[tt] [ExI] [wta-talk] Meme 128: What Have You Changed Your Mind about?

[space nookie]

The Club of Rome Report didn't make specific predictions.  They built a
computer model of the economy and ran it multiple times, using different
assumptions each time.  They found that all runs of their model EVENTUALLY
reached a peak of resource use, with
resource use falling off after that point (thus the title, "Limits to
Growth").   Changing assumptions about technology and recycling
altered the timing of this peak, but not by as much as you would think
because of exponential growth.  All they really talk about in the report is
this model, the multiple scenarios they put it through, and the observations
they made about the scenario outcomes.  They strongly suggested there were
real limits to growth but did not say what they were or when they would be
reached.


On Jan 12, 2008 5:00 PM, Perry E. Metzger <perry at piermont.com> wrote:

>
> > The climate change and energy shortening issue has been around since
> > at least the Club of Rome report '72.
>
> The Club of Rome report, "Limits to Growth", has proven to be
> inaccurate in every specific prediction it made. In fact, I believe
> the report essentially said that we would be in the throes of mass
> starvation and total resource exhaustion by now.
>
> I think that, if we pretend to be scientifically minded, we must
> assume that the hypotheses followed by the report must be wrong, since
> the predictions made on the basis of those hypotheses were wrong.
>
> Julian Simon did a pretty good job of explaining why the Club of Rome
> report was so thoroughly wrong, so I won't waste people's time here
> with it. My main point is that if we are to pretend to be followers of
> the scientific method, we clearly must look elsewhere for models of
> how the world works -- mentioning "Limits to Growth" is about as
> reasonable in this day and age as mentioning Marx or Velikovsky.
>
>
> Perry
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>
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