even relatively rapidly. Fossil fuel emissions used to be a local problem. The solution? Taller smokestacks. Decades later, those taller stacks had transformed the problem into a regional one—acid rain. The solution? Scrubbers and other technologies. But today we know that fossil fuel emissions are a global problem—greenhouse gases. Weather prediction. More manageable than we’d thought. However, peoples, and their leaders, are still carrying around much of that 1800s mindset. As a result, we can expect top-down, command-and-control approaches to dealing with climate, hazard, pollution, and resource issues to be ineffective.
That’s the LOTRW reality.
Rather dreary?
Not really. It only seems gloomy because of our human tendency to solve tomorrow’s problems using yesterday’s tools. New, promising tools are on hand or coming on line. More in a future post.
