What Happens in the Year 2050?

I've been noticing that in the last several years, perhaps even several decades, various news stories have come out indicating that something, usually disastrous, is going to happen in "about 50 years". Sometimes they say "around 2050". These things include:

It's not all bad:
Good or bad?:
What hit me was that each thing was reported by a separate new story or organization, and yet they all seemed to come up with about the same year. Of course, maybe my math is off. I want to explore this in more depth. My first step will be to try and gather a number of these stories together, or at least the links to them.

Here is an interesting book. The Next Fifty Years - Science in the First Half of the Twenty-first Century. It's contains some really interesting essays on speculations about what might happen in the next 50 years with various scientific disciplines. Edited by John Brockman

Another book, reviewed at Time.com about what the world will look like by 2050 The book is called A Brief History of the Future by Jacques Attali. Sounds interesting, however like Yogi Berra/Neils Bohr/Mark Twain said, "It's hard to make predictions, especially about the future".

More to come...

Links up-to-date as of Novemeber 27, 2008