I think they sort of project the current state of affairs, drawing attention to the issue, which may have significant developments in the future. They ran an ar

I think they sort of project the current state of affairs, drawing attention to the issue, which may have significant developments in the future. They ran an article about COVID during the earlier days of the pandemic, where they suspected it would take several years to come up with a viable vaccine. With R+D and novel vaccine technologies, we had a vaccine in a fraction of that time. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/30/opinion/coronavirus-covid-vaccine.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/30/opinion/coron... Similarly, a famous wager took place in the 80's where two academics agued over whether we would have significant resource scarcity in minerals. That scarcity as projected never came, because resource use patterns changed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon%E2%80%93Ehrlich_wager https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon%E2%80%93Ehrlich_wager