As a futurist, I look at long term trends and waves of history.  The three waves of history we know have been the Agricultural Age, the Industrial Age and the Information Age.  The first age began some 10,000 years ago when man first began to literally put down roots.  The second age began some 250 years ago with the invention of the steam engine.  The third age began some 30 years ago with communications satellites, computers, the explosive growth of the white collar work force and the birth of the electronic global village envisioned by Marshall McLuhan.

We are now entering a new age, the Shift Age.  In the months ahead I will write in some detail about this age because — shameless plug here — it is a name I have coined and is also the title of my book that will be published in the first quarter of 2008.  For this column however I will focus on just one of the distinguishing characteristics of the Shift Age.  The Shift Age marks humanity’s last, at least on this planet, stage of evolution, the global stage.  Humanity has ultimately and finally entered this global stage and there is no turning back.

In 1974, around the beginning of the Information Age, humanity reached 4 billion in number.  We are now at 6.7 billion which means that our species has grown 66% in the last 33 years, an astonishing fact.  This is one of the two primary drivers of global warming, the shear growth …

Bali is a word that in 10-15 years I hope will represent and define the time when humanity made an essential shift in direction.  There are currently some 10,000 people attending the United Nations Conference on Climate Change in Bali.  More than 180 countries are represented along with numerous attendees from non-governmental, intergovernmental groups and of course the media.  The general reason for the meeting is to start work on the replacement of the Kyoto accord to address the issue of greenhouse gas emissions which expires in 2012.

The Bali conference is actually the first step since its goals are threefold: to launch negotiations for a climate change deal for the post 2012 period, to set the agenda for these negotiations, and then to reach agreement on when these negotiations will have to be concluded.   While this process sounds ponderous and bureaucratic, that is to be expected given that it is governmental agencies that must make these determinations.  In this world of ever increasing rapidity of change, governments seem to be the part of society that moves most slowly and is now following their citizens rather than leading them. 

The length of this process will actually work to the benefit of those who feel, as I do, that immediate and drastic actions must be taken.  The data about global warming is coming in rapidly and it is alarming to those that study it.  The U.N Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, when they recently released their fourth and final report stated that even …