World Changing Events 2024: A new Middle East war, unparalleled extreme weather, the first new NATO member to border Russia since 2004, the first new British monarchy in seven decades, and a banking crisis that resulted in the second-largest banking collapse in US history—all of these events in 2023 may have marked significant changes in an ever-changing world.
Given that the Israeli ground offensive in Gaza is still underway, the conflict in Ukraine is expected to last into its third year, and technical advancements are advancing at an exponential rate while the climate problem becomes worse, it doesn’t take a soothsayer to predict some events that might drastically change the course of history.
World Changing Events 2024
As 2024 gets underway, experts tells about some of these potentially game-changing occurrences and the potential consequences if they occurred in the upcoming year.
“I think at least in the short term that can be a volatility driver and is in part one of the reasons why we think we’re in a different secular environment than the Great Moderation,” said Liz Ann Sonders, chief investment strategist at financial advisory firm Charles Schwab, to Newsweek during a press call on the economic outlook. “Geopolitical uncertainty is going to remain elevated,” Sonders said.
The most prominent expert stated that “a combination of supply and demand shocks—and you add climate change into the mix—[… is] supportive of that view that we’re not going back to the Great Moderation.”
Fallout from Nuclear Power
International relations specialists have stated that while the use of nuclear weapons in the near future is improbable, it is not completely inconceivable under certain situations.
Scholar and author on Russian security concerns Mark Galeotti stated that he did not see “any likelihood of nuclear conflict” in the upcoming year, but foreign policy expert and journalist Nikola Mikovic speculated that Russia would be persuaded to deploy a tactical nuclear weapon against Ukraine.
Russian propagandists close to Russian President Vladimir Putin have previously supported the use of nuclear weapons against Ukraine’s non-nuclear armed forces, with a yield that is lower than that of strategic nukes. Putin declared in March that Russia will construct tactical nuclear weapon storage facilities in Belarus, an ally of Russia that shares a border with Ukraine.
However, in response to Western countries’ presumably improbable sustained backing for Kyiv, the same propagandists have also threatened to launch nuclear strikes on them. Nuclear war “will definitely happen” between the United States and Russia over Ukraine, according to a commentator who stated in November that Russia would use nuclear weapons “right away” in the event of a fight with NATO.
Mikovic quoted Zbigniew Brzezinski, a former national security adviser to the United States, as saying that although Russian elites still possessed $500 billion in American banks, he saw no possibility of Russia using its nuclear capabilities. “Although the United States and its allies have already frozen over $300 billion in Central Russian Bank assets, children and grandchildren of Russian oligarchs and Kremlin officials continue to live and study in the West, which is why I cannot imagine Russia striking Western countries.”
But the expert, who is located in Serbia, stated that Russia may strike Ukraine with tactical nuclear weapons, but “only if its forces suffer a major defeat that would have a serious impact on Putin’s, or his successor’s, reign.”
“Even then, it would likely be a ‘demonstration of force’ rather than a serious nuclear escalation,” he said. “For instance, Russia could strike Snake Island aiming to scare the Ukrainian political and military leadership.”
But Mikovic stated that such a scenario was “very unlikely at this point” because “the problem for the Kremlin is that the U.S. would almost certainly intervene, one way or another, and I don’t think Moscow is ready for an open confrontation with the U.S. military.”
Vladimir Putin’s Possible Death
Putin’s health has been the subject of intense—and even wishful at times—speculation ever since Russia invaded Ukraine.
The 71-year-old has said he would run for president a fifth time, although there have been rumours that he is battling dementia, Parkinson’s illness, and perhaps cancer. The rumours that Putin had gone into cardiac arrest had to be denied by the Kremlin in October.
Additionally, it has alleged that Putin has been the target of assassination attempts by Ukraine, an allegation that President Volodymyr Zelensky has refuted despite an appearance a few weeks later by the head of Ukrainian intelligence. Zelensky, for his part, has stated that he had survived many attempts on his life.
“I have a suspicion that the system Putin has built would be severely disrupted if he were to pass away in 2024—and despite fanciful rumours, there is no proof that this is even remotely likely,” stated Galeotti, the director of the Mayak Intelligence consultancy and an honorary professor at University College London (UCL). “It is precisely that, his system, built up over 23 years of direct and indirect rule, with no real heir, no one with the authority to step into his shoes.”
Regardless of Putin’s successor, he continued, “a post-Putin regime would seek to mend fences with the West and see what kind of a deal it can get in Ukraine,” but that “does not mean an absolute surrender and withdrawal” as Ukraine might hope. “I imagine the succession would be the product of much horse-trading and coalition-building, and that tends to drag politics towards the centre,” he said.
