Back in 1980, I was fresh out of grad school and on to a new job. Gasoline was $1.16 a gallon, for off brand "low lead". My car was a relative gas hog with a low compression 5.7 L engine. I was certain gas prices would be headed higher routinely, so I wanted something more efficient, and bought one in 1984 that doubled the mpgs I got on the highway (and was painfully slow, but we had a 55 mph speed limit too). I had read about "zero petroleum by 2000" etc. I wondered if there would be enough to make chemicals.
All that has made me very circumspect about "expert predictions" 10+ years off. They usually sound good, but very often are nonsense. There was a well known expert in the day called Faith Popcorn of all things that made her living on such things and wrote books which I read, and nearly everything she predicted turned out to be rubbish.
I was convinced we'd have colonies on Mars by now. It's 2019. I was convinced the reciprocating internal combustion engine would be long gone replaced with something sensible, perhaps fuel cells, perhaps turbines, Wankels, something. I figured tires were as good as they'd ever get. I figured a 4 speed transmission was clearly as many gears as we'd ever need.
So, gas prices around here range $2.50-$3.00/gallon right now for regular. On an inflation adjusted basis, gas should cost $3.60/gallon. And we've gone to full unleaded which is more expensive to produce of course.
We have more forests today in the US than in 1900 by a large margin. We were looking out over the ATL yesterday from the summit of Stone Mountain and it's nearly all a green canopy. Places like the Smoky Mountains were almost denuded of trees by 1920, and now are completely covered (almost). Sometimes, the dot dot dot method of prediction just doesn't work.
The problem with predicting climate is that the models have to be derived based on what has happened to date. And it's far from easy to collect even simple things like mean global temperature. The impact of rising CO2 levels ALONE would be only tenths of a degree, it's the forcing factors added to the model that turn that into something dire. And that makes sense, a melting ice cap decreases the albedo of the planet leading to more warming, moisture levels may change leading to more cloud cover, etc. It's a massively complex system, and I don't think any of the models are really very good. Maybe one is by accident. Of course that includes the possibility that it turns out to be worse than the models predict, we might have massive permafrost melting that releases more methane and things spiral out of control.
I still don't see a viable means of controlling CO2 emissions. Europe has invested heavily in wind and solar, and their CO2 emissions have been rising faster than those in the US, where we've seen declines over the past years (in part because we have been energy hogs). So, I hope for the best, I don't think humans are really going to reduce CO2 emissions any time soon. "We" sign pieces of paper in lieu of real hard plans.
