The way this is written up in the Guardian makes it sound like NASA's all seeing eye has evaluated everything that is happening in the world and made a predicti

The way this is written up in the Guardian makes it sound like NASA's all seeing eye has evaluated everything that is happening in the world and made a prediction. The actual paper (early draft here apparently http://metosrv2.umd.edu/~ekalnay/pubs/handy-paper-for-submission-2.pdf http://metosrv2.umd.edu/~ekalnay/pubs/handy-paper-for-submis... ) is all about a fairly simple model which has been run through a bunch of scenarios as a way of studying civilisation collapse in general: Based on the long history of collapse of civilizations discussed in the introduction, we separated the population into 'Elites' and 'Commoners', and introduced a variable for accumulated wealth ... We have also added a different dimension of predation whereby Elites 'prey' on the production of wealth by Commoners. As a result, HANDY consists of just four prediction equations: two for the two classes of population, Elites and Commoners, denoted by xE and xC, respectively, one for the natural resources or Nature, y, and one for the accumulated Wealth, w, referred to hereafter as 'Wealth'. This minimal set of four equation seems to capture essential features of the human-nature interaction and is capable of producing major potential scenarios of collapse or transition to steady state. This definitely has some uses but is being misreported. A four equation model that splits people into two polarised classes doesn't really tell us much about the real world. There are lots of reasons to feel gloomy about the future for sure, but this little model isn't really adding to the evidence in any substantial way.