Quotes & Sayings About 2050

If warming were held to a minimum, the team estimated that between 22 and 31 percent of the species would be "committed to extinction" by 2050. If warming were to reach what was at that point considered a likely maximum - a figure that now looks too low - by the middle of this century, between 38 and 52 percent of the species would be fated to disappear. — Elizabeth Kolbert

Virgil takes a slightly mashed Twinkie from his pocket and sets this on the counter between us and Ralph. "How old is that?" I murmur. "These things have enough preservatives in them to keep them on the shelves until 2050," Virgil whispers. — Jodi Picoult

The good news is world population growth rate decreases systematically and is expected to reach zero by 2050, thanks to urbanisation and women's education. — Dan Shechtman

We should be working towards a carbon-neutral Britain by 2050. We should be working towards the elimination of petrol-driven motor cars, we should be really radical in what we do - the urgency of the problem is really enormous — Menzies Campbell

Low-cost, high-grade coal, oil and natural gas - the backbone of the Industrial Revolution - will be a distant memory by 2050. Much higher-cost remnants will still be available, but they will not be able to drive our growth, our population and, most critically, our food supply as before. — Jeremy Grantham

Global warming ... may be a plaintiff lawyer's dream. And it's interesting, in a perverse way, to imagine how a jury in 2050 might react to some of the recent industry-backed studies minimizing the dangers of global warming. I suspect future jurors will not be amused. — David Ignatius

The next 15 years will see thousands of people leave the atmosphere on suborbital flights. My company's SS2 system might fly 100,000 people by 2024. If it is shown to be highly profitable, perhaps we will see 20,000 people traveling to orbit by 2035, and then thousands to the moon by 2050. If we make a courageous decision, like the program we kicked off for Apollo, we will see our grandchildren in outposts on other planets. — Burt Rutan

In the late 1960s a woman in the poorer countries of the world typically had six children. Today the average is fewer than three. In fact, demographers now project that the world's population will begin to decline before 2050.47 — Stephanie Coontz

Are there still other possibilities? Of course there are. What is important to recognize is that all three historical options are really there, and the choice will depend on our collective world behavior over the next fifty years. Whichever option is chosen, it will not be the end of history, but in a real sense its beginning. The human social world is still very young in cosmological time. In 2050 or 2100, when we look back at capitalist civilization, what will we think? — Immanuel Wallerstein

With every inch of land on Earth now catalogued by our satellites, the stars are the next place we as a species must travel. And with a booming world population that will hit 9.1 billion in 2050, large-scale space travel may become a necessity. — Ben Parr

They argue that, if the governments of developed countries want a fifty-fifty chance of hitting the agreed-upon international target of keeping warming below 2 degrees Celsius, and if reductions are to respect any kind of equity principle between rich and poor nations, then wealthy countries need to start cutting their greenhouse gas emissions by something like 8 to 10 percent a year - and they need to start right now. The idea that such deep cuts are required used to be controversial in the mainstream climate community, where the deadlines for steep reductions always seemed to be far off in the future (an 80 percent cut by 2050, for instance). But as emissions have soared and as tipping points loom, that is changing rapidly. Even Yvo de Boer, who held the U.N.'s top climate position until 2009, remarked recently that "the only way" negotiators "can achieve a 2-degree goal is to shut down the whole global economy."48 — Naomi Klein

Between 2010 and 2050, the urban population of the more developed countries will increase by a mere 170 million people, growing at a rate of 0.6 percent per year. During that same period, the urban population of the less developed countries will increase by 2.6 billion people, 15 times that of the more developed countries, and at a rate of 2.4 percent per year, which is 4 times faster than that of the more developed countries (United Nations Population Division 2012, file — Shlomo Angel

The Australia to 2050 report highlights something that is well understood by South Australians, that infrastructure plays a key role in long-term economic expansion. — Kevin Rudd

The U.N.'s current projection is that humanity will number 9.3 billion individuals in 2050 and then hit 10.1 billion by 2100. Meanwhile, our energy resources are dwindling, and droughts threaten our food supplies. — Annalee Newitz

We run enormous risks and we know what kind of reductions of greenhouse gases are necessary to drastically reduce risks. Reducing emissions by half by 2050 is roughly in the right ballpark. It would bring us below 550 ppm. — Nicholas Stern

Marine scientists predict that by 2050 there will be no more large fish left in the ocean if we don't change our relationship with the sea. — Greg MacGillivray

But I think that there are things about the United States that aren't really recognized sufficiently, so it's important to remember that until 1945, the United States was a cultural backwater. It wasn't part of the modern world.... So, a good part of the country is still [adhering to] what's been traditional. It's just not part of the modern world. Just take a look at the statistics. The religious fanaticism, there's just nothing like it in the world. I mean, one of the problems with getting people interested in global warming is that about 40 percent of the population thinks that Jesus is coming in 2050, so who cares, you know. — Noam Chomsky

