Realistic: for my lifespan and my kids' lifespan, and my grandkids' lifespan if my kids have kids--we are going to see a declining standard of living in the formerly industrialized world, growing wealth disparity everywhere, and combinations of localized social disorder followed by authoritarian crackdowns. Famines are almost inevitable, because arable land is being depleted, and because the changes in weather patterns are likely to make formerly abundant areas produce far less yield per acre of food crops and of feed crops for food animals. Escalating oil prices are an inevitability: many of the most productive regions are already at or past peak, and the price of getting the oil out of the ground is going up just as world demand for oil is ballooning at an unforeseen rate.

There are going to be shortages of anything that needs to be transported across oceans, due primarily to the economic depression (I don't think we're even on the up-swing of the "W" yet, and I expect some level of permanent contraction of the economy--unemployment that never goes back to 1990s levels, permanent lowering of home prices, permanent credit shrinkage) and also due to the rising cost of oil.

We are well past the point of being able to stop global climate change: if the entire human race made a deep commitment to lowering carbon emissions, we might be able to slow it a little, but once the methane in the permafrost starts leaking out (which started last summer on a relatively small scale) there's not going to be a way to mitigate the problem. That isn't to say Earth will become another Venus, but it will make some real problems for agriculture (and a lot of the endangered species on Earth will go extinct).

It is entirely possible that we are going to enter a New Dark Age that will last a few centuries before anything improves significantly. Long-term, if humans are still around in a thousand years, I might be optimistic. Short term, though, I'm bearish on humanity--it's not going places.

Tucker