Sceptics say the latest doomsday report about climate change is a cover for yet more taxes. Keighley-born writer PETER SNOW, associate fellow of Oxford University's graduate business and management Templeton College, says we have been here before and asks why we are so obsessed with the future.

Health warnings about the future, like those on cigarette packets, seem to get bigger and blacker all the time. This is ironical, given we spent four of the five last decades crouched under the very real threat of nuclear destruction.

But, as one apocalypse recedes, others jostle to fill the gap - genetic manipulation, fundamentalist terrorism and now global warming.

Like nature, pessimism, it seems, abhors a vacuum. Francis Fukuyama, who in the afterglow of the collapse of communism famously predicted the end of history' and the universal triumph of free markets and democracy, now blows a more doleful trumpet.

In Our Post-Human Future (2002) he focused on the dangers posed by biotechnology to nature and basic human rights and dignity.

Pessimism is not restricted to eminent commentators. It is reflected also in popular culture. There has been a collapse of what we might call the happy counter-tradition in SF. From H G Wells's Martians and Morlocks onwards, catastrophe has of course always been a staple of the form.

But alongside the grim visions of classics like Planet of the Apes and Soylent Green ran more optimistic versions of the future - witness the first TV Star Treks with their Kennedy-esque New Frontier confidence (a kind of galactic peace corps but armed with phasers); Star Wars with its comfortingly black-and-white moral conflicts and the rich Spielbergian sentiment of ET and Close Encounters.

These innocent, glad horizons now seem to be closing off. Significantly, the sequel, Star Trek: The Next Generation, opted for politically correct introversion.

Remarkable prescience was shown by a young and imaginative airman with time on his hands in the final days of the Second World War. Flight Lieutenant Arthur C Clarke made use of the opportunity to dash off an article, Extraterrestrial Relays, that accurately predicted the development and use of communications satellites.

The time will come when we will be able to call a person anywhere on Earth, merely by dialling a numberThe business of the future may be run by executives who are scarcely ever in one another's physical presenceAnd so the captains of industry of the 21st century may live where they please, running their affairs through computer keyboards and information-handling machines in their own homes' Overall, however, human ability to judge future events has consistently shown itself to be massively limited.

In his book, The Year 2000, published in 1967, Herman Kahn listed 100 very likely' innovations. About a third have come to pass, including personal computers, mobile phones, VCRs and satellite dishes, but two-thirds, such as undersea cities, have not.

In The Shape of Things to Come (1933) H G Wells projected the stages of future civilisation. Wells's predictions begin accurately enough - with a devastating world war from 1940 to 1950 - but then go haywire. The war leads not to peace but to social disintegration.

Eschewing both democracy and Marxism, he puts forward the idea of a technocratic world state planned and imposed by intellectuals, backed up by an Air Police' who quell any short-sighted opposition. In short, Wells ends up back where he began: the totalitarian fascism of the 1930s.

The hugely influential Club of Rome report of 1973, The Limits to Growth, predicted the total exhaustion of fossil fuels by the 1990s unless we curbed our appetite for non-renewable sources of energy. Instead, more stocks were discovered; there was no setback to consumption.

Apocalyptic population predictions were another feature of the anxious Seventies. Numbers, it was feared, would soar, especially in the developing countries, disastrously outstripping the resources available to support them. In the event, through a combination of improved contraception, increasing female emancipation and wider prosperity, rates have fallen and show every sign of stabilising. The new fear - not just in developed societies but increasingly beyond them, is too few, not too many, young people and of an economically shrinking grey' world.

The terror in the 1980s was AIDS. Twenty years ago its spread in Britain was being painted in apocalyptic terms, especially in an intense and expensive government campaign of scarifying adverts. But the truth is that - despite its tragic impact on particular groups and a disturbing gradual percolation into the general population - the widely forecast epidemic in Britain simply never materialised.

In the same decade respected' journals like The Economist were predicting that the Japanese model would triumph over the troubled economies of the West. Almost immediately Japan plummeted into a prolonged recession, while the Anglo-Saxon economies went on to renew themselves with energy and resilience.

Undismayed, commentators throughout the Nineties continued to seek out new economic idols - Germany, with its worker participation, the dynamism of the Asian Tigers', the high-tech energy of the Sunshine State of California - each of which duly lifted its skirts and, with almost farcical predictability, revealed feet of clay.

Come the Millennium. Straddling it were two predictions connected with IT - the Millennium Bug and the New Economy.

The Bug, it was predicted, would throw business into terminal spasms, the New Economy translate it into exciting new, weightless' forms that would banish the economic cycle forever. Again, neither happened.

At the stroke of midnight 1999 the Bug scuttled invisibly away, while the dot.com bubble went puff a year and a half later, triggering and deepening a long-postponed, but inevitable, swing of the economic cycle.

Why do we get the future so wrong; why we are so obsessed with it, especially the catastrophic future?

One answer might be that human beings enjoy contemplating cataclysm from the safety of their armchairs. There is no shortage of sadistic experts who like to show their superiority by doing the scaring.

Humanity seems to have a deep hunger for a determining framework - any kind of determining framework. Rather than launch itself into the chaos of uncertainty it prefers certainty, even the certainty of imminent destruction.

It has been said that the decline of religion has left a God-shaped hole' in our minds, and a deep hole there certainly seems to be.

At the most basic level there is a disillusionment with science: technology is not so much seen as a failed panacea as actively distrusted as a destructive, destabilising force.

Earth meanwhile is looking an increasingly bruised and fragile fruit. Nature, no longer the patient and submissive subject of our experiments, itself seems to be striking back with savage new diseases and stiffer resistance to our drugs.

There is a loss of faith, too, in the West and its values and its promise. In the 20th century America had come to be identified with that faith: a moral force in international affairs, the military saviour of two world wars, the generous architect of the Marshall Plan.

Now America is seen as the world's bully boy, bouncing its weight around the globe, increasingly deaf to international institutions and opinion, consuming an inordinate share of resources and promoting an unfair and selfish social and economic system.

For futurology, as well as being a religion substitute, is also a way of having a conversation about the present.

Rather than the far horizon, better to keep your eyes on the road immediately ahead.