ABSTRACT
As the adage goes, forecasting is very difficult, especially if it is about the future. Yet concern about humanity’s newly discovered and inadvertent capacity to alter the global climate forces governments, organisations and individuals to take a much longer-term view of the future than is conventional. Politicians think mostly about a single electoral cycle of four to five years; businesses for the most part are concerned with the annual profit margin or with short-term returns on investment; and we individuals are concerned mostly about events over the coming year, only occasionally raising our horizons to think perhaps about our children’s education or our retirement. Decisions that we take now, and in the next few years, may well have profound effects on the climate inherited by our grandchildren and by generations beyond, and therefore greatly influence the ability of such future societies to prosper.
