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Society is right on track for a global collapse, new study of infamous 1970s report finds | Live Science
This is a sobering report in LiveScience. It concerns a recent followup to the famous (or infamous) 1972 MIT / "Club of Rome" study on "The Limits to Growth". LTG, as it's often referred to, is sometimes viewed as "gloom and doom" literature from a decade when predictions of the imminent collapse of techno-industrial civilization were in vogue. The study is widely taken to be discredited by the fact that no signs of collapse became evident in the first quarter century after its publication.
That characterization is unfair. First, LTG was never intended to predict what definitely would happen in the future. It was an attempt to rigorously model how various economic and.policy scenarios might play out. Second, none of the scenarios modeled ran into dire consequences within the remaining years of the 20th century. Hence, the failure of doomsday to arrive by the turn of the millennium can't be taken as discrediting evidence. The basic message was simply that planetary resources are finite, and that there are limits to growth. That message made it politically controversial. For the past 300 years, we've lived with a dominant economic and social culture that implicitly assume that growth can be sustained, and that it's always a good thing. The expectation of continuing growth has become woven into the fabric of our lives.
The new study that the LiveScience article covers is something of a report card on the original LTG study. It looks at how the LTG models track with what has actually been playing out, for the LTG scenarios that correspond to the trajectory we've actually been following. The study's conclusion is that in terms of population, resource consumption, resource availability, and other indices that were projected, the world actually been tracking pretty close to what the models showed. That's sobering, because for the scenarios we've been following, LTG had serious problems beginning to show up, well, just about now.
And that was before global warming and rapid climate change were recognized as looming problems.
Society is right on track for a global collapse, new study of infamous 1970s report finds | Live Science
A 1972 report predicted the collapse of human society by the mid-2000s. New research suggests that, yeah, we're right on track.
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