The idea that Putin is a modern-day tsar whose rule would collapse without him was, however, rejected by Mikovic, who saw Putin instead as “a manager who has to balance the interests of various influential oligarchic groups (many of whom have close ties with the West) and the so-called siloviki (the country’s security apparatus).”
Given the ongoing conflict, Mikovic hypothesised that the victor of that power struggle would probably be a siloviki member rather than a proponent of Western reconciliation.
According to him, it would be “easier said than done” given Zelensky’s insistence on seeing sovereignty restored over all of Ukraine under Russian occupation. “If, however, ‘the party of peace’ in the Kremlin prevails—which is not very probable—then Russia would have to find a way to end the conflict in such a way that would allow the new country’s leadership to save face,” he continued.
Donald Trump Restores America’s Greatness
In November of next year, Donald Trump is expected to face Joe Biden again, with whom he is now tied in national polls. If the results of the upcoming election year are any guide, he is expected to win the Republican Party’s nomination.
However, there are a few unanswered concerns regarding his third presidential run. The former president is defending himself against a lawsuit seeking to have him removed from the Colorado ballot while dealing with multiple criminal matters that might prohibit him from holding public office.
“If Donald Trump were to be re-elected, it would have global implications,” Julie Norman, a UCL professor of American politics, stated to Newsweek. “If Trump wins the electoral college again but loses the popular vote, there may be challenges to the election or electoral system in the United States, and polarisation is likely to intensify to unprecedented heights.
“There are also concerns that a second Trump term would undermine democratic norms and institutions much more than the first term, which would have long-term repercussions for the U.S. domestically, America’s image abroad, and the future of democracy around the globe.”
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GPT-3 Chat: The Machines Are Rising
Expert in artificial intelligence and cyber security, Oz Alashe, creator of CybSafe, told Newsweek, “The truth is that the explosion happened in 2023 and that was really about exploration.” It is generally acknowledged or anticipated that 2024 will be a year of application.
It is anticipated that businesses…will intensify their use of AI, especially generative AI, but in 2024, the technology may advance much further. Thus, the possibilities for improvements are endless.”
Artificial intelligence (AI) software that could edit movies, identify patterns in massive databases, and produce text and graphics based on basic inputs were widely available in 2023. However, every possible benefit of this new technology also has some risk; artificial intelligence is already being used for plagiarism, scamming, and the production of false information.
“The problems that this can be applied to and will be applied to are endless,” Alashe stated. “Pick your industry, pick your problem; everybody will be applying this technology to those problems.”
It’s common to describe technological advancements as following a sigmoid curve, with a gradual beginning, a rapid innovation explosion, and a plateau. Think about how cellphones quickly evolved from bulky bricks to svelte, potent gadgets, although they haven’t altered all that much recently.
“All indications are that we are right at the very beginning, especially when you consider the potential—and not just the potential, it’s coming—of artificial intelligence and quantum computing,” Alashe said when asked where AI was in the development curve. “We’re probably even earlier” in terms of technology adoption, she added.
Science fiction has long conjectured about dystopian futures where computers take power, even before artificial intelligence (AI) was established. In the Terminator movie series, Skynet, an AI platform, turns rogue and then sends a cyborg shaped like Arnold Schwarzenegger back in time to destroy humanity’s final chance.
Drastic Climate Change
Although the impacts of climate change are well known, it is more difficult to predict when and how they may materialise as catastrophic occurrences. However, recent years have shown that there may be severe storms, wildfires, and droughts in 2024.
A storm that caused two dams to burst, flooding a Libyan city in September, is one example of the impacts of climate change that I would expect to see coming into this year. There will be many extreme events happening, but one of them will end up doing something that I just hadn’t thought about,” Chris Brierley, a professor of climate science at UCL, told Newsweek.
Increased energy in the environment due to rising global temperatures causes weather systems to become more volatile, causing heatwaves to extend farther towards the poles and cold snaps to occur closer to the equator. Regarding the heatwaves in 2023, Brierley remarked, “In some ways, we were lucky.” “I don’t think we can presume we will be as lucky next year.”
The climate scientist expressed his concern about “extreme droughts,” including one that occurred last summer and caused the Panama Canal to slow down international transport. “If the drought continues, then you might start to see a real constraint on access through the Panama Canal, which would have some quite serious economic consequences if it happened,” he stated.
Big wildfires are made possible by droughts, as seen by the North American wildfires of 2023. There may be “not just a wildfire, but a wildfire that pushes an ecosystem beyond its resilience,” according to Brierley’s prediction. That is to say, you begin to witness a forest that permanently retreats and does not return, similar to how an El Niño event causes destruction in the Amazon.
