Doom and gloom

It being the time of year when older people like to explain why the world as we know it is coming to an end, I thought I ought to offer some recipes for doom of my own, large and small. In no particular order.

Global warming is going to bring stresses and strains - for example those arising from large scale movements of people away from low lying areas - which the creaky world order is going to be hard put to cope with. The numbers involved might well be large compared with those in, for example, Syria today.

Muslim warming is going to continue to cause trouble for some years yet. The Christian wars of religion centred around the 16th century took a hundred years or so to work themselves out, and we still have some pockets of bother left. And the meek have not yet inherited the earth (see reference 1). Will we be able to contain this trouble while it works itself out?

Distribution of wealth between rich and poor. Is getting bad and the poor might well, at some point, fight back, using whatever weapons they can get hold of. Be they the hard weapons of the thrown brick or the soft weapons of benefit fraud.

Distribution of wealth across the ages. The half of the population that is working is going to have to support the quarter that is too young to work and the quarter that is too old to work, while the old are presently holding onto rather a large chunk of the available wealth. We need to find some way of sorting this out. Bit more optimistic about this one; maybe we will muddle our way through to a sensible solution over the next decade or so, at least in this country.

Distribution of wealth across the world. Some countries, with oil-rich Arab states being the worst, have a disproportionate share of primary wealth, through accident of geography. How do we soften the impact of this disproportionality without doing too much damage to property rights, essential for the orderly conduct of business?

The collapse of two party government. The nice tidy, two party system which has served parts of the western world well over the last couple of hundred years looks to be falling apart, at least in the UK and the US. Perhaps the cosily adversarial era of Her Majesty's government and Her Majesty's loyal opposition is over. Will we manage to move on without a fall? From which I associate to a worry that governments will fail to control the power of the giants of the corporate world, the unruly barons of the 21st century.

The exhaustion of fossil fuel. Are we going to run out of fossil fuel before alternatives come on stream? Before we crack the fusion problem? Bit more optimistic about this one too, with solar power and wind power now coming on stream big time.

And so I reach the magic number of seven and can stop for breakfast.

Reference 1: King James' Bible, Matthew 5:5, Beatitude 3.