Africa will have replaced Europe and the United States as the center of Christianity. By 2050, Uganda alone is expected to have more Christians than the largest four or five European nations combined. And like the early church, the growth in the church in the Majority World is taking place primarily with the poor on center stage. — Steve Corbett

As we march toward the reality that, by 2050, no one racial or ethnic group will hold a proportional majority in this country, racial suicide paranoia abounds. And for the white racist legislators in the red states, nothing is more threatening than a majority-brown country; it strips them of their historic power. The prospect of being outnumbered is what enabled the Tea Party's mutiny of Congress in 2010 after the election of Barack Obama, America's first black president, allowing it to cripple the Republican establishment; render the first major-party female presidential candidate powerless; and enable the rise of the racist, nationalistic, and misogynistic Donald Trump The white people who are still in charge believe that if their women don't start having lots of babies they- the white patriarchs - are going to become obsolete. — Dr. Willie Parker

By 2050, the Australian population is expected to grow from 22 million to 36 million. That increase alone will put huge pressure on our towns and our cities. We will need more homes, more roads, more rail lines, more hospitals, more schools, just to accommodate so many Australians. — Kevin Rudd

If we do not get control of our borders, by 2050 Americans of European descent will be a minority in the nation their ancestors created and built. No nation has ever undergone so radical a demographic transformation and survived. — Pat Buchanan

Unless we change direction, models show that the profit of the entire consumer goods sector could be wiped out by 2050 — Paul Polman

Experts say this global warming is serious, and they are predicting now that by the year 2050, we will be out of party ice. — David Letterman

To be sure, there exists in principle a quite simple economic mechanism that should restore equilibrium to the process: the mechanism of supply and demand. If the supply of any good is insufficient, and its price is too high, then demand for that good should decrease, which should lead to a decline in its price. In other words, if real estate and oil prices rise, then people should move to the country or take to traveling about by bicycle (or both). Never mind that such adjustments might be unpleasant or complicated; they might also take decades, during which landlords and oil well owners might well accumulate claims on the rest of the population so extensive that they could easily come to own everything that can be owned, including rural real estate and bicycles, once and for all.3 As always, the worst is never certain to arrive. It is much too soon to warn readers that by 2050 they may be paying rent to the emir of Qatar. — Thomas Piketty

One fifth of human kind depend on fish to live. Today now 70 percent of the fish stock are over-exploited. According to FAO if we don't change our system of fishing the main sea resources will be gone in 2050. We don't want to believe what we know. — Yann Arthus-Bertrand

Because industrial cycles are never complete - because there is no return - there are two characteristic results of industrial enterprise: exhaustion and contamination. The energy industry, for instance, is not a cycle, but only a short arc between an empty hole and poisoned air. And farming, which is inherently cyclic, capable of regenerating and reproducing itself indefinitely, becomes similarly destructive and self-exhausting when transformed into an industry. Agricultural pollution is a serious and growing problem. And industrial agriculture is forced by its very character to treat the soil itself as a "raw material," which it proceeds to "use up." It has been estimated, for instance, that at the present rate of cropland erosion Iowa's soil will be exhausted by the year 2050. I have seen no attempt to calculate the human cost of such farming - by attrition, displacement, social disruption, etc. - I assume because it is incalculable. This — Wendell Berry

I'd like to know what the Internet is going to look like in 2050. Thinking about it makes me wish I were eight years old. — Vinton Cerf

Based on the above analyses, it is reasonable to expect the hardware that can emulate human-brain functionality to be available for approximately one thousand dollars by around 2020. As we will discuss in chapter 4, the software that will replicate that functionality will take about a decade longer. However, the exponential growth of the price-performance, capacity, and speed of our hardware technology will continue during that period, so by 2030 it will take a village of human brains (around one thousand) to match a thousand dollars' worth of computing. By 2050, one thousand dollars of computing will exceed the processing power of all human brains on Earth. Of course, this figure includes those brains still using only biological neurons. — Ray Kurzweil

My dream appliance circa 2050 has one big dial on it, and when I twist it to the right, my IQ goes up to 450. — Bruce Sterling

In 2000, twice as much water was used throughout the world as in 1960. By 2050, half of the planet's projected 8.9 billion people will live in countries that are chronically short of water. — Rose George

Safer chemicals and more energy-efficient technologies can provide cooling without severe climate implications. Shifting to these alternatives could avoid the equivalent of 12 times the current annual carbon pollution of the United States by 2050. — Frances Beinecke

When I was born, the world's population was 3.5 billion. There are now 6.8 billion people on the planet. By 2050, that's expected to rise to 9.4 billion. What's more, the Earth's resources aren't growing; they're decreasing - and rapidly. — Lewis Gordon Pugh

Human spirit is the ability to face the uncertainty of the future with curiosity and optimism. It is the belief that problems can be solved, differences resolved. It is a type of confidence. And it is fragile. It can be blackened by fear, and superstition. By the year 2050, when the conflict began, the world had fallen upon fearful, superstitious times. — Bernard Beckett

With an estimated population of nine billion people by 2050, we cannot continue to consume resources at the same rate and maintain our quality of life. — David Suzuki

