• Most likely to come true (non-political): “Science: A more or less Earth-like planet will be observed in a more or less Earth-like orbit around a more or less Sun-like star.”
• Most likely to come true (political): “Chris Dodd loses his election. Capital police need to use a crowbar to loosen his grip on his office desk. ”
• Funniest crack: “North Korea: Kim Jong Il will be deposed by his military. (Yes, it’s true, I cut’n’pasted that from last year’s predictions. It’s bound to happen one year soon, though, unless the little toad dies first.) ”
• Most sobering: “The GOP will not take back the House. But it will be very, very close.”
• Most typical: “The economy will improve, despite the best efforts of the Democrats to weight it down with more regulations and the promise of future taxes. The Democrats will take credit for the improvement, the Republicans will dismiss the growth as inadequate, positions which would be exactly reversed should the parties’ relative political positions also be reversed.”

As for myself, I only have resolutions, same as 2009, to learn to use and own a gun and to meet minimum Marine corp selection criteria. The difference would be, well, I am more resolved and in the case of the second resolution, I have more time as well. Since I am not in the future-telling business, I will just leave with this quote from the wisest man that ever lived:

There is a time for everything,
   and a season for every activity under heaven:

a time to be born and a time to die,
   a time to plant and a time to uproot,

a time to kill and a time to heal,
   a time to tear down and a time to build,

a time to weep and a time to laugh,
   a time to mourn and a time to dance,

a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them,
   a time to embrace and a time to refrain,

a time to search and a time to give up,
   a time to keep and a time to throw away,

a time to tear and a time to mend,
   a time to be silent and a time to speak,

a time to love and a time to hate,
   a time for war and a time for peace.

What does the worker gain from his toil? I have seen the burden God has laid on men. He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end.

Incidentally, he links to this UC Berkeley page where helpful instructions for building a nuclear bomb is laid out, step by step with complete list of vendors and reliable contractors who can do the job.

Oh, wouldn’t it be ironic that UC Berkeley is helping GOP go nuclear?

At this point, there was every reason to think that running other problems through these increasingly powerful machines would yield useful results. That was the thinking that led Forrester to collaborate with the Club of Rome in the early 1970s. They devised a model of planetary resources that considered a variety of interconnected dynamic systems and global scenarios — death rates, birth rates, natural-resource depletion, population density, capital investment, crowding, pollution, etc. They fed the model into a large MIT mainframe and flipped the switch.

Forrester’s partners published the results in the 1972 bestseller Limits to Growth. They predicted a rapidly growing global population combining with rapid resource depletion to spark violent social upheaval. Limits to Growth suggested that disasters and die-offs were imminent, and that the survivors would live in a world of misery and scarcity.

Well, in fairness to climatologists (unlike Scientologists, I think they deserve some respect), their models are not completely wrong—and they are not trying to model something as complex as a human, only the amount of CO₂ generated by one and the effect of the released “toxin”.

In fact, Prof. Muller says that he trusts the latest computer models—at least as much as he trusts the back-of-the-envelope calculation performed about 100 years ago, which happens to agree with the latest computer models. (Colloquium webcast. It’s a good talk; abstract here.)

Of course, if the current calculation is only as accurate as what they could do without computers 100 years ago, then it goes without saying that we haven’t made much improvements in that area, i.e. the calculation is not complete garbage, but it ain’t gospel either.

In case you don’t want to listen through Prof. Muller’s talk at the colloquium two weeks ago, here’s the scientific consensus on global warming: (1) warming is real, there is overall rise in global temperature, at least up until 2000 or so; (2) the hypothesis that natural causes (solar activity, etc. anything but CO₂ levels) alone are responsible for the warming is excluded within 90% confidence level, i.e. outside that 10% chance, human activities probably contributed to, although is not solely responsible for, global warming seen in the 20th century.

Aside from these, I don’t know any other broad, data-backed scientific consensus on climate change. Anything more dire you hear is probably either a politician or a scientist (or both) trying to scare you into action.