Warning for 2020: Beware the Straight Line #predictions #unexpected

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Hydroelectric plant near the US/Canadian border. This one’s been around so long that the original generating facility is on the US National Register of Historic Places

If you predict that tomorrow’s weather will be like today’s, you’ll have a good accuracy rate, but no one will want you for their forecaster. You’ll miss all the changes!

People tend to extrapolate. It’s easy to see a straight line extending into the future. But even when we try to take lots of factors into account, we get it wrong.

America’s energy sources, like booming oil and crumbling coal, have defied projections and historical precedents over the last decade… Coal-fired power is plummeting and natural gas has risen significantly… EIA (U.S. Energy Information Administration) had projected in 2010 that U.S. energy-related carbon dioxide emissions would continue rising. In fact, they dropped. axios.com

The experts got it wrong because they failed to foresee a combination of technological and political changes. They’ll get things wrong again because change never stops, the world is complex, and no solution is perfect. What will we be shaking our heads over in 2030?

It’s not just global energy markets that change. Name any field you care about. Healthcare? Archeology? Agriculture? Physics? Birdwatching? Football? Continental drift? Origin of birds? It’s easy to scoff at expert pronouncements, but you and I are likely to see beliefs we thought were rocks turn to sand.

Some people change their mind when new information arrives. What do you do?