Seychelles said at U.N. climate talks. The report was bound to sharpen disputes in Lima over who pays the bills for the impacts of global warming, whose primary cause is the burning of coal, oil and gas but which also includes deforestation. It has long been the thorniest issue at the U.N. negotiations, now in their 20th round. Rich countries have pledged to help the developing world convert to clean energy and adapt to shifts in global weather that are already adversely affecting crops, human health and economies. But poor countries say they're not seeing enough cash. Projecting the annual costs that poor countries will face by 2050 just to adapt, the United Nations Environment Program report deemed the previous estimate of $70 billion to $100 billion "a significant underestimate." It had been based on 2010 World Bank numbers. — Anonymous

I wonder if in 2050 there will be a movie called, 'Dude, Where's My Spaceship' — Zach Galifianakis

I would love to see what's going to happen with science fiction with peoples' heads, because we still have people running around in the year 2050 or 2100 or 2200 and they have incredible technology and you see the effects: laser beams and rays and beaming down and beaming up. Incredible technical things happening, but everybody is still running around jealous, fighting, whacking, cheating. There's got to be something going on! Some kind of change. I'd like to see something starting to happen in that area, with the psychology of the human being and how that changed. — Leslie Nielsen

The Second Green Revolution, as the world's population grows to over 9 billion by 2050, is the new revolution we have to have to lift food production by another 75 percent. — Anthony Pratt

By 2050, at bio-extinction's current rate, between 25 per cent and 50 per cent of all species will have disappeared or be too few in numbers to survive. There'll be a few over-visited parks, the coral reefs will be beaten up, grasslands overgrazed. Vast areas of the tropics that have lost their forests will have the same damn weeds, bushes and scrawny eucalyptus trees so that you don't know if you're in Africa or the Americas. — Stuart L. Pimm

Winter regularly takes many more lives than any heat wave: 25,000 to 50,000 each year die in Britain from excess cold. Across Europe, there are six times more cold-related deaths than heat-related deaths ... by 2050 ... Warmer temperatures will save 1.4 million lives each year. — Bjorn Lomborg

I'm a technological optimist in that I do believe that technology will provide solutions that will allow the world in 2050 to support 9 billion people at an acceptable standard of living. But I'm a political pessimist in that I am concerned about whether the science will be appropriately applied. — Martin Rees

The future of mankind is going to be decided within the next two generations, and there are two absolute requisites: We must aim at a stable-state society [with limited population growth] and the destruction of nuclear stockpiles. ... Otherwise I don't see how we can survive much later than 2050. — Jacques Monod

A cap on carbon is important because it sets a specific goal for reducing carbon emissions 80% by 2050. — Frances Beinecke

If our government won't spend the money to protect New Orleans sufficiently today, what are the chances we will spend the money to protect dozens of coastal cities post-2050, once everyone knows that sea levels will keep rising and intense hurricanes will occur relentlessly? — Joseph J. Romm

Rising seas create a higher baseline for future storm surges. The New York City Panel on Climate Change has projected that coastal waters may rise by two feet by 2050 and four feet by the end of the century. — Nicholas D. Kristof

Our expectation is that by 2050, which is a long time away, India will be the largest economy in the world, overtaking both the U.S. and China. — Adi Godrej

Beyond 2050 the world population may start to decrease if women across the world will have, on average, less than 2 children. But that decrease will be slow. — Hans Rosling

I hope that by 2050 the entire solar system will have been explored and mapped by flotillas of tiny robotic craft. — Martin Rees

By 2050, seven out of ten people will live in cities, which will account for six billion people living in urban areas. That phenomenon is central to all the challenges humanity faces. If there is an issue to be addressed, then it is certainly happening in cities and therefore must be considered on an urban scale. — Eduardo Paes

The real requirement, if we are to avoid runaway global warming, is probably 80% by 2030, and almost no burning whatever of fossil fuels (coal, gas and oil) by 2050. — Gwynne Dyer

I think it's inevitable that there will be Earthlings establishing a presence on Mars. And I would say that it would certainly take place by 2050 or shortly thereafter. — Buzz Aldrin

Essentially, by 2050 we need all activities outside agriculture to be near zero carbon emitting if we are to stop carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere growing — David Miliband

If I were going to put my money on it, I would bet that by 2050 - hopefully earlier - we'll have found that more than 80 percent of all human cancer is caused by infection. — Paul W. Ewald

Replacing half of the U.S. ground-transport fuels with hydrogen from wind power by 2050, for example, might require 1,400 gigawatts of advanced wind turbines or more ... replacing those fuels with electricity might require less than 400 GW. — Joseph J. Romm

The wealthiest 300 people have greater riches than the three billion poorest. The three wealthiest people have greater riches than the 48 poorest countries put together. With only limited environmental space to accommodate the expected 9 billion human inhabitants of the world by 2050, such disparities in consumption are clearly not sustainable — Tony Juniper

Some claim that computers will, by 2050, achieve human capabilities. Of course, in some respects they already have. — Martin Rees