Grand Transitions: How the Modern World Was Made

by Vaclav Smil

Various forms of pollution can be managed, even eliminated, by expensive but effective technical fixes. In contrast, such degradative processes as the depletion of ancient aquifers or widespread loss of biodiversity have no easy technical solutions. And global warming, the ultimate environmental challenge, arising from the grand population, and from nutritional, energetic, and economic transitions, will require unprecedented levels of worldwide commitments as well as technical and socioeconomic adjustments merely to moderate the most worrisome impacts of higher tropospheric temperatures, the ocean’s rise, acidification, and deoxygenation. This challenge may turn out to be beyond our capacity for nimble adjustment: it is now almost certain that we will not be able to limit the increase of average global temperature to less than 1.5°C, the level that is now seen as the maximum compatible with tolerable impacts. Surely no model constructed in 2020 can tell us how we will come out of this by 2050 or 2100. Despite mastering so much we still face the fundamental existential uncertainty.