Yes, we shall get help from new technologies: intelligent materials regulating pollutants and temperature; fibres carrying daylight as if it were water into every room; waste treatment systems such as Biolytix, recycling 80 per cent of household water by means of living humus full of good bacteria; photovoltaic cells giving home owners near independence from the power grid; computerised vehicles cutting fuel costs in half; and city farms on rooftops growing our daily greens and salads-but, as in Vienna, there will be old-fashioned remedies too. Faced with an urgent need to travel two or three kilometres, I often use a traditional device invented in Africa and refined in Europe -legs. As a boy, I walked to school from the Danube to central Vienna, in snow or sunshine. It was always a delightful trip, fuelled by not much more than a slice of toast. If we design our cities with enough thought, imagination and consultation we could achieve a sublime future: a combination of the best of old and new.

Several years ago I wrote a novel, 2007: A true story waiting to happen. Many of its scenarios have come true, including John Howard’s endurance in the Lodge in Canberra. Now that we have reached my year of reckoning, I am in the position George Orwell, sadly, did not live long enough to enjoy when he wrote 1984- getting ready for my comeuppance. The year 1984, as it approached, held forbidding associations. Nowadays I don’t believe anyone gives it a second thought.

In my novel, 2007 was the year when animals, large and small, decided that the crunch had come. The environment was in a tailspin and climate change had gone berserk. The animals sensed it, freaked and took over civilisation. Roads were blocked (shitting cows), airports closed (3000 pelicans), whaling ships were sunk (by 40 angry whales) and communication lines severed (by rodents chewing optic cables). Soon the normal business of government and commerce proved impossible. The people got very cross and planned to zap the animals.

This was, I thought, a reasonable extrapolation from conditions in 2000. Having now got rid of half of the natural world, we might well decide to cut our losses and eliminate the rest. It will soon go anyway. And the benefits seem compelling. Nearly all our plagues come from contact with domesticated animals. Bird flu is the present preoccupation. Other pandemics will emerge as we squeeze nature into corners. Thus AIDS arose from crowding monkeys or apes, and Ebola fever from hemming in the remains of jungle in Africa. Clear it all away and our worries would cease.

Would we miss animals-pets, birdsong, snuffling dog muzzles, cows in pastures? The Chinese seem to have coped. As for those creatures in the wilderness-the tigers, gorillas and frogs-they are not long for our planet. Some have turned up their paws already. Let’s get real!

Getting real in 2007 meant first committing universal faunicide, then shutting all the farms (most are failing anyway) and facing the turbulent realities of climate change. What would we eat? Easy! Attach food factories to bigger supermarkets and there manufacture mounds and sheets of protein that can be moulded and flavoured to resemble chicken or beef or prawns. Carbohydrates could come from plant-like GM crops developed by NASA for use on other planets. Both kinds of food are not much of a problem for genetic engineers, who even now have bacteria standing by that are capable of fermenting a fairly decent two-hat meal.

The problem is energy. It would need lots. But once you have amortised transport costs (none) and the release of real estate (all that farmland), the price of GM-gourmet grub would be much the same as before.

With new allotments in cities and food virtually on tap, we would then need to think about what we do with the countryside. This decision may be taken from us when Bangladesh goes under the Indian Ocean and 40 million people need somewhere else to go. Australia would be perfect. There are barely a million people in the South Island of New Zealand, half that number in Tasmania. The Bangladeshis might feel a bit cool, but they seem to have coped in England (better than I did!). Both those islands could become one big city, bar the mountains, which look nice anyway. And inland Australia could house the remaining 38 million dispossessed.

If flooding doesn’t happen, or is mysteriously delayed, the rural remains can be developed, as Chongming has been, as 21st century eco-cities.

The odd thing about my novel is the date in the title. I wrote it in 2000, in a burst of rage about the way plants and animals-rainforests, coral reefs, apes and tigers-were being wiped off the face of the Earth. It made me feel a little better, but I did not notice much change. Those concerned were still anxious about what they knew to be an appalling threat to nature, but those in charge did little.

The switch came at the end of 2006. Now, in 2007, you have to be dim, deprived or George W Bush not to realise we have a mega problem. So my timing (I take no pleasure) was right. Will it be that bad? Is this not yet more exaggeration from what Margaret Thatcher used to call the ‘moaning Minnies’, the ‘elites’ keen to denigrate can-do enterprise?

Try doing a thought experiment. Take a house or a town designed for a reasonable number of people, then multiply the inhabitants by a thousand. That is what we are doing both to human habitats and to nature itself. I wrote my novel in a fury, thinking of all those apes consumed as bush meat, all that rainforest pulverised for unsustainable farming, all those fat fools tooling around in boys’ toys. It made me feel better, briefly.

Now the prospects are even more bleak. The worst scenarios offered by sober scientists of good judgement are truly horrifying. But we must assume there is some prospect for putting things right.

We have a chance, a slim one, as I shall note in the final chapter, to do something about it all. Cities are the key. We have to get the cities right-make them work. We have ten years. A narrow future.

No one need go broke, either! As my friend Ron Oxburgh exclaims: ‘It’s a prodigious opportunity.’

The Hunches of Nostradamus

2008 Minority of world’s population now lives in countryside. Fifty-five per cent of city-dwellers don’t know where meat comes from.

2009 Tokyo grows to 47 million.

2010 Adelaide and Brisbane ban flushing urinals. Pee Police set up.

2011 No one earning less than $180,000 a year can now live in Sydney (unless running drugs).

2012 Chinese cities, like Singapore, establish ‘city museum’ to show what they once were like (anything old having been covered in concrete).

2013 New York grows more of its food in rooftop and allotment gardens than it imports.

2014 Bio-identichips allow only locals to be in prestige cities. Visitors must pay by the hour. Beijing, Birmingham and Brisbane remain free.

2015 Pets banned in China, unless eaten.

2016 Intelligent materials, computerised doors and windows installed in London office buildings. Staff die in Stock Exchange when locked in.

2017 London cuts energy expenditure by factor of ten (March). Barrier on Thames breaks and half of city disappears in flood.

2018 Baghdad, Jerusalem, Haifa, Damascus, Tehran, Islamabad and Manchester become holes in the ground. UN conference convened.

2019 Galveston, Texas, and West Palm Beach, Florida, blown away.

2020 Santa Cruz, California, becomes a no-waste city.