The Future Through Yesterday: Long-Term Forecasting in the Novels of H.G. Wells and Jules Verne

30 Jun The Future Through Yesterday: Long-Term Forecasting in the Novels of H.G. Wells and Jules Verne

“The Future Through Yesterday: Long-Term Forecasting in the Novels of H.G. Wells and Jules Verne” The Centennial Review 38, 1994

Introductory Paragraph:

Suppose you were living in 1896, the date Arrhenius published his amazing paper on the Greenhouse Effect, and that your profession or intellectual passion was to predict the distant future. What impression might his paper have made, if you happened to encounter it in your studies? Arrhenius was attempting to account for the Ice Ages; he only hinted that the carbon dioxide (“carbonic acid” in the chemical terminology of the times) produced by combustion of coal for industrial purposes could affect the content of the atmosphere.2 Would you have imagined that global warming caused by the burning of fossil fuels might pose a threat to civilization 100 years hence? What, in 1896, might you have visualized about the future course of the development of civilization? The time horizon over which present-day forecasts relevant for climate policy have to be made is just as long. Can we learn anything about whether such forecasts contain meaningful information by looking with hindsight at forecasts made during the nineteenth century? (footnote omitted)