Right-wing Doomsday

This is an common event. We are all the time bombarded by the nagative nancy doomsday senerios of the Left but it's rare we see one from the Right. I hope you get a chance to enjoy, "The End of Power " from The Wall Street Jounal. Like many doomsdays from the Left there are interesting points to be made and also like many of the doomdays from the Left it is a possibility. There is however one large if and that is their prediction will only come to pass if a large number of factors all develope as they predict. And this one falls to the most base of junk science predictions, the "if this trend continues" school of thought.

In this doomsday senerio we have the polulation of Yemmen becoming larger than that of Russia all thanks to the hard work of continuing trends. I wonder if when people of this school of thought read that a Kia Sedona minivan can go 0-60mph in 8.5 seconds they then assume that it will break the sound barrier in under 2 minutes at full throtle.

The problem with these things is that people get so hung up on the few good points or the details of numbers that the miss the reallity that it's nothing more than a work of "what if" fiction. Niall Ferguson has created for us an interesting world where a decent author could live well off the series of books they could write but I don't think it or any other doomsdays need to be considered too hard when making policy decisions.